While research on the cost effectiveness of standardization to date has focused on the impact of different degrees of standardization, it has paid insufficient attention to the process an organization uses to formulate and implement standardized procedures. Drawing on the organizational...

This exploratory paper sketches some of the behavioral processes that give rise to the learning curve. Using data from two manufacturing departments in an electronic equipment company, we construct a model of productivity improvement as a function of cumulative output and two managerial...

While product development efforts are often viewed a unique configurations of idiosyncratic tasks, in reality different projects within an organization often exhibit substantial similarity in the flow of their constituent activities. Moreover, while most of the planning tools available to...

Total productivity learning curve results are reported for several departments of an electronic equipment manufacturer with plants in the U.S., Europe and Asia. These results were used to focus qualitative field investigations into the behavioral and cognitive determinants of considerable...