Abstract:
An issue on which opinions still differ concerns the presence or absence of trade-offs
between different types of manufacturing performance. In an attempt to provide some
empirical evidence to resolve this argument, a recent conference paper examined
the relationships between different types of performance for a sample of plants in the
metal/mechanical industry. The authors concluded that trade-offs between several
performance types still exist. This paper provides a different interpretation of the data
presented, using statistical analysis to demonstrate that the evidence for trade-offs is
not significant. However, there is evidence that some types of performance are
mutually supportive. The results obtained are compared with the results predicted by
each of the available trade-off models and some empirical support for the sand cone
model is obtained.
