| Firms are adopting Just-In-Time (JIT) managerial practices in their plants to be competitive in the marketplace. While many JIT implementations have been successful, many others have been failures. Previous research on JIT provides very little insight as to why the same managerial practices are successful in one plant and fail in another plant. The premise of this dissertation research is that the failures are due to a lack of implementation of JIT infrastructure which includes: quality management, manufacturing strategy, product technology, work integration systems, and HRM policies.;The current JIT literature on infrastructure design is largely prescriptive, but the prescriptions are not backed by systematic empirical investigation. This dissertation research attempts to fill this void in the literature by testing hypotheses drawn from three perspectives: universal, contingency, and configurational. A universal perspective posits a direct relationship between JIT managerial practice and plant performance. A contingency perspective, on the other hand, implies that the relationship between JIT managerial practice and plant performance is contingent on the elements of JIT infrastructure in a plant. A configurational perspective draws on the holistic principle of inquiry to identify maximally effective patterns of JIT managerial practice and the elements of the infrastructure. According to this perspective, synergy between the elements of infrastructure and JIT managerial practice results in superior plant performance.;The hypotheses based on the above three perspectives are tested with data from the "World Class Manufacturing" project. This study includes 30 U.S. plants, 46 Japanese plants, and 34 Italian plants selected by stratified random sampling across three industries: automobile suppliers, electronics and machinery.;The results obtained provide support for the contingency and the configurational perspectives. Specifically, the analyses indicate that the efforts expended by plants in each of the elements of infrastructure (quality management, product technology, work integration systems, and HRM policies) moderate the relationship between JIT managerial practice and plant performance. JIT managerial practice and the elements of infrastructure together provide synergy resulting in superior plant performance. |
