Three Yards and a Cloud of Dust: Industrial Management at Century End

Abstract

After a decade of updating and modernizing U.S. manufacturing with advanced management techniques (AMTS), competitive results have been generally disappointing. Industrial managers under pressure have relied on AMTS to solve their problems, but in this era of ever more intense and fast‐moving competition, this has generally proven inadequate. Competitors abroad have moved ahead just as vigorously and usually earlier in applying AMTS such as JIT, TQM, and MRP, so the result has been “competitíve gridlock.” Simultaneously, industry is full of misfits between manufacturing policies and strategy, as AMT‐driven managers make and change policies piecemeal. The mediocre results of this conventional, operational mindset demonstrate that sheer productivity improvement or other conventional performance objectives seldom build unique competitive advantage. Winning in competition today requires a different management approach, one which is focused on establishing competitive superiority. Basic structural redesign is the key to clear competitive advantage, but its rare practice signals the presence of problems in the skills, attitudes, and premises of many industrial managers. Rather than continuing the common practice of relying on available AMTS, a new breed of industrial managers is needed, equipped with a breadth of skills which encompass all the functional areas of production and who are business‐ and strategy‐rather than narrowly operation‐ and functionally‐oriented.

Performance Improvement Paths in the U.S. Airline Industry:Linking Trade‐offs to Asset Frontiers

“…Operations management textbooks began eliminating discussions of trade-offs between the operations objectives. But, as we neared the latter half of the 1990s, more research emerged re-examining the need for trade-offs in operations (Skinner 1996b(Skinner , 1996c. Most recently, Safizadeh, Ritzman, and Mallick (2000) found trade-offs between some of the operations capabilities, but not all of them.…”

Risk Pooling Advantages of Manufacturing Network Configuration

“…We, however, take a more prescriptive approach-what are the relevant logistics and market parameters that direct firms to choose one strategic option over the other? Skinner (1996b) argues that the focus of the new breed of operations managers is toward creating flexible and agile organizations and using strategic thinking to advance a firm's competitiveness rather than advanced manufacturing technology. Our focus, in this paper, is summarizing the conditions under which a manufacturing strategy choice (between product and process plant networks) offers differential advantages.…”

Trying to Resolve Manufacturing Performance Trade‐Offs: The Case of British Contract Electronics Assemblers

“…There is a unifying theme across the articles of this special issue; most authors notice the undeniable popularity of manufacturing best practices that have gained wide acceptance in industry and have had a noticeable impact on manufacturing performance, allowing companies to "violate many of the prescriptions in the manufacturing strategy literature" and to "have it all-quality, dependability, flexibility, high variety, and low cost" (Clark, 1996, p. 43). Whether the authors refer to these as "advanced manufacturing techniques" (Skinner, 1996b), "tools" (Wheelwright & Bowen, 1996), or "advanced manufacturing systems" (Clark, 1996), the message is the same: these manufacturing practices are powerful but they should be encompassed within the framework of a coherent and unique manufacturing strategy. This pre-257 scription was formulated earlier by Hayes and Pisano (1994).…”