A methodology for competitiveness analysis and strategy formulation in glass industry

The increasingly important role of global competition in shaping long-term strategies of industrial firms has been recognized by managers, planners, politicians and academicians alike. This has prompted recently an increase in the number of studies explicitly dealing with competitiveness analysis. The studies done in this respect however are usually descriptive in nature, providing only checklists of factors with few measurement guidelines, and hence difficult to make them operational. The present paper is an attempt to meet this attested need by proposing a model-based approach to competitiveness analysis and discusses its multi-phased implementation in a large glass company. The practice experience gained with this approach indicates that mathematical models can provide an analytical framework for the analysis of industrial competitiveness and can yield useful insight for competitive strategy formulation.