TIME for performance improvement: Targeting innovation in manufacturing engineering

Performance improvement capability is related to an organization’s ability to utilize a fundamental asset, the knowledge that resides with its employees, together with learning from past projects and having good links to external knowledge sources. Firms that develop mechanisms to encourage conversation between individuals and teams to take place, particularly in today’s post job security economic climate, can witness performance improvement at the individual and team level, and thence to the overall performance of the organization. This paper reports on performance improvement work that is taking place with the case study company, a post-lean organization, in order to develop its capacity for team and organizational learning an

The role of social relationships in improving product development decision making

The quality of decision making in product development (PD) is dependent upon the designer's ability to optimize conflicting needs. However, optimization is unlikely to succeed when based on inaccurate or erroneous information. Given that provision of accurate information frequently lies beyond the designer, decision making is dependent upon effective optimization and a timely flow of accurate information. The present paper explores informal organizational approaches to improving information flow for decision making. It presents an empirical study of relationships in two UK engineering companies and finds significant correlation between the effectiveness of these relationships and the trust, respect, and loyalty that they exhibit during PD. It further identifies the impact of relationship longevity, commonalty in background, and the wider social context of relationships. It concludes by examining the potential extendibility of the findings and the potential for further research to identify interventions that can assist management to enhance the relationships of product developers