MEM 2221 Lecture Notes - Lecture 17: American Girl, Linguistics, Statistical Inference

• School: UConn
• Department: Management and Engineering for Manufacturing
• Course: MEM 2221
• Professor: John Wilson

Document Summary

Joan woodward studied 100 manufacturing firms and classified them. Production of units to customer"s orders, prototypes, large equipment in stages, small batches to customer"s orders. Production runs are too small to justify specialized manufacturing equipment, procedures, or tooling. Skilled craftsmen using general purpose equipment and past experience. Production of large batches, mass production, often uses an assembly line. Long production runs justify special production methods, equipment, elaborate methods of scheduling and programming. Jobs are standardized and repetitive, may use less skilled workers. Skilled workers monitor and maintain production systems. The number of levels of management and the span of control for chief executives increased as manufacturing increased from unit to mass to process. Mechanistic management - similar to bureaucracies, centralized, formalized, standardized jobs. More employees reporting to first line supervisor. Larger companies are more likely to have high levels of specialization, standardization, formalization, and centralization, regardless of technology.