Recently, the competitive advantage is said to come from improving the value of the goods by product technology and the productivity by production technology. Japan is proud of the highest productivity in manufacturing industry.
Japan industry started domestic manufacturing of production equipments from 1950s and now become exporters of production equipments having the highest productivity.
In Korea, companies import most production equipment in advanced industry like semiconductor and automobile from the developed countries.
This study aims at analyzing the relationships between users and suppliers in production equipment and finding the key success factors for user-supplier cooperation systems. In this paper classifies user-supplier cooperation systems into vertical integration, joint venture, strategic alliance, selected contractor relationship and general supplier relationship and focuses 8 situation factors, that is, long-term repetitive transaction, large quantity, similar item combination, fewer suppliers, sharing information, earlier participation in development, assigning investment and mutual control.
The data required in this study were collected by means of interview of 3 firms and from the papers studied user-supplier relationships.
The findings are summarized as follows.
1. Strategic alliance is the most efficient to user-supplier cooperation system.
2. The key success factors for user-supplier cooperation system are long-term repetitive transaction, large quantity, similar item combination, fewer suppliers, sharing information, earlier participation in development, assigning investment and mutual control.
3. The integration of FA (factory automation) department among the affiliated companies is more efficient to user-supplier cooperation system.
Because of insufficiency of case study, research methodology may be imperfect, but this study suggests that it is useful to research in this field.
The more study in this field is needed.
