A study of operations management constructs and their relationships

This paper describes an exploratory research effort to analyze and classify emerging operations management practices in US manufacturing. Using a survey of senior materials and operations management professionals in the United States, this study investigates manufacturers' supplier assessment practices, new product design and development practices, just‐in‐time practices, and quality practices. This study also identifies practices that share common variance‐covariance characteristics and to what extent the observed practices are linked to their underlying factors by means of exploratory factor analysis. Finally, bivariate correlation analysis is used to examine the relationships of the factors.