IDENTIFICATION OF THE STRATEGIC FORCES AGAINST CHANGE IN MANUFACTURING TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPMENT PROCESSES

Manufacturing technologies throughout the world are rapidly changing in order to survive in today's highly competitive market environments. Some examples of coping with changing environments are simultaneous enterprise re-engineering, automated and intelligent manufacturing, virtual manufacturing and agile manufacturing. The objective of this development in manufacturing technology is to improve flexibility, reliability, productivity and to achieve competition-based technology development. The ultimate goal is to improve profitability of operations. In the real situation, frequently those objectives and goals are not achieved as we wanted. The cause of this failure is the lack of management in manufacturing technology change processes. The failure should not be happened if the enterprise change agents knew precisely resources and characteristics of the forces against change.
In manufacturing technology changing, there are many factors as the forces against change like; (1) uncertainty about the cause and effect of the change, (2) unwillingness to give up existing benefit, (3) possible social loss, (4) inconvenience, (5) economic losses and (6) force for habit.
This research paper is aimed to identify and measure significant level of contribution the forces against change to resist the change processes. For achieving this aim, I used Factor Analysis. It is one of the multivariate statistical methods that generally used for such research. Based on the statistical results and empirical analysis in some industries, I concluded that the urgent forces against change in manufacturing technology development processes come from three main factors; (1) logic factors, (2) psychological factors, and (3) sociological factors. Because of those forces absolutely determined the changing process, so those factors are named the strategic forces.