Worldwide competition and the pace of technological innovation simply will not permit distraction from industries' primary task : producing quality products at competitive prices. The profitability, productivity and market share of Korean firms have been adversely affected by many factors, including raw material price increases, a failure to understand customers and markets, domestic wage increases, poor use of capital, the trend of worldwide economic bloc and the diffusion of technology protection. Factory Automation(FA) provides a good means to improve this situation. Nevertheless, FA implementation usually costs an organization millions of dollars and the long payback period for a FA technology may hinder management from adopting this new technology. Therefore it is necessary that both financial and strategic benefits derived from the acquisition of a FA technology be evaluated on a long-term basis. In this thesis, we attempt to identify the critical success factors of FA through case study. Research findings of this study are as follows : 1. Main competitive priorities are "quality on production process" and "dependability". 2. Main FA strategies are "specialization of operations" and "improved materials handling". 3. Main operational objectives of FA are "effective manufacturing control", "capacity expansion" and "cost reduction". And main strategic objective of FA is "improved dependability". 4. Major obstacle and justification technique of FA introduction are "financial difficulty" and "pay-back period method", respectively. 5. Major obstacle of FA implementation is "lack of technical experts". 6. Critical success factors of FA are 1) Consistancy between competitive priorities and FA strategies 2) Compatibility between competitive priorities and FA technologies 3) Commitment and support of management 4) Self-development and self-operation of FA facilities 5) Continual education and training
