Made in the 21st Century: How Far Have we Come on the Journey to Excellence?

Abstract

The ‘Made in Europe’ studies, published during the 1990s, were a landmark in advancing our understanding of ‘best manufacturing practice’, and the extent to which it is effectively deployed. The studies revealed links between practice and performance, and profiled various sectors, countries and organization types in terms of their characteristics, strengths and opportunities for improvement. The ‘Made in Europe’ findings have exerted significant influence on public policy and business support strategies, and the studies’ original research tools have subsequently developed into a leading-edge suite of benchmarking tools known collectively as PROBE – ‘PROmoting Business Excellence’. This paper describes the development and current status of this suite of international improvement tools, which has reached 32 countries and has established a dataset containing over 4000 individual site benchmarks. The paper reflects upon the lessons learned from 10 years of experience of deploying diagnostic benchmarking in support of organizational change and learning. It presents a ‘then and now’ comparison of PROBE data for UK manufacturers, and looks forward to further developments and growing momentum in the spread of good practices, arguing that the next 10 years may be less about the state of the art of best practices as such, and more about applying the social sciences to stimulate and support diffusion and adoption of those practices.

Keywords:

• Benchmarking
• best manufacturing practice
• PROBE
• excellence
• diffusion
• adoption