James Lowe

The process of benchmarking

Benchmarking is a topic which is currently attracting considerable interest among both academics and practitioners in the manufacturing community. Yet little has been written about the assumptions which lie behind benchmarking. As a process, benchmarking remains poorly understood. Describes a benchmarking study in the auto components industry, and makes a preliminary attempt to identify the principles of good practice in benchmarking.

British Factory, Japanese Factory and Mexican Factory: An International Comparison of Front-Line Management and Supervision

This paper presents a case study of a Japanese-owned electronics firm, presenting a comparative analysis of the companys supervisory systems in three of its plants located in different countries – Japan, Mexico and Britain. Comparative analysis is enabled through use of the concept of a supervisory system of control, which allows us to match the relative positions of managers, supervisors and workers across the three sites. The case study data enables us systematically to examine questions of the transferability of a Japanese supervisory system – a central component of Japanese manufacturing – outside of Japan. The results suggest that ‘Japanese’ supervisory systems have been established with more success in Mexico than in Britain, and the main factors that explain this are varying local labour market conditions, limits to managerial control on the shopfloor, the relationship between the product market and the organization of production, and local and expatriate management commitment to a Japanese system.

Japanization on the shopfloor

This paper reports the findings of a study into 12 UK and nine Japanese automotive component plants. Compared to the UK plants, the Japanese plants showed a 60 per cent superiority on productivity and a 9:1 superiority in quality. Detailed examination of work structures on the shopfloor revealed that UK plants devolve more responsibility to operators for activities such as quality monitoring and improvement, work allocation and work pace determination than the Japanese plants do. This implies that key aspects of the Japanese model may have been misrepresented in the Japanization debate.

“Front‐end reflections”: supervisory systems in the UK’s Japanese transplants and in “Japanized” companies

The Japanization debate in the UK has moved considerably since first mooted in 1987. On the one hand academics ‐ advocates as well as sceptics ‐ have questioned its continued usefulness as an analytical framework. On the other, there has been greater sophistication, refinement and clarity on what is being studied, and particularly surrounding aspects of the transferability of the Japanese model. This paper reports on a study of production supervisors in Japanese transplants in the UK, and data from emulating or comparable non‐Japanese owned organizations. It also draws on comparative data from Japan and North America. The study focuses on two industries ‐ consumer electronics and autos ‐ and uses a variety of methodologies.

UK Computer Industry: American, British and Japanese Contrasts in Human Resource Management

The management practices of three organisations in the computer industry, one North American, one Japanese and one British owned are described. Although operating in similar marketplaces, markedly different management styles and practices were apparent, with the British company showing much less evidence of “human resource management” activities than the other two.