A Holistic View on Production Systems Management

Abstract

Almost every large corporation nowadays operates some sort of Production System (PS), usually built as a derivative from leading examples like the Toyota Production System. Production Systems (PSs) are introduced to increase operational performance and to eventually instill a culture of continuous improvement across the mostly globally dispersed production networks. The main question is not any longer if PSs are helpful but how to manage them. So far there is neither an answer to this question in practice nor in literature. That is, how to design and develop the content, the process and the organizational support structure of a PS, and thus providing a corporate perspective to managing PSs, is heavily under researched. The methodological approach in this paper is twofold. First, a systematic literature review was conducted to identify appropriate papers dealing with this topic. Second, we draw on interviews with corporate representatives being accountable for the PS at 11 respective companies from the Pharmaceutical industry. The companies have been selected based on their maturity of production system implementation. Interviews were transcribed and coded. We found various activities related to the three dimensions of content, process, and structure of PSs. Thereby, we provide an overview of activities for managing PSs. We add to the literature of PSs from a corporate perspective and derive several future research opportunities, such as if there are multiple ways in combining the identified activities to be successful with a PS. Our limitation is that interviewees are from the pharmaceutical industry only, yet the level of sophistication of PSs in this industry and the twofold approach mitigate the limitation.