Knowledge that Transforms

A resource‐based construct of manufacturing competence, termed strategic production competence, is examined with respect to its convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity. The construct evaluates manufacturing performance across a comprehensive domain of competitive priorities relative to item importance and performance. Data from an earlier study of furniture firms ( n = 65) are used for statistical testing. The results establish the convergent and discriminant validity of strategic production competence and show that it is positively related to business performance.

We examine the phenomenon of shifting production bottlenecks from an analytic perspective. We quantify the propensity of a work center to be a bottleneck, defined as maximal queue length, using a simple Jackson production network model. Comparison of the analytic model against an empirical simulation‐based model shows that the two are in good agreement. A scalar measure of bottleneck shiftiness is proposed and used to investigate several policies for mitigating shiftiness. Simulation experiments show that several commonly observed managerial policies for coping with shifting bottlenecks actually increase shiftiness, but that shiftiness declines when the capacity of nonbottleneck resources is increased.