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Trends in modern operations management
Edited by Ben Clegg, Jillian MacBryde and Prasanta Dey
Introduction
There is a strong and intensifying trend among manufacturers to develop and deploy company-specific production systems (XPS). Inspired from the success of the Toyota Production System (TPS), and armed with a massive body of literature suggesting a positive relationship between improvement programmes and operational performance, corporate managers firmly believe that having a similar but tailored system in place will strengthen their firm's competitiveness. Such a system is often labelled the "company name" production system, here abbreviated to XPS[1] .
XPSs seem particularly popular among multinational enterprises that have undergone rapid global growth over the last decades. They now face the challenge of operating a globally dispersed manufacturing network effectively and efficiently ([14] Colotla et al. , 2003) and seek inspiration from the broad literature that suggests sharing organisational practices among multiple locations as a fundamental strategy for seeking competitive advantage in multinational enterprises ([37] Maritan and Brush, 2003; [11] Birkinshaw and Hood, 1998; [29] Jensen and Szulanski, 2004). Thus, a recent innovation is that companies consolidate their earlier plant-specific local improvement programmes into corporate-wide global improvement programmes. Companies as varied as Mercedes, Caterpillar, John Deere, Scania, Bosch, Du Pont, Jotun, Hydro, Siemens, Ecco, Whirlpool, Swedwood, Lego and Volvo have all implemented an XPS in recent years. A shared ultimate goal is to build dynamic capabilities that provide sustained competitive advantage ([3] Anand et al. , 2009).
Despite this evident trend in industry, only a few dedicated studies of firm-specific improvement programmes in international manufacturing networks have been published, with the notable exception of the TPS ([62] Witcher et al. , 2008). Even though the TPS is a convincing example of an XPS that has rendered its mother company with a durable competitive advantage, it is questionable that the implementation of an XPS would become a competitive advantage for any company to the same extent that it has for Toyota. Under what circumstances an XPS contributes to competitive advantage is not well understood, and at first glance the increased adoption of such systems tends to be based on conviction rather than research-based evidence. This study seeks to investigate the general conditions under which the global deployment of XPSs can provide...