Evaluating the Chinese furniture manufacturing industry for operationalizing the cooperation with Finnish manufacturing training center

Abstract

In the past few decades, the furniture manufacturing industry in China has been developed rapidly. China becomes to be the biggest furniture exporter in the world and offers the world’s largest furniture manufacturing bases. The first objective for this research is to evaluate the Chinese manufacturing industry strategies and analyze several attributes in difference sections which will affect the overall performance in past and future. The second objective is to evaluate the strategies and performances for one of the furniture manufacturing training center, the last objective is to compare the result to find the possibilities for the cooperation between the Finnish manufacturing training center with Chinese furniture manufacturers.

The research is carried out with the sense and respond methodology and Manufacturing strategy index. The questionnaires are filled by the respondents, the data is analyzed and evaluated with SCFI model.

The results shows the critical/over resourced and non-critical/under resourced attributes in each sections for different case companies include the trends of the development for each attributes which can help the decision makers to notice from which aspect the professional training will be required as well as to make more strategic plan and decisions to improve the overall business performance in future.