Assessing manufacturing performance: an advanced manufacturing technology portfolio perspective

Addresses the relationship between firm performance on 15 manufacturing attributes and the extensiveness of advanced manufacturing technology (AMT) portfolios that firms adopt. Mail survey data obtained from 116 manufacturing firms in the USA that had adopted a variety of AMT are used in this research. On average, responding firms reported some improvements in manufacturing performance for all variables except changes in average labour cost (total labour cost/number of direct and indirect labour employees). Adoption of AMT tended to result in marginal reductions in the number of operators and marginal increases in average labour costs across all technology portfolio classifications. For all technology groups, firms recorded their highest level of improvement for product quality, and operator output rates/operator productivity. The majority of firms that had adopted both integrated process technologies and integrated information/logistic technologies reported improvements for 14 of the 15 performance attributes covered in this study.