A newly appointed hospital CEO must decide how aggressively she should pursue a sexual harassment accusation against a long-time senior hospital executive, who was also a rival for the CEO position.

Modularity is a familiar principle in the computer industry. Different companies can independently design and produce components, such as disk drives or operating software, and those modules will fit together into a complex and smoothly functioning product because makers obey a given set of design rules. As businesses as diverse as auto manufacturing and financial services move toward modular designs, the authors say, competitive dynamics will change enormously. Leaders in a modular industry will control less, so they will have to watch the competitive environment closely for opportunities to link up with other module makers. They will also need to know more: engineering details that seemed trivial at the corporate level may now play a large part in strategic decisions. Leaders will also become knowledge managers internally because they will need to coordinate the efforts of development groups in order to keep them focused on the modular strategies the company is pursuing.

The case examines the development of the float glass process at Pilkington in the mid-1950s. Pilkington has pursued the development of a radically new process for flat glass production, but has experienced serious problems at each stage of development. The senior management must now decide whether to scale up to commercial production. A rewritten version of an earlier case.

During the last decade, U.S. manufacturers have narrowed if not eliminated the competitive gap between themselves and such foreign rivals as the Japanese and the Germans. But how can they take the lead and retain it? What will it take to stay ahead? To answer those daunting questions, an ad hoc group of 27 academics and industry executives formed the Manufacturing Vision Group in 1988. They studies development projects at Chaparral Steel, Digital Equipment, Eastman Kodak, Ford Motor, and Hewlett-Packard. Development projects are microcosms of an organization. And when designed and managed well, they generate powerful, distinctive capabilities as well as winning products or processes. The most successful projects combine seven key elements, which, when applied comprehensively, optimize development, foster learning, and initiate change throughout an organization. Those elements are: core capabilities, guiding visions, organization and leadership, ownership and commitment, "pushing the envelope," prototypes, and integration.

To be a leader in global manufacturing in the 1990s, a company must excel in two seemingly contradictory ways. First, it must constantly build and refresh its individual areas of expertise so that it has the critical capabilities needed to stay ahead. And second, it must get its ever-changing mix of disciplines to work together in an ever-changing competitive environment. Most manufacturers, especially those companies that have reorganized themselves by cross-functional processes, have already discovered how difficult it is to integrate various disciplines and still maintain functional excellence. But development projects offer a solution. Development projects are the critical juncture where functional groups meet and are therefore the true test of an organization's integrative abilities. More important, they can be used as a tool for strengthening the relationship among functions, while still giving those functions the room they need to advance their own expertise. The Kodak FunSaver project illustrates how a company can encourage functions to work together effectively, enhance functional expertise, and create a winning product to boot.

Leadership is the key to developing great products--products that surprise and delight customers. To achieve that goal, all the technical elements of a product must work well together as a system. The manufacturing process must produce everything that the design requires and the product must be delivered to customers in an outstanding fashion. And if the development of a great product is not an isolated case--if one great product is followed by another and another--the result is a great enterprise. Leadership is the key to achieving that kind of consistency. Eastman Kodak's FunSaver camera and Hewlett-Packard's DeskJet printer are examples of development efforts that created great products. Each became the basis for a whole family of products that has created a significant business for its company. The Manufacturing Vision Group studies successful projects that had powerful guiding visions for business strategy, project, and product. Moreover, these three visions were mutually reinforcing, energizing the people on the teams, focusing attention and effort on the right things, and getting them done in the right way.

The long-term competitiveness of most manufacturers depends on their product development capabilities. Yet most companies' development process is unruly and unfocused, with a collection of projects that do not match business objectives and consume far more development resources than are available. An "aggregate project plan" can help managers to focus on a set of projects, rather than individual ones. A central element of the plan is the project map, which categorizes projects into five types: breakthrough, platform, derivative, R&D, and partnerships. With the plan, managers can improve resource allocation, project sequencing, and critical development capabilities.

Examines the challenge facing the managers of a large aluminum manufacturing plant in its drive to improve workplace safety. The CEO of the company has made safety a top priority. The plant has made good progress in reducing the injury rate, but now confronts the need to accelerate its improvement. Doing so requires the safety director to consider progress to date and analyze the opportunities for improvement, many of which involve fundamental changes in behavior at all levels of the organization. Progress has not been uniform throughout the plant and past approaches may not be adequate in meeting the challenge. As the case comes to a close, these issues come to a head because a superintendent wants to fire a supervisor who has failed to adhere to safety procedures. Designed to introduce students to the issues of safety in its operating context. Students have information available that allows them to analyze underlying causes and identify major opportunities for improvement. However, the interactions between safety and other dimensions of manufacturing performance are evident in developing and implementing a plan for improvement.

Products with integrity perform superbly, provide good value, and satisfy customer's expectations in every respect, including such intangibles as their look and feel. The most successful development organizations appoint a "heavyweight" product manager to guide the creation of a strong product concept. This person ensures that a product concept both satisfies potential customers' wants and needs and is completely embodied in a product's details.

Ceramics Process Systems (CPS) is an advanced ceramics company facing problems with lead time in product/process development, and late delivery of prototype parts to its customers. Engineering is confronted with difficult technical problems and multiple objectives (i.e., meet customer requirements for prototype parts, build technical capability). Kathryn Sundback, head of development for molded products, must deal with the lead time and delivery problems on current products while making choices about and allocating resources to several new projects that marketing has developed. The case gives students the opportunity to examine engineering capacity, the nature of the development process, managing the set of projects as a whole (i.e., mix of project type, resource allocation) and customer interaction in a dynamic, technical, and market environment. May be used with Ceramics Process Systems Corp. (A).

Five trends shape the new competition: worldwide dissemination of scientific knowledge, growth in the number of global competitors, fragmented markets and shifting customer preferences, diverse and transforming process technologies, and proliferation of the number of technologies relevant to any product. Never has technology been so important, never has it been harder to gain a competitive edge by means of technology alone. Managers must link technical capabilities to customer requirements. Important principles of action are: know the technological core and link it to strategic intent, take a global view of technical competence, time is of the essence, discipline functions around the science of production, and integrate operations around the information system.

Before managers can take meaningful steps to boost factory performance, they need an accurate way to judge what good performance is and to compare performance among facilities. The measurement systems in place at many factories fail to tell managers what they really need to know. To clarify the variables that affect productivity, 12 factories in 3 companies were studied over time. A new measuring system called total factor productivity (TFP) was devised to gauge each plant's overall efficiency. Then, the managerial practices that, when done right, make a difference were identified: investing in new equipment, reducing waste, and cutting work-in-process inventories by solving the problems that produced them in the first place.

Considers decisions facing the leader of a manufacturing staff project team assigned to a plant where yields have deteriorated sharply. The process is complex: the plant organization is not cooperative and there are deep disagreements about what is wrong and how to fix it. Provides an opportunity to analyze yields and productivity, as well as the organizational and personal challenges inherent in line-staff interaction.

Faced with growth exceeding 100% per year, James Davis, president of New Balance, must decide how to meet the need for additional capacity. Several factors contribute to a climate of extreme uncertainty. Several options are considered, ranging from a second shift to acquiring a plant in Ireland. Sufficient information is provided to allow an analysis of forecasted demand as well as the strategic financial and organizational implications of alternative courses of action.