The topic of competitive priorities has attracted many of those interested in manufacturing strategy and stimulated a number of surveys in manufacturing industry. Much of this empirical work concentrates on large companies in industrialised economies while asserting the general applicability of findings. In contrast the survey reported here was conducted in a newly industrialising country, Turkey, focusing on small to medium‐sized manufacturing enterprises. Key personnel in 41 companies were questioned about the priorities of cost, quality, flexibility and, in particular, time. Process innovations, since these enable improvements in competitive priorities, were also examined. General similarities were evident between the Turkish, other European, and US situations. However, certain elements of quality and time were not ranked as highly in Turkey and the adoption levels of process innovations were lower. In contrast to US data, connections between competitiveness and time‐related performance measures were not apparent. Conclusions were drawn that Turkish manufacturing industry was generally at an earlier, quality‐dependent, stage in developing competitiveness and that time‐based competition was not yet evident.

The concept Industry 4.0 (I4.0) represents intelligent production processes combining cyber and physical systems through a set of technologies such as internet of things, big data and cloud computing. Transition to Industry 4.0 is expected to cause formidable structural changes, productivity increments and competitiveness in manufacturing industry in all over the world. This study aimed to investigate the general approach to the concept of Industry 4.0 and levels of adoption of the basic Industry 4.0 technologies in manufacturing firms across Turkey. For this purpose, a survey was conducted with 427 firms with various sizes (micro, small, medium and large) operating in six subsectors (automotive; electronic; machinery; chemical; food; and textile) of Turkish manufacturing. The paper examined nine I4.0 technologies: autonomous robots, big data applications, cloud computing, cyber security, simulation approaches, additive manufacturing, system integration, internet of things, and augmented reality. The results revealed that, there is a significant correlation between the degrees of importance and implementation of the basic Industry 4.0 technologies. Moreover, I4.0 implementation degree increases as the firm size increases. The top three industries in Turkish manufacturing that use the most basic Industry 4.0 technologies are automotive industry, electrical and electronics, and machinery, respectively. The analyses are aimed to achieve a better understanding of the concept Industry 4.0 by comparing different groups of manufacturers.

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Competitive success is increasingly linked to implementing change in a coordinated manner within the organization and in the extended value network that embeds the organization. In particular, for manufacturers the successful implementation of advanced manufacturing technologies (AMT) can be linked to collaborative buyer-supplier relationships. Derives a model from the literature to link these aspects. Tests empirically major propositions from this model using data from 83 firms positioned at the top of the Turkish automotive industry supply chain. Establishes that companies with higher levels of AMT implementation collaborate more with their parts suppliers and companies are more successful in achieving their AMT implementation objectives if increased AMT implementation is coupled with more collaborative supplier relationships. Both AMT implementation levels and buyersupplier collaboration are shown to have significantly increased over a five-year period. While AMT implementation levels of individual firms appear to have diverged, levels of buyersupplier collaboration appear to have converged during the five years.

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