Competitive Manufacturing

1 Competitive Manufacturing 1.1 MANUFACTURING MATTERS In the earlier part of the 20th century, manufacturing became a capitalintensive activity. A rigid mode of mass ware replaced gen date of referencelly smallbatch and make-to-order fabrication of products. A turning point was the 1920s. With increased folk incomes in North America and Europe came large-scale production of household appliances and motor vehicles. These products steadily increased in complexity, consequently requiring design standardization on the one hand and bear on specialization on the other. Product complexity combined with manufacturing in?exibility led to long product life cycles (up to 5 to 7 years, as opposed to as low as 6 months to 1 year in todays communion and computation industries), thus slowing down the introduction of mod products. In the postWorld War II (WWII) era we saw a second boom in the manufacturing industries in Western Europe, the U.S.A., and Japan, with many domestic companies competing for their respective market shares. In the early 1950s, most of these countries imposed heavy tari?s on imports in order to protect local companies. Some bailiwick governments went a step further by either acquiring large equities in numerous strategic companies or providing them with secure subsidies.

Today, however, we witness the fall of many of these domestic barriers and the emergence of multinational procure © 2003 by Marcel Dekker, Inc. All Rights Reserved. companies attempting to gain international belligerent advantage via distributed design and manufacturing across a number of countries (sometimes some(prenominal) continents), though it is important to note that most such self-made companies are normally those that encountered and survived intense domestic competition, such as Toyota, General Motors, Northern Telecom (Nortel), Sony, and Siemens. Rapid expansion of orthogonal investment opportunities continue to require these companies to be innovative and mention a... If you want to get a full essay, order it on our website: Ordercustompaper.com

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