Editorial

Citation

Burgess, T. and Heap, J. (2012), "Editorial", International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, Vol. 61 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijppm.2012.07961daa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, Volume 61, Issue 4

We start this issue with what is a first for the journal; an article authored by your co-editors. This is the first time we have authored together but we feel that the topic merits something out of the ordinary. We believe wholeheartedly that sustainability today mounts a major challenge for mankind and in this paper we set out to contribute, in some small way, to addressing this challenge. The paper aims to develop a social, environmental and economic (SEE) productivity index for individual countries that integrates these three major factors that governments and societies have to grapple with and balance against one another. As far-sighted individuals such as Elkington (1999) have observed, we need to balance people, planet and profit such that we achieve a socially-equitable, environmentally-bearable and economically-viable existence on the planet. It is hoped the index we offer will enable the benchmarking of an individual country’s performance in achieving a suitable balance of these important factors. The World Confederation of Productivity Science deserves credit in stimulating your co-editors to develop and apply the SEE index to the available data. We hope that the fruits of this venture are positively received and that the index makes a suitable mark on the future.

In the issue we have a further five papers. Thomé, Scavarda, Fernandez and Scavarda from Brazil contribute a paper containing a meta-analysis of questionnaire-survey-based studies that explore the influence of sales and operations planning on firm performance. Interestingly their study narrows the field down to only four papers that fall into this category although they examine a larger sample of 55 papers before they home in on the four papers meeting their criteria. What this small number points to is a key feature of the social sciences when compared to the natural sciences; namely that social science research is fragmented and tends not to build on previous studies. Presumably this feature is something that applies generally to our field of productivity and performance management, and not just to the limited topic that Thomé and his colleagues study. Leaving this general point aside, the limited group of studies analysed in the paper does shed light on the mechanism by which sales and operations planning has a positive impact on firm performance.

In the third paper Willis and Rankin introduce an alternative approach to measuring the performance of the construction industry. The authors “borrow” the process maturity modelling approach from the software industry; hence drawing a key parallel between the two industries, namely the reliance on project management. Their paper describes how the maturity model was constructed using input from a group of industry experts that was subjected to the analytical hierarchy process. Willis and Rankin apply their method by looking at two out of the three elements of project management’s iron triangle (cost, quality but not time) for the construction industry in the Canadian province of New Brunswick. The authors have put forward an interesting alternative to the traditional ways of measuring industry performance such as labour productivity.

Today’s lean thinking is rooted in the Toyota production system and therefore has a history that goes back many decades. Although it is now a standard feature of the modern production environment, companies still encounter difficulties in implementing the lean approach. In his paper Bhasin uses the data collected from a survey of 68 UK adopters of Lean, supplemented by seven case studies, to explore these difficulties. The study identifies barriers to lean implementation and demonstrates how these vary depending on the size of the organisation. The case studies comprise a wider spread of employees than the questionnaire survey and highlight that opinions on what constitutes the major barriers vary between the various groups of employees, managers in general and those managers who are specifically responsible for lean implementation. Bhasin also finds that recognition of barriers is inversely correlated with performance suggesting that high performers either do not recognise barriers exist or they do not allow barriers to develop within the firm.

Desai, Antony and Patel examine, in the issue’s fifth paper, the critical success factors for implementing the six sigma technique in Indian industry. The authors based their study on a survey with a response rate of approximately 15 percent with just under 90 firms responding. Over two-thirds of the sample comprised manufacturing firms. Little difference was found across differently-sized firms but some variation was found across the different industry sectors included in the sample. Unsurprisingly the major critical success factor related to management involvement and participation.

The final paper is an interesting foray by Scholz-Reiter, Heger, Meinecke and Bergmann into traditional operations research territory. The authors revisit the topic of inventory classification, in particular the ABC-XYZ technique, and show that a feasible approach can be constructed that integrates forecast demand data with more conventional data on historical stock usage. Intuitively this modification seems more suited to the dynamic times that we live in where product life cycles are shorter and new product introduction more frequent thus leading to increased obsolescence and less reliance on past data.

Tom Burgess, John Heap