Manufacturing and supplier roles in product development

Article Abstract:

The increasingly competitive markets of the 1990s are generally perceived to be demanding higher-quality and higher-performing products, in shorter and more predictable development cycle-times, and at lower cost. Product development must therefore increasingly managed as a concurrent, multi-disciplinary process. In terms of the manufacturing function and suppliers on project teams, and a strategic approach to suppliers on project teams, and a strategic approach to suppliers based on partnership sourcing arrangements and supplier development programmes. However, findings of a recent research study of the UK electrical and mechanical engineering sector, involving comparative analysis and benchmarking against a model of best practice of 12 in-depth case studies, followed by an interview survey of 46 companies, has shown that the diversity in the competitive environment and the characteristics of companies, their strategic policies, and their development projects, give rise to different requirements vis-a-vis the roles of manufacturing and suppliers in product innovation. Also, the study has shown that some features of `best practice' are inappropriate to some companies operating in the low-volume industries. It is concluded that, rather than adopt a prescriptive model of `best practice', companies need to develop procedures which more adequately reflect their inherent needs and the types of project they undertake. [C] 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Product development; Concurrent engineering; Best-practice; Low volume manufacturing; Company context

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An international comparison of the effect of manufacturing strategy-implementation gap on business performance

Article Abstract:

This study has the purpose of empirically testing the importance of consistency between manufacturing strategies and practices in achieving better business performances. An empirical test has been conducted and compared on the data sets from three different nations, each of which seems to have quite different manufacturing capabilities and competitive environments. The empirical test result implies that the gap variable indicating inconsistency between manufacturing strategy and implementation practices plays a more important role than the strategy or implementation variable in discriminating the superior from the inferior performance groups. For those data sets from the US and Korea, the gap variables of flexibility, quality and/or cost show more significant contribution in discriminating business performance groups. But none of the gap variables outperform other strategy or implementation variables in discriminating performance groups in Japan. [C] 2001 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Manufacturing strategy; Empirical study; Comparative study; Manufacturing practices; Business performance; Gap analysis; Discriminant analysis

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Information flows for high-performance manufacturing

Article Abstract:

The successful implementation of many management best practices (just-in-time, total quality management, concurrent engineering, etc.) heavily depends on proper organisational communication and information management. In this paper, we address the issue of how these best practices, labelled as high-performance manufacturing (HPM) practices, can affect a firm's communication structure. The paper firstly develops a reference framework for the analysis of information flows in operations. This reference framework integrates research in operations management and in organizational communication. The paper then applies the proposed framework to investigate how information flows tend to be characterised in HPM. In doing so, the proposed framework relates cost, time and quality performances to three operational processes (physical transformation, product development and material flow management) and to three classes of information flows: vertical, horizontal and external information flows. [C] 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Information flow; Communication; Operations; Performance; Information systems

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