This explorative study investigates the phenomenon of the company-specific production system (XPS). It has been a strong and recent trend across many manufacturing industries to develop and deploy such corporate improvement programmes. Five propositions regarding the uniqueness of XPSs are...

There is currently no theory that explains the pattern of change in a plant’s performance as it implements a lean program. Does it improve at a declining, increasing, or constant rate, or in some other pattern? We use empirical data from the implementation of the Volvo Group’s lean program...

Companies that seek to improve their operational performance by adopting new practices often report disappointing adoption rates. The literature concerning practice adoption has tended to focus on efficacy and legitimacy drivers at the organizational level. However, there exists convincing...

Purpose: Why some assembly factories implement a lean program faster than others is an enduring puzzle. We examine the effect of a fundamental characteristic of every assembly factory—its rhythm of production. Approach: We designed a multi-method study and collected data from a leading global...

Most typologies of production networks either provide a description of which subunits networks are composed or of their structural-geographic features. These typologies allow to map, delayer and diagnose networks and this way manage complexity. However, they usually do not hold an empirical...

The Covid-19 pandemic and other recent disruptions in the early 2020s led to sections in the business press blaming Just-in-Time (JIT) practices for operational failings. Consequently, there are calls for moving away from JIT toward holding more inventory as preparation against future...