Manufacturing

• Author: Thomas Haynes
• Pages: 483-486

Page 483

One can trace the origins of modern manufacturing management to the advent of agricultural production, which meant that humans did not constantly have to wander to find new sources of food. Since that time, people have been developing better techniques for producing goods to meet human needs and wants. Since they had additional time available because of more efficient food sources, people began to develop techniques to produce items for use and trade. They also began to specialize based on their skills and resources. With the first era of water-based exploration, trade, and conflict, new ideas regarding product development eventually emerged, over the course of the centuries, leading to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-eighteenth century. The early twentieth century, however, is generally considered to mark the true beginning of a disciplined effort to study

Flywheel assembly line at the Ford Motor Company's Highland Park, Michigan, plant ca. 1913. ASSOCIATED PRESS, FORD MOTOR COMPANY

---

Page 484

and improve manufacturing and operations management practices. Thus, what we know as modern manufacturing began in the final decades of the twentieth century.

The late 1970s and early 1980s saw the development of the manufacturing strategy paradigm by researchers at the Harvard Business School. This work focused on how manufacturing executives could use their factories' capabilities as strategic competitive weapons, specifically identifying how what we call the five P's of manufacturing management (people, plants, parts, processes, and planning) can be analyzed as strategic and tactical decision variables. Central to this notion is the focus on factory and manufacturing trade-offs. Because a factory cannot excel on all performance measures, its management must devise a focused strategy, creating a focused factory that does a limited set of tasks extremely well. Thus the need arose for making trade-offs among such performance measures as low cost, high quality, and high flexibility in designing and managing factories.

The 1980s saw a revolution in management philosophy and the technologies used in manufacturing. Just-in-time (JIT) production was the primary breakthrough in manufacturing philosophy. Pioneered by the Japanese, JIT is an integrated set of activities designed to achieve high-volume production using minimal inventories of parts that arrive at the workstation "just in time." This philosophy—coupled with total quality control (TQC), which aggressively seeks to eliminate causes of production defects—is now a cornerstone in many manufacturers' practices.

As profound as JIT's impact has been, factory automation in its various forms promises to have an even greater impact on operations management in coming decades. Such terms as computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM), flexible manufacturing systems (FMS), and factory of the future (FOF) are part of the vocabulary of manufacturing leaders.

Another major development of the 1970s and 1980s was the broad application of computers to operations problems. For manufacturers, the big breakthrough was the application of materials requirements planning (MRP) to production control. This...