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Abstract:
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The purpose of the research has been to investigate how merger and outsourcing activities
impact the way productivity is measured on five categories of company resources: human,
physical, knowledge, capital, and infrastructure resources. This research involves: an
assessment of productivity measures with the goal of determining which resource category
are key areas to monitor after merger activity, an evaluation of profitable textile mergers with
the goal of delineating the execution of the merger strategies, an analysis of the effect of
increased outsourcing on productivity growth with respect to the textile industry, and an
evaluation of the adequacy of productivity measures in representing the economic
competitiveness of the US Textile Industry. For the sample of textile companies, merger
activity impacts the productivity of capital and knowledge resources the most. The most
common strategies employed during successful textile mergers targeted the improvement of:
corporate structure, product differentiation and speed to market. The influence of outsourcing
on productivity growth in the textile industry was found to be negligible when comparing
productivity measures that include and exclude outsourcing. In order to get a better
understanding of competitiveness, companies are not looking solely at productivity, but are
pairing productivity with other measures mainly profitability measures. Of all the resource
categories, the productivity of knowledge resources is the leading contributor to
competitiveness. However, one difficulty is that knowledge resources are also the category
for which there were not concrete measures of productivity that denote how well this
resource was being used.
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