Missing link in competitive manufacturing research and practice: Customer‐responsive concurrent production

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1016/j.jom.2016.12.006
• Author: Karen A. Brown,Richard J. Schonberger
• Published date: 01 March 2017
• Date: 01 March 2017

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Missing link in competitive manufacturing research and practice:

Customer-responsive concurrent production

Richard J. Schonberger

a

,

*

, Karen A. Brown

b

,

1

a

177 107th Ave.NE, #2101, Bellevue, WA 98004, USA

b

Thunderbird School of Global Management, 1 Global Place, Glendale, AZ 86001,USA

article info

Article history:

Accepted 10 December 2016

Available online 25 January 2017

Accepted by Mikko Ketokivi.

Keywords:

Operations management

Competitiveness

Concurrent production

Sequential production

Customer focus

Customer responsiveness

Factory configuration

Factory infrastructure

Cellular manufacturing

Utilization metric

Monument equipment

abstract

Manufacturing management, in its evolving theory, research, and practice, is plagued by mindsets that

are narrowly focused on factory efficiency, with insufficient emphasis on customer responsiveness and

its dominant role in competitiveness. In our presentation of thes e issues we describe and advocate

customer-oriented manufacturing practices, in the realm of factory infrastructure. This approach, which

we call concurrent production or CP, involves configuring, equipping, and operating factories with a

primary focus on synchronization with customer demand. We call on OM researchers to consider these

topics in furthering the cause of market competitiveness.

©2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

The manufacturing arm of operations management (OM) has

limited itself to a narrow vision of what this key organizational

function is supposed to be and do. OM scholars have quibbled about

efficiency in factory and supply-chain operations (see Sidebar 1

about what we call the “terminology jungle”), while giving little

attention to tying production forward to end customers. Our view is

that this single-minded focus on efficiency has effectively knocked

OM research, theory, topics, methods, measures, and practitioner

guidance off kilter.

On the industry side, a narrow view of OM mirrors the single-

minded focus that we observe in academia. Manufacturers

proudly display factories that have been cleared of targeted wastes

and are marvels of short flow times, low work-in-process in-

ventories, and high capacity utilization. They may also point to

similar achievements with key suppliers. A closer look, however,

often reveals a supply chain with extended lead times and swollen

finished-goods inventories that dwarf the low in-plant inventories

(Schonberger, 2016). The overall supply chain often loses the ability

to compete on anything except cost. The resulting vulnerability to

low-cost competition leads to offshoring.

Inability to synchronize with downstream demand increases

production cost through supply-demand mismatches, delays in

addressing quality issuesdeven mass product recalls, and

customer defections. These negative outcomes are commonplace

even in factories held up as bastions of “best practices”. The

acronym VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) has

been coined to describe how customer demand has been evolving

across most industries (Bennett and Lemoine, 2014).Manufacturers

continue to expand their product mixes and variants, eventually

approaching mass customization (Yavuz and Akçali, 2007). Our

objective is to zero in on concurrent production (CP),

1

designing

manufacturing to make production concurrent with end-customer

usage. After briefly describing CP and reviewing its place in the

*Corresponding author.

E-mail address: sainc17@centurylink.net (R.J. Schonberger).

1

Deceased.

1

A synonym is simultaneous production, used, for example, by Nicholas (1998,p.

198).

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Journal of Operations Management

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jom

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jom.2016.12.006

0272-6963/©2017Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Journal of Operations Management 49-51 (2017)83e87