1THE BEST PERFORMING COMPANIES ’ PRACTICES

During the last 20 years both industry and academia have searched for World Class Manufacturing and tried to define ‘best ’ practices in all areas in the organisation, which will lead to superior performance and capability leading to increased competitiveness. Furthermore, many of these studies are problematic because the practices that are considered as best often are predefined, and the link to the actual overall company performance is often not investigated. This paper identifies the best performing manufacturing companies in the 2002 International Manufacturing Strategy Survey (IMSS-III) database, and investigates the practices that these companies have relative to those of the worst performing companies. The results indicate that improvement centred practices and programmes are the most influential on operational and overall company performance, and that the best performing companies are better in implementing all the investigated practices compared with the worst performing companies