Operational excellence and competitiveness of Kenyan manufacturing firms
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Date
2015-10Author
Mwololo, Boniface
Type
ThesisLanguage
enMetadata
Show full item recordAbstract
The operations function of a business plays a critical role in the attainment or sustainment of a
competitive advantage in the market. Firms must develop certain core capabilities that enable them
create more customer value than their competitors by balancing product cost with product quality
and delivery flexibility with delivery speed thus achieving operational excellence. This study
sought to determine the process-based and system-based capabilities employed by Kenyan
manufacturing firms, to model operational excellence in terms of these capabilities and to
determine how operational excellence as a concept influences customer value perception as an
indicator of competitiveness. Self-administered questionnaires were used to collect data from a
sample of 51 manufacturing firms obtained through stratified random sampling from the
Manufacturers and Exporters Directory list of the Kenya Association of Manufacturers. A test of
mean differences was used to determine the process-based and system-based capabilities
emphasized by sampled firms. Multiple regression was used to model operational excellence in
terms of process-based and system-based capabilities and liner regression was be used to determine
the relationship between operational excellence and customer value perception. A test for
goodness of fit was used to assess the validity of the relationships established from both multiple
regression and linear regression.
Publisher
University of Nairobi