People and Technology in the Workplace (1991) / Chapter Skim
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Capitalizing on New Manufacturing Technologies: Current Problems and Emergent Trends in U.S. Industry
Capitalizing on New Manufacturing Technologies: Current Problems and Emergent Trends in U.S. Industry
Pages 59-88
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Capitalizing on New Manufacturing Technologies: Current ProbJems and Emergent Trends in U.S. Industry PAUL S
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When technologies develop at a more rapid pace, a more dynamic model is needled that facilitates more frequent technological change ant! encourages a process of continuous improvement at all levels of the organization.
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delivery, usually at stages such as layout, styling, drafting, finite element analysis, manufacturing documentation, numerical control [NC) programming, and clevelopment of installation and service manuals (Automation Technology Products, 19851.
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The emergent trends can be cIassec! in six categories (Institute for Defense Analyses, 1988 )
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Underlying all these activities is the development of enabling technologies such as object-oriented programming, expert systems, and relational data bases. The current state of technology constrains not only major process innovations but also the continuous improvement process.
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The results of a recent survey by Arthur Young ~ Company are sadly eloquent: surveying 378 visitors to a factory automation trade show in November 1987, they found that middle managers and engineers disagreed strongly with the common assumption among senior executives that advanced process technology was
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The United States graduates and employs proportionately fewer engineers than several of its competitors National Science Board, 1987, Table 3-15J ant! employs proportionately fewer in nonclefense and development Rather than researchJ activities.
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If skill requirements are driven by automation, and if the rate of change in process technology accelerates as many predict, then the skill formation challenges faced by industry may grow rather than diminish. Singelmann and Tienda forecast that even though the
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The recent report by the Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce 1990 makes a stronger point one that parallels the thesis advanced in the preceding section on technology: even if industry is not currently experiencing any widespread skill shortages, and even if technological and demographic projections do not suggest any future massive skill shortages, evidence is accumulating that the current skill level of the industrial work force leaves the United States less able to derive competitive acivantage from new technologies than our competitors. Apart from this extensively debated if poorly documented question of skill :levels, there is the question of changing types of skill required within occupations to implement new process technologies.
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For organizations accustomed to promoting their manufacturing engineers from the shop floor, the change is dramatic. · System cleveJopment engineers.
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lapanese manufacturing operations have derived great benefit from the statistical skills of their blue-collar workers, since this enables them to mobilize these workers in the quality improvement process rather than rely exclusively on more expensive quality engineers. Developing coaching skills for first-line supervisors and manufacturing engineers is another important element needed to motivate and organize problem-solving activities on the part of blue-collar employees.
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PROCEDURES If the skill base of the organization is the underlying condition for the effective use of new technologies, the proximate cause for many of the implementation deficiencies is often stack in the procedures that specify how people are supposed to use the technology. Research in the International Motor Vehicle Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that procedural mechanisms such as {ust-In-Time inventory control and Statistical Process Control accounted for a much higher proportion of the variance in assembly plant productivity than did the level the automation.
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. The role of procedures in the continuous improvement process is currently the object of an unannounced and confused but important debate.
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One important factor in the workers' support for standardized work is that they set the standards themselves. Workers actively participate in establishing the standards; indeed, the plant has no work standards engineers.
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from view, perhaps because subsequent generations of researchers in industrial sociology and organizational behavior have been more struck by the prevalence of bureaucracies that are not negotiates! and that represent efforts to ensure the compliance of a recalcitrant work force.
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The implementation of new process technologies often seems to be more effective when associated with broacler jobs and teamwork organizational structures. This, too, is clear from the MIT International Motor Vehicle Program research (MacDuffie and Krafcik, 19891: teamwork and job rotation are key elements of the lean production system.
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P~~e ~ t~ ~ ~ ~ 4~~ ~ _ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ / ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ A 1 ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ more likely to have a positive long-term effect on productivity when it involves decisions related to shop floor daily life, when it involves substantive clecision-making rights rather than pure consultative arrangements, such as quality circles, ant! when it occurs in an industrial relations environment that creates employee commitment and the legitimacy of managerial authority." There are no data on whether these structural innovations are particularly common in more technologically dynamic firms nor whether their benefits are particularly great in such contexts.
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. One of the key reasons for poor performance in capitalizing on technology opportunities in manufacturing is simply that many firms have not seen manufacturing as a potentially important part of their competitive advantage.
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to manage technology more strategically is leading more firms to created chief technology officer jCTOJ positions Adler and Ferdows, 1989; Rubenstein, 1989J. A CTO can have a broad enough perspective to avoid pitfalls, to identify technological gaps, and, given sufficient organizational latitude, to be a catalyst in bringing together critical technological resources that might otherwise remain isolated in organizational fiefdoms.
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"doing" and that separate workers from engineers and managers become obsolete. · Innovation efforts are hobbled by the great status differences among different types of engineers, particularly by the gap that often separates product design engineers and manufacturing engineers.
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One of the most visible expressions of the differentiation among engineers is in the fact that in many businesses design and manufacturing engineers are not only not at the same average pay levels but also not even on the same pay curves. In some companies with common curves, there is a lower maximum for manufacturing; in some others, manufacturing engineers are not included in profit sharing plans.
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Finance and marketing have often dictated the overall direction of many organizations, while design engineering spelled out the desired new product line characteristics and manufacturing was left to "implement" the strategy that the other functions had articulatecI. In companies hoping to capitalize on the synergies between product and process technology opportunities, all the functions will need to enter the strategy formulation process as equals.
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the new process technologies are going to be used by managers to deskill work, ant!
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The difference in the performance between externally focused, internally cooperative organizations and organizations that have turned inward and become absorbed by rivalry and hierarchical mechanisms of control will grow over time. A culture of hierarchy was perhaps efficient in more stable contexts; the increasingly dynamic character of product and process technology renders that culture obsolete.
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Although an extensive analysis of this dimension is beyond the scope of this chapter, we should note that building and maintaining these external links require an appropriate set of internal organizational assets. Managing downstream linkages, for example, requires skills to interpret customers' comments, procedures to ensure the systematic collection and analysis of field information, organizational structures to ensure that results of this analysis flow to the appropriate people and that these people have some incentive to act on these results, a strategy that focuses attention on learning from users, and a cultural context that avoids the "not invented here" syndrome.
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· In the static model, culture is based on hierarchical authority. In the dynamic model, collaboration replaces rivalry, and culture is marked by encouragement to experiment and the right to fail.
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1989. The performance effects of employee ownerships plans.
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1986. Human Resource Practices for Implementing Advanced Manufacturing Technology.
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Autofact 6- Conference Proceedings. Dearborn, Mich.: Society of Manufacturing Engineers.
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MM 84-629. Dearborn, Mich.: Society of Manufacturing Engineers.
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