Investigate Inspection and Quality Control in CAM systems

Investigate Inspection and Quality Control in CAM systems

Task # 1

For scholars and practitioners concerned with the strategic management of computer-based information systems (IS), one central issue is whether IS contribute to competitive advantage. A large body of the strategic IS literature has attempted to address this issue by empirically testing the relationship between levels of IS investment and firm performance with industry- and firm-level data (Alpar; Bharadwaj; Brynjolfsson; Cron; Floyd; Harris; Hitt; Li; Loveman, 1988 and Tam). Several recent reviews of this body of research ( Dos; McKeen and Wilson) have shown that the empirical evidence for IS effects on firm performance is generally inconclusive. Some studies have found a positive relationship between IS investment and firm performance (e.g., Alpar; Bharadwaj and Brynjolfsson), while others have reported a zero or even a negative relationship (e.g., Barua; Hitt and Weill, 1988). Although these mixed findings may be attributed to several measurement problems ( Brynjolfsson and McKeen), Lucas (1993) suggests that the appropriate use of IS may be the missing link in the relationship between IS investment and firm performance.

During the 80s, a variety of theoretical or conceptual frameworks was advanced to specify how IS could be properly used to gain competitive advantage (cf. Neumann, 1994). The most dominant and influential framework is the “Structure-Conduct-Performance” paradigm of industrial organization economics ( Porter; Porter and Porter). According to this framework, IS may engender competitive advantage insofar as they are used to manipulate an industry's structural parameters, such as increasing a firm's bargaining power over its buyers and suppliers, heightening entry barriers, and deterring competitive rivalry ( McFarlan; Parsons and Porter).

Despite its popularity in guiding much of the strategic IS research and practice in the past decade, the IO framework has limited researchers' efforts to investigate the idiosyncratic resources as the drivers of superior firm performance. Recently, strategy researchers who espouse the “resource-based” view of the firm (Barney; Conner; Mahoney and Wernerfelt) have rejected the IO assumptions of resource homogeneity and mobility. Instead, they entertain the view that the firm is a collection of hard-to-copy, idiosyncratic resources and capabilities ( Conner and Dierickx). Accordingly, to the extent that these resources are valuable, rare, imperfectly imitable, and non-substitutable ( Barney, 1991), their development and deployment hold the prospects for sustainable competitive advantage and superior firm performance.

Researchers have recently used the resource-based perspective to reexamine the issue of whether and to what extent IS can generate competitive advantage for a firm relative to its competitors. From this perspective, Clemons and Row (1991) and Feeny and Ives (1990) have shown that IS which exploit asymmetrical differences in firm resources (e.g., customer databases) may lead to sustainable competitive advantage. In their study of IS uses in the retail industry, Powell and Dent-Micallef (1997) have found that firms with IS that are synergistically linked to human and business resources outperformed those with IS that lacked those synergies. Lado and Zhang (1998) developed a conceptual model that shows that expert systems (ES) that foster ...