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Describes the evolution of a company's manufacturing strategy over an eight-year period. Copeland had pursued a strategy of building freestanding focused plants devoted to single processes or product lines, and then moving products from the home plant at Sidney, Ohio to the new facility. Sidney is now left with a jumble of unrelated products and processes, and management must decide whether it should be reorganized by product line or manufacturing processes. HBR reprint number 85117 "Competing Through Manufacturing," January-February 1985, by S.C. Wheelwright and R.H. Hayes may be taught with these cases.

In the (A) case, Copeland had to choose between focusing its Sidney plant by product line or by manufacturing process. Now that it has made that decision, a plant layout must be selected from two alternatives.

In the preceding case, Copeland had to choose between two alternative plant layouts for organizing its Sidney plant. Now it must get work force approval for a change in "bumping" rules before proceeding with the change. Management must decide how to proceed--to continue with the reorganization, delay the moving of equipment and personnel, or drop the project completely.

Intended for distribution during class, this case contains one set of answers to the (A1) case. It introduces the concept of a Gantt chart and discusses issues raised by the case such as the value of labor flexibility. The open-ended questions in the (A1) case are only partially answered to encourage further student creativity.

The student is starting his or her own business, baking make-to-order cookies. Basic times of each operation are laid out and the student is asked to determine the consequences for the operating system. Serves as an exercise and review of concepts such as capacity, bottlenecks, and throughput times. Students should be able to make several useful suggestions for improving the system. The case ends with a series of open-ended questions.

A small manufacturing company has purchased an innovative and complex new machine. The equipment is for a vital part of the manufacturing process. Despite the concerted efforts of the equipment maker and the company's production and manufacturing staffs, the new machine fails to achieve the promised output. The purchase of this equipment was supposed to be the first step in a move toward advanced manufacturing techniques. The vice-president, production, must decide whether to continue to attempt to get the equipment running well or to exercise his option of returning the system and getting back the purchase price plus a penalty fee.

Manufacturing companies are confronted today with an array of new systems to improve production efficiency. Chief among these are: materials requirements planning (MRP), kanban (the Japanese just-in-time system), Israel's optimized production technology (OPT), and the latest approach, flexible manufacturing systems (FMS). A rundown of each methodology explains strengths, weaknesses, and trade-offs to help managers choose a system to match their needs. Examples of applications of each system worldwide are included.

To reduce high manufacturing overhead, companies should look beyond their direct labor and materials costs to the costs of transactions. These transactions are the exchanges of materials and/or information that are necessary to move production along. They do not directly result in physical products but instead in a kind of "augmented product" that the customer buys--on-time delivery, quality, variety, and design improvement. Three approaches to managing the costs of these transactions are to analyze which transactions are necessary and improve the methods of carrying them out, to increase the stability of operations, and to rely on automation and systems integration.

The managing director of Benetton is faced with several issues concerning the adequacy of the company's organization to capitalize on the early success it has achieved in an important foreign market, the United States. Specifically, the case raises questions about whether Benetton should alter its strategy and form a U.S. subsidiary, the responsibilities that managers in such a subsidiary should hold, and other organizational changes that should be made at the company's Italian headquarters to accommodate such actions. In addition, it focuses on the management of the transition from an entrepreneurial to a professionally-managed stage of a company's development.

Applichem has six plants in different countries making the same chemical product. The purpose of this case is to allow students to think about what costs are relevant to management in this process industry environment, about how to define a comparison of costs and productivity across plants, and about how it happens that plants in different parts of the world come to have quite different costs of producing the same product. Finally they can begin to think about what management might do to ensure that productivity improvements made at one plant would be routinely useful for other plants.

Presents a general approach to diagnosing and solving problems in management, especially in production situations with ambiguous problems.

Describes what has happened since the introduction of just-in-time production techniques were developed to reduce inventory. Reviews the progress to date in such areas as process rationalization; set-up reduction; quality improvement and leveling the scheduling; and discusses options for the future. The aim of the case is to show students the details of implementing a new production method.

The different roles that manufacturing can play in a company's efforts to formulate and achieve its strategic objectives can be described in terms of a developmental continuum. At the lowest "internally neutral" stage, top managers regard production as a low-tech operation, incapable of influencing competitive success. Stage 2 companies seek an "externally neutral" parity with major competitors on the manufacturing dimension. This attitude is often found in America's smokestack industries. Stage 3 organizations, on the other hand, expect production to support and strengthen the company's competitive position, and manufacturing investments are screened for consistency with the business strategy. The fourth and most progressive stage arises when competitive strategy rests to a significant degree on a company's production capability.

The world's largest manufacturer of woolen outerwear garments seeks to extend its retailing network to the United States from its base in Europe. A number of issues concerning marketing, manufacturing, and logistics strategy are raised by the proposed move along with specific questions about how the move should be managed. The case describes a well-thought-out, functionally integrated strategy for Europe in a way that allows assessment of its applicability for a proposed U.S. effort.

Group technology (GT), the concept of exploiting similarities in recurring tasks and grouping like problems, is drawing increasing interest from manufacturers because of its ability to boost productivity in three ways: 1) by performing similar activities together, thereby cutting setup time; 2) by standardizing closely related activities, thereby eliminating unnecessary proliferation of similar parts; and 3) by storing and making accessible information related to recurring problems, thereby cutting time spent searching for information or solving problems.

Competition in the industrial marketplace is growing steadily more intense. Consequently, managers are beginning to take a close look at the logistics systems of their companies as a means of gaining competitive advantage. A well-designed system can help advance a company's strategic goals - and a poorly designed system can lead a company to disaster.

Describes systematic methods for process debugging and improvement, based on statistical quality control. Examples are from manufacturing settings, but techniques are also useful for services and sales, and to quantity improvement as well as quality improvement.

Involves the introduction of a technology which almost completely eliminates direct labor for a major segment of the product line. The technology is unproven though, and requires managing the learning process. The teaching objective is to review the differences in managing change between fixed and variable cost-intensive technologies and additions of manufacturing capacity.

Describes the method of control of repetitive manufacturing as used at Toyota by Just-in-Time and Kanban. The objective is to facilitate an understanding of how the method works and its rationale.

The director of the Victoria Hospital Pharmacy has been forced by a request from his superior to confront and consider the possibility that people could die because of weaknesses in his operating systems. In a health care system, the operating environment must support, not only ideally, but in reality, 100% quality control with no defects. The one-time failure or lapse in the performance of the operating system(s) can have tragic consequences for all involved. The director must decide if Victoria Hospital Pharmacy is delivering the level of quality service expected of it by the public through its existing systems.