On the complementarity between internal and external just-in-time bundles to build and sustain high performance manufacturing

The focus on the sequential nature of the improvement initiatives has neglected the synergistic effects among practices and literature lacks research on complementarity between internal and external bundles of practices. The aim of this paper is to test the existence of complementarity among internal and external just-in-time bundles. We run statistical analysis using the third round of High Performance Manufacturing international research project data set and we find that upstream and downstream JIT are complements. This finding suggests the importance of managing the interdependencies both in designing and implementing upstream and downstream JIT in order to maximize operational performance. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.