A comparative study on the structural relationships of manufacturing practices, lead time and productivity in Japan and Korea

✍ Scribed by Boo-Ho Rho; Yung-Mok Yu

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1998
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 162 KB
• Volume: 16
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0272-6963
• DOI: 10.1016/s0272-6963(97)00041-7

✦ Synopsis

This study focuses on analyzing how the factory productivity and lead time can be linked together with manufacturing practices in different countries, especially in Japan and Korea. A structural relationship model with five exogenous Ž manufacturing practice constructs design and engineering changes, production planning, materials management, process and . Ž . process technologies, and quality and two endogenous manufacturing performance constructs lead time and productivity has been proposed and empirically tested with mail-surveyed data sets collected in these two countries. As a result, the overall fitness of the proposed model showed a significant structural relationship in both countries. Two exogenous constructs, process and process technologies and materials management, appeared to have significant effect on length of the lead time in both countries. Process and process technologies also showed a direct significant relationship with productivity in both countries. But other manufacturing practices had different cause-and-effect relationship with lead time andror productivity depending on the countries. No other constructs were found to have any significant relationship with lead time in Japan. But the Japanese sample showed that process and process technologies, lead time and quality had a significant effect on productivity. Production planning and quality performance also seemed to significantly affect the length of lead time in Korea. But no significant relationship could be found between productivity and lead time or between productivity and quality in Korea.