Employing Consistency Between Agile Manufacturing and Cleaner Production Strategies to Enhance Sustainable Competitive Advantage

Applied research in the General Company for the manufacture of cars and equipment / battery factory in Al-Waziriyah – Baghdad

Presented to

 The Council of the College of Administration and

 Economics – Karbala University It is part of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of science in Accounting

By

Mohammed Diwan Shaniwar Al jabri

Supervised by

The Professor

Dr. Hayder Ali Jarad Al-Massudi

Abstract

The business environment in the current era is witnessing a great and remarkable development in the means, methods and techniques of production, as the volume of production expanded and the products became more complex and diversified, and as a result, the demands of customers became constantly changing and diversified, and accordingly, an agile manufacturing strategy appeared that seeks to provide a high degree of flexibility and ability to Responding to the requirements of customers, on the one hand, but on the other hand, this development cast a shadow on the environment. Products and production processes have had a negative impact on the environment, which called for the need for the emergence of a strategy to reduce or eliminate this deterioration and then improve the environmental aspects and at the same time It takes into account the economic aspects of the product and the production process, and this strategy is the cleaner production strategy.

And that the research aims to demonstrate the role played by consistency between the two strategies of agile manufacturing and cleaner production in enhancing the sustainable competitive advantages of economic units, including reducing the cost of products, the time for products to reach customers, as well as reducing the harmful environmental effects caused by products and production processes. In order to achieve this goal, the industrial sector was chosen as a community for research because of the great importance this sector represents in supporting the local economy, and among that, the impact of this sector on the environment is clearly what it causes from the environmental pollution produced by products or production processes. The General Company for Automotive and Equipment Manufacturing/Battery Factory was chosen as the research sample, to apply the proposed consistency between the two strategies of efficient manufacturing and cleaner production.

The researcher followed two approaches, the deductive approach and the inductive approach, and he relied on the deductive approach to enrich the theoretical side of the study through books, research, letters, university theses, articles and periodicals, both Arab and foreign. Research and personal interviews with factory officials, as well as access to accounting and cost records and report.

The researcher reached a number of conclusions, the most important of which is that the economic unit in question does not apply any strategies of its own, but rather works with the old traditional systems, which have become unqualified to face the major developments in the business environment, and that the application of consistency between the strategies of agile manufacturing and cleaner production contributes to enhancing the competitive advantage sustainable economic units in the Iraqi environment, and among these advantages, which were reinforced by the application of consistency, are reducing the cost of products, reducing the time of their arrival to the customer, and improving the environmental aspects of products and production processes.