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This is an extended version of a paper first presented at The First International Conference on Managing Enterprises-Stakeholders, Engineering, Logistics & Achievement (ME-SELA '97) at Loughborough University, UK, 22-24 July 1997.
1. Introduction
Aspiring to become a "world class manufacturing" (WCM) organisation is a common aim of many manufacturers. However, recent research by authors such as Hanson et al. (1994) and Schonberger (1996) concludes that few manufacturers are achieving this status and many are failing to even get started in the race to improving their manufacturing practices and performance. For some manufacturers, this may be due to inertia or, more seriously, it may be due to a lack of relevance of the advice available on what WCM means and on the steps required to attain WCM status. Indeed the research referred to above by Hanson et al. (1994) and Schonberger (1996) uses one set of criteria to assess the practice and performance of all types of manufacturers. Given the diversity of strategies and of manufacturing types, it seems unlikely that this one set of criteria could be appropriate to them all. Research is needed to identify the degree of relevance for specific industry sectors of such assessment criteria and of the advice generally found in the literature. Without this, many companies will not be able to assess their current position accurately and will not be able to move forward in an appropriate manner.
This paper seeks to address these issues for the "make-to-order" (MTO) sector of industry. This sector consists of those companies that manufacture high variety products in relatively low volumes. Often the volumes are low even at the component production stage as there is little scope for common components because products are manufactured to customer design and specification. It must be stressed that this is a different group of companies to those which have historically manufactured on a make-to-stock basis, but are now able to manufacture on a make-to-order basis because of the reduced lead times achieved when implementing new manufacturing principles such as lean production (Womack et al. , 1990). The term MTO, as used in this paper, refers instead to those companies that have always manufactured on a make-to-order basis because of the nature of their products and their relationship...