Job Shop Properties

JOB SHOP PROPERTIES

What might better be said about enterprises configured to for mass customization is that they would admix some features of both process- and job-shops … with the balance of process vs. job shop properties depending on whether the firm’s emphasis is more on “mass” or more on “customization”, respectively. Following here are a few thoughts about job shops to complement the discussions in the Virtual Corporation:

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1. Note, first of all, that there are really two different guises in which the job shop can appear:

 RFP-driven, where the business answers requests for 'bids' on jobs whose requirements have been determined elsewhere;

 Innovation-driven, where the firm itself makes the determinations as to what products it will produce in pursuit of monopoly profits.

In terms of critical managerial challenges, the success and survival of the former is most dependent on the quality of its bidding process, while the integrity of the latter depends on making the 'strategic' decisions we associated with the most demanding of competitive contexts, i.e., those where competitors properly perceive themselves as players in a zero-sum game, such that whatever one gains is at the direct expense of the others. For RFP-driven job shops, the most generally critical aspect of the bidding process is scheduling…this in the attempt to avoid over/under capacity. That is, the control emphasis is on maintaining a prospective equilibrium position between demand loading and capacity. In contrast, equilibrium maintenance for the typical process shop is a more leisurely affair, aimed at balancing demand with supply (vs. capacity) over some extended period. Moreover, process-shop equilibrium maintenance is more a retrospective than prospective activity.

2). The machines employed in job shop are typically less specialized (more versatile) than those used by process shops. Hence the former's greater reliance on the quality (i.e., craft) of its employees; that is, less 'programmation' demands more highly skilled and self-motivated personnel.

3). Given that the primary objective of enterprises qua process shop is to “stay in the neighborhood of the low-cost producer in the industry”, they will tend to have very elaborate cost-accounting systems. Allocation of costs is not so easy in the job shop environment. Moreover, because pricing (costing) a job must be undertaken in advance of actual production (as an aspect of the bidding function), after-the-fact cost assessment data is of only limited value…useful only to the extent that it might apply , in some part, to some future job. Moreover, job shop pricing depends on factors other than cost (e.g., capacity leveling, retention of skilled personnel, prospective leverage on a client).

4). In terms of basic structure, most process shops will be organized around functions, whereas most job shops will be organized around projects (programs, LOB's, etc.). The ‘programmation’ characteristic of process shops argues for a high degree of integration via centralization. In contrast, the job shop's emphasis on skilled or professional personnel and operational inconstancy argues against bureaucratic rigidity or standing policy impositions, and so puts the emphasis on lateral integration via team-work, management-by-consensus, etc.

5). Because life is so inconstant for the job shop, they cannot rely on the straightforward statistical (performance monitor based) incremental-improvement or fine-tuning related industrial engineering tools that can serve the process shop (which can even look to approach 'optimality' via brute trial-and-error vs. analytic techniques). In contrast, job shops must have instruments that can combine both empirical (historical) data and opinion (notional arguments) in an attempt to reconfigure the shop for each entry/exit of a job. Beyond this, the job shop and process shop are defined over different units-of-analysis, i.e., the former is best viewed as a collection of semi-autonomous workstations which can be combined in different ways to produce a multiplicity of different processing states (configurations), while process shops have only a singular (stationary) processing state. 6). The dependency of the job shop on modern versatility-related manufacturing technologies especially CAD/CAM based FMS setups is obviously going to be greater than that of the typical process shop (for which traditional efficiency-related or optimization-seeking instruments are still appropriate).

7). When one talks about a 'customer orientation' (a feature of the so-called horizontal enterprise), such talk will generally be more relevant to the PFP-based (vs. innovation-driven) job shop than the process shop. True, a process shop may produce a few variations on a theme for different customers. But the degree of differentiation among the various product lines must be rather insignificant ... more cosmetic than elemental. Not so with the RFP-driven job shop. Hence the need, in the latter, for customer-specific or product-specific information subsystems, and for an integrative suprasystem of some sort (a macrocybernetic construct, most desirably). In contrast, the innovation-driven job shop ought to rather more introspective, with the products it elects to produce owing more to technological considerations than customer-elicited preferences (recall the various empirical cases indicating the futility of trying to follow customer-inspired lines of innovation ... the Edsel and IBM's laptop, etc.).

8). Note that quality is always to be treated as a variable, not a constant! Concepts like TQM or even Demming's approach may be affectively appealing, but they are not to be universally recommended for either process or job shops. After all, if high-quality quality were indeed a critical commandment for managements (especially of process shops), there would be no Walmart.

9). Job shops may not be able to benefit much from the much-touted Just-In-Time (JIT-type) inventory management initiatives. For one thing, disparity between the material requirements of various jobs may argue against the long-term, intimate relationships with suppliers that a process shop might meaningfully pursue (via Kieretsu-type associations). For another, some job shops may actively seek to corner the market on some particular type of material so as to get a quasi-monopolistic advantage. In this case, it might be more than willing to tolerate higher inventory carrying costs. Minimizing inventory costs is thus not a prime concern for job shops.

10). The job shop is much more dependent on a vibrant informal organization than the process shop because of: a). The need to cope with novelty, which mitigates against pre-programmed relationships among components; b). the premium on timeliness (which makes bureaucratic inertia or 'red tape' particularly intolerable); c). the heavy reliance on skilled personnel (specialists or professional employees) vs. the machine-dominated (automated) environment of the process shop.

11). One likely consequence of the thrust towards outsourcing would be the emergence and spread of specialized job shops that, in terms of managerial challenges, may have more in common with their tactically-challenged, cost-- preoccupied process shop cousins than with their purer counterparts (RFP or innovation-driven job shops).