The changing pressures on manufacturing businesses over the last thirty years have brought about a significant shift in emphasis away from an internal focus on plant efficiency and asset utilization rewards creating flexible, responsive manufacturing plants that can cope with an ever more demanding marketplace. This development is charted and translated into the characteristics needed in order to compete in the global markets of the twenty-first century. A model of manufacturing excellence is built and described in terms of the interdependence between the key factors that can create competitive advantage from manufacturing systems: process repeatability ream capability, design for manufacture, and volume and mb flexibility. These factors build capabilities in terms of quality consistency and throughput efficiency and also through the delicate balance now required between complexity and flexibility. The traditional measures of perfomance, such as utilization and return on sales, are presented as being relevant only as consequences rather than as drivers for plant performance.
