Advanced manufacturing technology, planning and business performance

This paper uses regression analysis of factors obtained from measured variables to find statistical relationships between investment in advanced manufacturing technology (AMT), the planning effort associated with that investment and business performance amongst Australian and Canadian manufacturing firms. A direct effects model and a model introducing a second order factor were both statistically significant, but the latter was more parsimonious and explained significantly more variation in performance. Investment in some kinds of AMT (direct AMT and AMT supporting administrative functions) was associated with better performance but investment in indirect AMT (supporting scheduling and product design) was not. We investigated differences between domestic and foreign owned firms finding that, in both models, some coefficients differed significantly with the kind of ownership. This supports the persistent, but not well researched, idea that Australian managers are not as skilled as their overseas counterparts