I. Strategic, Economic and Flexibility Aspects

This is a report of a study on the evolution of manufacturing technology policy during the deployment of domestic advanced manufacturing systems in thirty-four plants and two panels of data collection separated by one year. Changing firm environment was significantly correlated with pioneering product introduction business strategy (p < 0.05). More importantly, it was found that manufacturing technology policy is significantly (p < 0.05) associated with pioneering business strategy. Further, findings indicate that fine-tuning or modest adjustment in this policy (versus doing nothing or drastic change) was significantly (p < 0.05) associated with the maximum levels of reported utilization of these new systems in a subsample of second panel, complete data cases (n -21). This curvilinear relationship between the absolute value of changes in technology policy and performance measure did not hold for the percentage of target cycle time achieved nor uptirne, although results concerning performance are considered preliminary at the time of this writing. Advertising this processing technology tends to be inversely related to the radicalness of the technology incorporated into the system (p = 0.076) during the deployment period tracked thus far. That is. firms installing more radical systems tend to become very cautious about sharing information about the project once installation begins.