Time‐based competition

This study reports the experience of management from 83 electronic plants located in the USA in dealing with time‐based performance. The general finding is that by managing time effectively, a firm is able to enjoy reductions in manufacturing cost, warranty cost, and more importantly increased market shares. Also, despite some prominent features offered by some of the more advanced quality related techniques, such as quality function deployment technique (QFD) and the Taguchi methods, our survey showed that very few electronic firms in the sample have actually adopted either of these two techniques. Yet consistent with the robustness of these theories, results indicate that those firms embracing these methods experienced a greater reduction in product development time. Thus, our study has important implications for manufacturing firms, particularly those which are still searching for better ways to improve their product development time. For example, according to Ray Stata, the president of Analog Device “The thing that hung us up for the longest time in the product development area is that we didn’t have anybody in the company who had a clue as to how to improve product development. It wasn’t that we didn’t think it was important, but how do you do it?”.