According to W. Edwards Deming, American companies require nothing less than a transformation of management style and of governmental relations with industry. In Out of the Crisis, originally published in 1982, Deming offers a theory of management based on his famous 14 Points for Management. Management's failure to plan for the future, he claims, brings about loss of market, which brings about loss of jobs. Management must be judged not only by the quarterly dividend, but by innovative plans to stay in business, protect investment, ensure future dividends, and provide more jobs through improved product and service. In simple, direct language, he explains the principles of management transformation and how to apply them.

Out of the Crisis

This article builds a theoretical framework to help explain governance patterns in global value chains It draws on three streams of literature ‐ transaction costs economics, production networks, and technological capability and firm-level learning ‐ to identify three variables that play a large role in determining how global value chains are governed and change These are: (1) the complexity of transactions, (2) the ability to codify transactions, and (3) the capabilities in the supply-base The theory generates five types of global value chain governance ‐ hierarchy, captive, relational, modular, and market ‐ which range from high to low levels of explicit coordination and power asymmetry The article highlights the dynamic and overlapping nature of global value chain governance through four brief industry case studies: bicycles, apparel, horticulture and electronics

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The governance of global value chains

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The Theory of Industrial Organization

Typologies are an important way of organizing the complex cause-effect relationships that are key building blocks of the strategy and organization literatures. Here, I develop a novel theoretical perspective on causal core and periphery, which is based on how elements of a configuration are connected to outcomes. Using data on hightechnology firms, I empirically investigate configurations based on the Miles and Snow typology using fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA). My findings show how the theoretical perspective developed here allows for a detailed analysis of causal core, periphery, and asymmetry, shifting the focus to midrange theories of causal processes.

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Building Better Causal Theories: A Fuzzy Set Approach to Typologies in Organization Research

Product architecture is the scheme by which the function of a product is allocated to physical components. This paper further defines product architecture, provides a typology of product architectures, and articulates the potential linkages between the architecture of the product and five areas of managerial importance: (1) product change; (2) product variety; (3) component standardization; (4) product performance; and (5) product development management. The paper is conceptual and foundational, synthesizing fragments from several different disciplines, including software engineering, design theory, operations management and product development management. The paper is intended to raise awareness of the far-reaching implications of the architecture of the product, to create a vocabulary for discussing and addressing the decisions and issues that are linked to product architecture, and to identify and discuss specific trade-offs associated with the choice of a product architecture.

The Role of Product Architecture in the Manufacturing Firm

The Genetics Of Business: Learning From The Fruit Flies * Evolution or Extinction * What Fruit Flies Teach Us About Business * Survival of the Fittest * The Secret of Life Supply Chain Design: The Ultimate Core Capability * The Primacy of Chains * Laws of Nature * DNA Mapping Executive Strategy In The Age Of Temporary Advantage: Three-Dimensional Concurrent Engineering * Cloning in Three Dimensions * Enriching the Gene Pool * Molecular Manipulation * Genetic Engineering in a Fast-Clockspeed World * Back to the Fruit Flies * When Fruit Flies Inherit the Earth

Clockspeed: Winning Industry Control In The Age Of Temporary Advantage

This paper presents a model and an analysis of the cost-flexibility tradeoffs involved in investing in product-flexible manufacturing capacity. Flexible capacity provides a firm with the ability to...

Optimal investment in product-flexible manufacturing capacity

Manufacturing strategy is a critical part of the firm's corporate and business strategies, comprising a set of well-coordinated objectives and action programs aimed at securing a long-term, sustainable advantage over competitors. It should be consistent with the firm's overall strategies, as well as with other functional strategies. A methodology for designing such manufacturing strategies has been successfully tested in actual manufacturing environments, including the Packard Electric Division of General Motors.

Manufacturing Strategy: A Methodology and an Illustration

Recent interest in product quality suggests that effort devoted to improving the quality of manufactured products may reduce unit costs. This conjecture-that improving quality can lower costs-challenges the traditional assumption that unit costs increase with increased quality assurance activities and has significant implications for quality management.

By introducing the idea of a quality-based learning curve, this paper links the previously disjoint literatures of quality control and learning curves to explain why high quality and low costs need not be inconsistent. When costs are affected by a quality-based learning curve, product quality favorably influences the rate of cost reduction due to learning. Thus, costs decline more rapidly with the experience of producing higher quality products.

Two formulations of the quality-based learning phenomenon are presented. The first assumes that quality-based experience affects direct manufacturing costs. For this formulation, the optimal quality level is decreasing over time, but is always larger than the optimal base-case quality level. The optimal production quantity is constant if the interest rate is zero and increasing in time when the interest rate is positive.

The second formulation assumes that quality-based experience affects quality control costs. In this case, the optimal quality level is always increasing over time. The optimal quantity behavior is qualitatively similar to the first formulation.

A key feature of the second quality-based model is that it resolves the controversy between the economic conformance level model of Juran, which asserts that one should use cost-tradeoff analysis to find the optimal quality level, and the claims of Deming and Crosby, that zero defects is always the optimal quality level. For certain parameter values, the optimal quality policy in the second model conforms to the economic conformance level model but the dynamics of the model demonstrates the optimality of always pushing towards zero defects.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2631702.pdf

Quality Improvement and Learning in Productive Systems

This paper discusses a framework for strategic supply chain design that rests on an assortment of conceptual approaches. These approaches include benchmarking fast-evolving industries to posit principles of supply chain dynamics and integrating supply chain design into the concurrent processes of product and manufacturing system design. These approaches yield insights into sourcing strategy as well as implementation of concurrent engineering.

Charles H. Fine

Papers

Clockspeed: Winning Industry Control In The Age Of Temporary Advantage

Optimal investment in product-flexible manufacturing capacity

Manufacturing Strategy: A Methodology and an Illustration

Quality Improvement and Learning in Productive Systems

Clockspeed-based strategies for supply chain design1