Advanced Manufacturing Technologies and Strategically Flexible Production. A Review and Outlook

During the 1980s, Western manufacturers were attracted by the potential of computer technology to increase productivity through the improvement of quality and the reduction of costs and lead times. However, most investments aimed at exploiting the benefits of Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) led to only partial results, and were often abandoned or scaled down. At the same time, a number of soft organizational and managerial approaches and improvement programs, mostly derived from Japan, began to spread in response to the dramatic changes in the competitive environment that seemed to require new rationales to organize and manage production systems. However, the compatibility and coherence between changing organizational paradigms and CIM approaches were not extensively explored nor understood. This paper aims to investigate the interactions between the implementation and integration of Advanced Manufacturing Technologies (AMT) and the adoption of new managerial and organizational principles.