Why Time Compression?

Ian C. Gregory and Simon B. Rawling

Chapter 1 in Profit from Time, 1997, pp 1-12 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract Business is in disarray. The world is getting a smaller place. Countries that a few years ago were sleepy backwaters are now thrusting forth into global markets with a low cost base and a management cadre educated in the best western universities. Their companies have learnt all that we have to teach them and built upon that to gain advantage in the market-place. We react to stay in the game. We try to change the culture of our businesses to take on the challenge, yet the harder we try the more our corporate dinosaurs seem to stand still. Programmes such as MRPII, Total Quality Management and Business Process Re-engineering have promised much but the results show success rates of at best 20 to 30 per cent. Even so, the desire to find the Holy Grail of competitiveness burns ever more fiercely. In the early 1990s the idea of time-based competition became popular in the United States as the next source of competitive advantage. The case studies presented showed enormous benefits, particularly in becoming more responsive to customers through shorter lead-times. In 1992 the Time Compression Programme was set up in the UK. Our mission was to investigate this phenomenon to see if it could be used to aid the competitiveness of UK manufacturing industry. Just as it has helped the competitiveness of companies elsewhere in the world, we found that not only did Time Compression deliver the benefits it promised, but that our approach was able to fill the crucial gap between a company’s processes and its people to accelerate the change process, in effect to time-compress it.

Keywords: Supply Chain; Business Performance; Total Quality Management; Time Compression; Kanban System (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1997
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-14591-1_1

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9781349145911

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-14591-1_1

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Macmillan Books from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().