Boosting Up Operational Performance of Manufacturing Organizations through Interpretive Structural Modelling of Enabling Practices

For achieving world-class performance and competitiveness in today’s global highly complex environment and competition, there is an immense pressure on manufacturing organizations having limited resources to pursue operational excellence in terms of productivity and quality, reduce cost, and provide high-quality products in shorter lead times. Identification of representative practices affecting operational performance (OP) and understanding of mutual dependence among those practices will improve the performance of manufacturing organizations with available resources. A sample of 10 experts of academicians and senior company managers from different functional areas of large-scale textile, sugar, and cement industries were surveyed to identify critical practices influencing OP and then to develop the relationships among them. It also identifies those practices that support other practices (driving practices) and also those that are most influenced by other practices (dependent practices). Firstly, through in-depth review of relevant literature, 10 most influencing practices were identified. Then expert elicitation was employed, and a hierarchical structure was established by using interpretive structural modelling (ISM) technique. After determining driving and dependence power of practices, classification or clusters of these practices were made through an additionally carried out MICMAC (cross-impact matrix multiplication applied to classification) analysis. The results contribute that lean management, organizational culture, ISO 9001 (quality management system), and human resource management practices indicate strong driving power and are at the bottom of ISM model. This is a novel and useful application of ISM to identify inherent interactions among these practices and construct a structural graph. With the help of this strategic understanding, researchers and practitioners will be able to identify the focal areas and to pay more attention to driver practices to effectively incorporate them at their strategic and operational levels and the effectiveness in addressing these driver practices will influence the OP to a large extent.