Abstract
Recently Korean textile industry has been in the phase that requires its strategy change from the less-develped country style of the labor-intensive products to the developed country style of the technology-intensive products. It needs to make more efforts to develop the value-added products to meet the customer's various needs. In addition, development of technology, equipment, and design is required to implement its corporate strategy successfully. Although Korean textile companies have currently kept skillful labor and advanced equipments, they are losing their share in the international textile markets. This is mainly because corporate management has not been involved with efficient strategy. Strategy is an adoption of a company to environment by its corporate members, thus leading to the requirement of coordination of the main functions such as manufacturing and marketing. In fact, the coordination of the two departments toward reaching the corporate goal is not easy since the two are interested in different areas, respectively. Manufacturing people show their interests in production capacity, equipment layout, process technology, quality, purchasing, and labor while marketing people, target customer, product mix, advertisement, product specification, and customer service. For this reason, conflicts sometimes happen between the two departments. There are, however, many area that need a horizontal cooperation, for instance, in layout, process technology, product mix, and potential demand. Therefore, reciprocal coordination is necessary for achieving the firm's common objectives. This study was concerned with determining the factors that enhance the competitiveness of textile firms so that they could reach the common goal of the two departments with a horizontal collaboration.