Performance measurement system simplicity

Eric O. Olsen and Peter T. Ward

International Journal of Manufacturing Technology and Management, 2006, vol. 8, issue 4, 330-354

Abstract: Leading researchers, consultants and practitioners advocate that internal operations performance measurement (PM) systems need to be 'simple' in order to be most effective. The notion of PM system simplicity has often been expressed as the characteristic of having few versus many measures. This paper proposes a new simplicity scale based on the importance rankings of performance measures found in a large-scale survey of manufacturing firms. The PM system simplicity scale is developed and applied in the context of traditional manufacturing strategy constructs such as cost, quality, delivery and flexibility and with respect to environmental dynamism. Analysis of empirical data on 100 manufacturing firms shows that superior market performance is associated with firms that have both complex and simple PM systems, but that moderately simple systems perform less well.

Keywords: complexity; manufacturing management; performance measurement systems; simplicity; manufacturing performance; importance rankings; manufacturing strategy; environmental dynamism; business performance. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.inderscience.com/link.php?id=9243 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:ids:ijmtma:v:8:y:2006:i:4:p:330-354

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in International Journal of Manufacturing Technology and Management from Inderscience Enterprises Ltd
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sarah Parker ().