Companies that aim to enhance competitiveness usually set up their newly designed management program. But it is proved that many companies did not achieve their original purposes because of various reasons.
Core competence theory, presented firstly by Hamel & Prahalad in 1990, is based on the resource based theory. It makes a company pay attention to the internal resource of each company. Many researchers have found that core competence makes a company to maintain competitive advantages even though the market and product change.
Core competence management shows the way how to manage and use core competencies in business reality. The identification of core competence is the first task to be done for the core competence management at each firm. Many studies proposed that core competence could give a competitiveness, but it is hard to identify core competence at a glance. With theoretical background of Hamel & Prahalad(1990), this study performed a case study on the identification process of core competence in the factory automation industry. This study was done with one case, 'S' company which is well known as a factory automation company in Korea.
With the case study, following conclusions and implications were identified:
The identification process of core competence can be structured as five steps as follows; First step is the verification process to identify the resources and abilities of each company up to date, or essential resources and abilities for the future. Second step is to identify the leverage factors of competitive advantage at each industry. At third step, required competencies are identified. Fourth step is the identification of success factors for each company. Finally core competencies can be identified through comparisons of required competencies and success factors.
Based on the proposed process, this study identified core competencies of a factory automation industry. Those are project management structure, technical ability for the both basic and detail design processes, and well trained people. To develop the technological capability in the factory automation industry, firms should make efforts to get own technologies which are very hard to achieve within couple of years. However, the only way to succeed in the economic war is to build own technological capability.
Based on conclusions, this thesis suggests following recommendations. First, recommended identification process of core competence can be applied to any other kinds of industry. Core competence has two point of view; past view and future one. Both view of core competencies can be identified based on the proposed process.
Second, core competence can not be acquired naturally. It would be accumulated only if the company who has a will to build, manage, and use core competence. To build core competence, the effort of corporate level and workers innovative attitudes are needed.
