Identification of world-class manufacturing strategies and their implementation requirements in food industry (case study: olive product)

For decades, world-class manufacturing has attracted tremendous attention and become one of the driving forces for business success in organisations. Paying attention to customers' needs from different perspectives and planning to meet them helps industries achieve world-class manufacturing, the main purpose of this study is to identify the world-class manufacturing strategies and their implementation requirements in Iran's food industry (case study: olive product), using quality function deployment (QFD) technique. In this study, at first, the most important customer needs, technical requirements, and world-class manufacturing strategies were identified. Then, the customers' needs were ranked using the TOPSIS method, and the relationships and value of technical requirements and world-class manufacturing strategies were identified and analysed by the house of quality matrix. According to the results, to achieve world-class manufacturing with good quality, all three factors (customers' needs, technical requirements and world-class manufacturing strategies) must be scrutinised. In the present study, the most important customer need, technical requirement, and world-class manufacturing strategy were brand and product reliability, better technologies and process and product development, respectively.