Editorial

Citation

Burgess, T. and Heap, J. (2011), "Editorial", International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, Vol. 60 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijppm.2011.07960caa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, Volume 60, Issue 3

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The first paper in this edition, by Towill and Childerhouse, stems from reflections by two academics on the literature and on the practical activities that they have undertaken over a number of years in conjunction with production sites to improve the performance of supply chains. Towill and Childerhouse offer a set of principles to guide the industrial engineer in how to go about their improvement initiatives. One particular dilemma they deal with is where the industrial engineer should start and in what order they should carry out the individual tasks that comprise the improvement toolkit. In providing this map the authors deal with the strategic issue of whether in the first instance to concentrate in-house (local) or on the wider aspects of the supply chain (holistic). Their statistical testing of the empirical data suggest that, in practice, firms should “learn to walk” by improving internally (locally) before embarking on more complex enhancement activities in the wider supply chain.

Authors Nandakumar, Ghobadian and O’Regan explore in their paper how business-level strategies relate to organisational performance. In particular they examine one of the key contributions to the strategy field; namely Porter’s generic strategies. Using a mail-delivered questionnaire survey they generated a data set of 124 firms drawn from the electrical and mechanical engineering sector. Using various multivariate approaches, but noticeably ANOVA, their results confirm Porter’s hypothesis that firms whose strategies are “stuck-in-the-middle” perform less well than those pursuing generic strategies. In particular the cost-leadership and differentiation strategies deliver better results than following an integrated strategy.

While the previous two papers draw from the manufacturing sectors of the UK, the third paper focuses on the public sector in Finland. Jääskeläinen and Uusi-Rauva explore the problems in measuring (service) productivity in the public sector by presenting a case study of the City of Helsinki. They propose an approach that is suitable for dealing with such large public sector organizations with multiple units providing services. Essentially, a number of individual measures – taken at the unit level – are aggregated to comprise the overall measure for the organisation – they term this a “bottom-up” approach. They use an action research approach to design and implement the new productivity measurement system in the case study organisation. They argue that the new measurement method is more relevant to management’s needs than the old method – a claim which, if true, must indicate the value of their contribution.

The next paper deals with two ubiquitous improvement philosophies relevant to both manufacturing and service situations, those of Total Quality Management (TQM) and Supply Chain Management (SCM). Talib, Rahman and Qureshi concentrate on reviewing the literature with the intention of identifying what practices constitute these two approaches and how they are related. They come up with a set of six major practices for each philosophy which they go on to reduce further to a set of three key practices which form the foundation for TQM and SCM. These key practices comprise: top-management commitment; customer focus; and supplier relationship and management. These seem to make sense to your Editors.

Kulatunga, Amaratunga and Haigh study performance measurement in Research and Development (R&D) for the construction industry. They develop a performance measurement system (PMS) suitable for evaluating the performance of construction R&D. They do this via a combination of literature review and analysis of empirical data assembled from questionnaire survey and semi-structured interviews. The paper proceeds from identifying critical success factors to building these in to the PMS.

In addition to the five academic papers described above we have a reflective practitioner piece. This is set in a healthcare context and it describes and discusses a data-driven system, built around electronic health records, and its impact on productivity, further suggesting that such systems can also have an impact on clinical outcomes. Not surprisingly, the measurement system did prove to be a catalyst for change

So, we bring to you another set of papers representing the breadth of the topics and industrial sectors we try to cover in this journal. Enjoy!

Tom Burgess, John Heap