Handbook of Management Scales/Competitive priority: flexibility

Description
A common approach to measuring competitive priorities involves using a multiple item list and asking respondents to rate the relative importance of each priority. This scale was originally developed for use in the Boston University Manufacturing Futures Survey by Miller/Vollmann (1984) and was used by Boyer (1998). Boyer's values were later reported in Boyer/Pagell (2000). These measures have been employed in numerous studies and have been shown to have good reliability and been deemed valid as well by Ward et al. (1998).

Items
For your manufacturing plant, how important is the ability to


 * make rapid design changes
 * adjust capacity quickly
 * make rapid volume changes
 * offer a large number of product features
 * offer a large degree of product variety
 * adjust product mix

(Likert scale ranging from 1 - not important, to 4 - very important, to 7 - absolutely critical)

Source

 * Boyer/Pagell (2000): Measurement issues in empirical research: improving measures of operations strategy and advanced manufacturing technology. Journal of Operations Management, Vol. 18, No. 3, pp. 361-374. Also used in: Boyer/Lewis (2002): Competitive Priorities: Investigating the Need for Trade-offs in Operations Strategy. Production and Operations Management, Vol. 11, No. 1.

Related Scales

 * Competitive priority: cost
 * Competitive priority: delivery
 * Competitive priority: quality