DELIVERY AND TRADE-OFFS

The idea of trade-offs has been one of the accepted constraints of man ufacturing strategy development. However, recently the idea of the exi stence of trade-offs has been called into question. In particular, the World Class Manufacturing School has stated that they do not exist in the manufacturing environment. An important feature of the convention al wisdom of manufacturing has been that if a plant's management wishe s to achieve good delivery performance on those items that they supply on a quoted delivery date they need to quote a long lead time. The lo ng lead times give them the ability to plan production effectively and so achieve high levels of delivery performance. The purpose of this p aper was to investigate if the conventional trade-off between lead tim es and delivery performance still exists. The results of our research into the trade-off between lead times and delivery performance indicat e that the conventional wisdom no longer applies. Our results indicate the reverse situation being present, namely manufacturing plants quot ing short customer lead times were, in fact, achieving much better del ivery performance than those plants that quoted long lead times.