Author
Listed:
- Collins, Robert
- Cordón, Carlos
- Julien, Denyse
Abstract
Many executives are currently striving to develop world-class manufacturing operations to ensure that they remain competitive in increasingly global markets. To do this, they are adopting a range of practices, from organisational changes such as empowerment and teamwork to the use of techniques such as pull production. Their goal is to substantially improve performance: faster cycle times, reduced manufacturing costs and greater customer satisfaction. The question of how far companies have moved towards world-class manufacturing is at the heart of the 'Made in Switzerland' project, a major benchmarking study of Swiss manufacturing practice and performance. The study was carried out in 1995 by IMD faculty and researchers working with consultants from IBM Switzerland. It is part of the internationally-based 'Made in Europe' project comprising similar studies in the UK, Germany, The Netherlands and Finland. The central hypothesis of the studies is that the adoption of best practice leads to high performance. The objective is to establish a benchmarking database for participating manufacturers around the world. The studies, which are highly structured, examine six areas of manufacturing practice and performance in detail and assess the relationship between them at individual plants. The areas covered in the study are quality, organisation and culture, concurrent engineering, logistics, lean production and manufacturing systems. Plants in each country are grouped according to their position on the practice and performance indices and then studied in order to pinpoint the issues and challenges facing the manufacturers within that group. Less than three per cent of the 800 plants currently on the 'Made in Europe' database are considered 'world-class'. Yet for manufacturers striving to reach this level of performance, this small minority can provide some valuable insights for the way ahead. This article discusses many of the issues raised by the analysis described above, with particular reference to the 'Made in Switzerland' study. In the first section, it looks at the key lessons arising from the Swiss study and what insights these can provide for manufacturers, not only in the Swiss market, but across Europe. In the second section, it looks at how the study can be used for benchmarking and provides manufacturers with some general recommendations to help them focus their improvements and move closer to becoming world-class.
Suggested Citation
Collins, Robert & Cordón, Carlos & Julien, Denyse, 1996.
"Lessons from the 'made in Switzerland' study: What makes a world-class manufacturer?,"
European Management Journal, Elsevier, vol. 14(6), pages 576-589, December.
Handle:
RePEc:eee:eurman:v:14:y:1996:i:6:p:576-589
Download full text from publisher
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.
Citations
Citations are extracted by the
CitEc Project, subscribe to its
RSS feed for this item.
Cited by:
- Garcia, Fernanda A. & Marchetta, Martin G. & Camargo, Mauricio & Morel, Laure & Forradellas, Raymundo Q., 2012.
"A framework for measuring logistics performance in the wine industry,"
International Journal of Production Economics, Elsevier, vol. 135(1), pages 284-298.
- Morita, Michiya & James Flynn, E. & Ochiai, Shigemi, 2011.
"Strategic management cycle: The underlying process building aligned linkage among operations practices,"
International Journal of Production Economics, Elsevier, vol. 133(2), pages 530-540, October.
Corrections
All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:eurman:v:14:y:1996:i:6:p:576-589. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.
If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.
We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .
If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/115/description#description .
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through
the various RePEc services.