America’s Best: : Industry Week’s Guide to World‐Class Manufacturing Plants

Citation

Lewis, M. (1998), "America’s Best: : Industry Week’s Guide to World‐Class Manufacturing Plants", International Journal of Operations & Production Management, Vol. 18 No. 6, pp. 631-632. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijopm.1998.18.6.631.1

Since 1990, Industry Week magazine has held an open competition to highlight excellence in US‐based manufacturing. Their “America’s Best Plants” awards have proved to be very popular and over the last six years a large and potentially invaluable database of information on “world‐class” manufacturing has been built up. This book is an attempt to summarise the main lessons from all these award‐winning plants and present them to a broader practitioner audience:

No unproved theory, no unsupported stories, no unspoken agendas ‐ just the facts. Here was the staff that works! (Preface, p. v).

The book is divided into two main sections and strives to establish a no‐nonsense style from the very beginning. The first section is an editorial attempt to draw out the common themes that define a “world‐class” plant. Nine areas of major similarity are identified, which are then re‐classified into the three “core strategies” adopted and the six “supporting competencies” required for implementation. Although this book is clearly aimed at a practitioner audience, the theoretical flaws in this approach are nonetheless significant. A competence perspective on competitive success argues that long‐term advantage is linked to the possession of unique organisational attributes and therefore those factors common to most firms in an industry ‐ and also to many industries ‐ can never underpin sustainable competitive advantage. Although many of the factors identified in the book could be classified as firm‐specific resources (i.e. experienced engineers, project management skills, etc.) the focus is firmly on those features that are common across the sample. The resulting categorisation is almost inevitably too “broadbrush” for many useful practice lessons to be drawn. For example, the first two “strategies” are customer focus and quality, these that should be familiar to any reader (practitioner or academic) who has taken even a passing interest in the development of manufacturing practice over the last 20 years. The third strategy, agility, is superficially the most innovative and interesting, yet this chapter is among the weakest in Section One. The book’s observed definition of agility to thrive under conditions of constant and unpredictable change) leads the reader to anticipate an invaluable practical discussion about the interplay between market and organisational dynamics. However, the actual chapter is not much more than a review of already well documented ideas (focus and cellular manutacturing, JIT, multi‐skilling etc.) collected under a new, albeit modish heading.

Several of the six supporting competencies also suffer from a degree of overfamiliarity ‐ employee involvement, supply‐chain management, technology management, product development etc. ‐ although the extra emphasis placed on satety, environmental responsibility and corporate responsibility are welcome additions. Unfortunately, the impression that this book is simply a collection of buzzwords rather than a serious analysis is reinforced by the discussion of corporate responsibility. Only one of the 62 plants profiled is actually identified as a winner in this category and the other examples highlight little more than employee charity work, something which is highly laudable but cannot be conceived of as innovative managerial practice!

As well as ignoring the specificity of individual organisations, most of the case analyses underplay the role of the competitive environment in defining success. The book recognises the importance of particular processes but underplays the fact that much of their value lies in the manner and mechanism of their deployment and fit within an industry structure.

The second section of the book provides a brief narrative description of each plant, followed by case‐specific practice hints and then relevant contact information.

Also included is the comprehensive questionnaire used to assess the award entrants ‐ the intention being that readers can use it as a self‐assessment (benchmarking) tool? It is this section that provides the book with its real justification. A wide variety of real examples, will prove useful to practitioners (especially those who are sceptical about academic and consultant “theories”) and offers potential case material for academics. The difficulty with this section is that by including 62 different cases, the amount of detail that it is possible to give on any one case is extremely limited. This does not allow the reader to feel like they are “inside” the company, and certainly does not give confidence that the information is heavily filtered.

The Industry Week award is not the only attempt to define best practice in manufacturing. In the UK for example, Cranfield School of Management and Management Today magazine run the annual Best Factory awards and London Business School and IBM Consulting have run extensive surveys of European manufacturing excellence. The difficulty with all best practice literature is that it rarely addresses the most pertinent and practical questions. Establishing what went wrong, what was abandoned, and what were the greatest implementation difficulties is at least as important as revealing the successful outcomes of a minority of manufacturing improvement initiatives.