MIT Sloan Management Review

After strategies are set and plans are made, management’s primary task is to take steps to ensure that these plans are carried out, or, if conditions warrant, that the plans are modified. This is the critical control function of management. And since management involves directing the activities of others, a major part of the control [...]

Product quality is rapidly becoming an important competitive issue. The superior reliability of many Japanese products has sparked considerable soul-searching among American managers.1 In addition, several surveys have voiced consumers’ dissatisfaction with the existing levels of quality and service of the products they buy.2 In a recent study of the business units of major North [...]

AN AUTO PARTS MANUFACTURER in Northern Europe started to slip in profitability. For historical reasons, manufacturing was organized in a very disjointed way with facilities scattered over the countryside, each managed independently and concentrating on only a part of the full production process. Consolidation seemed advisable to regain profitability and the managing director pondered which [...]

SEVERAL STUDIES published in the 1980s indicated that Japanese firms, led by Toyota, have achieved the highest levels of manufacturing efficiency in the world automobile industry. Physical productivity, which reflects the “throughput” speed for completing products and the amount of labor required, has been significantly higher than in most U.S. plants (although differences vary by [...]

Another area in which U.S. firms have often lagged behind their overseas competitors is in exploiting the potential for continuous improvement in the quality and reliability of their products and processes. The cumulative effect of successive incremental improvements and modification to established products and processes can be very large and may outpace efforts to achieve [...]

The authors offer principles that help project managers define goals, establish checkpoints, schedules and resource requirements, motivate and empower team members, facilitate communication and manage conflict. These principles integrate the technical and human aspects of project management, allowing managers to complete projects on time, within budget, and to high quality standards.

DOES THIS SOUND familiar? A large retail company (or bank or fast food chain) designs its customer contact positions to be filled by people who are willing, at least temporarily, to work for wages marginally above statutory minimums. It simplifies the jobs, reducing them to a series of repetitive, boring tasks that require minimal training. [...]

Total quality management (TQM) has become accepted practice in services. Concepts from TQM in manufacturing, such as benchmarking, diagnostic tools (fishbone diagrams, Pareto charts, and so on), and customer-driven design (through quality function deployment), have joined with such concepts as service guarantees and service recovery planning to drive the quality philosophies of many service firms. [...]

Many firms have responded to the globalization of business by developing international supply chains1 in which the various value-adding activities comprising a finished product are dispersed geographically in a number of countries.2 At the same time, many businesses have tried to understand and implement lean production systems, pioneeered by Toyota, that encompass goals such as [...]

Do you consider distribution and inventory costs when you design products? Can you keep your customers informed of when their orders will arrive? Do you know what kind of inventory-control systems your dealers use? If not, you’ve succumbed to the pitfalls of inventory management. Lee and Billington describe fourteen pitfalls of supply-chain management and some corresponding opportunities.