Information flows for high performance manufacturing

The successful implementation of many management best practices (just-in-time, total quality management, concurrent engineering, etc.) heavily depends on proper organisational communication and information management. In this paper, we address the issue of how these best practices, labelled as high-performance manufacturing (HPM) practices, can affect a firm's communication structure. The paper firstly develops a reference framework for the analysis of information hows in operations. This reference framework integrates research in operations management and in organizational communication. The paper then applies the proposed framework to investigate how information flows lend to be characterised in HPM. In doing so, the proposed framework relates cost, time and quality performances to three operational processes (physical transformation, product development and material flow management) and to three classes of information flows: vertical, horizontal and external information flows.