NETWORK ANALYSIS: A NEW APPROACH FOR EVALUATION OF INDUSTRIAL OPERATIONAL PLANS (STUDY OF TEXTILE INDUSTRY & CLOTHING OF IRAN)

Abstract

"Network Analysis" is a new approach which its main focus is on the relations among actors, not individual actors and their attributes in order to discover the gaps, overlaps, isolations, pendants and centralities in networks. As a result, this approach could be useful for "evaluation". "Evaluation" is one of the most important stages of Strategic planning and some failure in operational plans is just due to some inappropriate pre and post evaluations. Preparing operational plans as a guideline for governments is another important stage of strategic planning and management. Hence, pre and post evaluations of these plans lead to prevent changes in strategic plans and increase the time and money saving. In Iran, according to industrial plan development and in order to privatization, some industries such as textile confront some strategic problems. In this regard, we prepared an operational plan for textile industry of Iran including important strategies, problems, plans and activities and the organizations responsible to execute each activity by Hoshin Kanry Model. Then, we used Network Analysis to delineate and analyze this strategic management network in which nodes are considered as organizations and relations are viewed as their collaborations in the same activities. UCINET, Netdraw Softwares, and centrality measures were used for analyzing and visualizing the plan. The end results showed that Network Analysis is a useful approach to pre and post evaluation of operational plans and helps planners and managers to discover the strengths and weaknesses of strategic plans

Keywords

• Network Analysis, Operational Plan, Strategic Planning, Textile Industry

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