Machine Performance Centres: A Survey of Technology Management Issues and Their Impact on Industrial Corporate Competitiveness

This paper reports the results of a machine performance centre survey of 54 industrial manufacturers in the USA. Here a machine performance centre refers to the technological or mechanical components of a production floor, i.e. machinery, used intentionally to produce a pre-established form of output. The paper details findings and analyzes survey results both individually and comparatively with traditional Japanese manufacturing practices in order to prove that the demise of many US industrial manufacturers has been caused in large part by internal technology management failures. The results provide the basis for the proposed conceptual framework for machine performance centre management described within the context of the paper. Substantive effort is made to describe the potential implications of this research on corporate competitiveness and machine performance centre management while the empirical message is aimed at providing a new premise of thinking for the management of industrial manufacturing organizations.