Quick Response Manufacturing

2Benefits of QRM

TO GAUGE THE FORCES AT WORK in the marketplace today, consider what the CEO of a Massachusetts-based high tech electronics company told me in the spring of 1996:

We are reevaluating how we can compete. We have tried to compete on price, but there are too many big players in the market. They have both the capital to buy the high-capacity machines and the volume to support those machines and keep costs down. Worse, when there’s a downturn in the market, everybody cuts price and we don’t have the staying power of the big players. As for quality, that’s a given these days. Customers expect it from everyone and it’s no longer a differentiator.

What this senior executive is saying, and many companies have experienced, is that ...