Abstract

A survey has been made of the manufacturing characteristics and performance of 35 engineering companies which are using Group Technology (GT) methods in production. Data have been collected from these companies on a “before” and “after” GT basis. This study investigates the changes in staffing levels brought about by introducing GT, and the findings reported here are compared with those of other researchers. In this paper we argue that it is doubtful whether the extensive research work carried out on the relationship between the “technology” of organizations and structures can be used to extrapolate the changes which might take place in staffing levels when a GT system is introduced into a firm.

Introduction

Woodward (1958 and 1965), Pugh et al. (1969) and Hickson et al. (1970) carried out extensive examinations of the relationships between the “technology” of organisations and their structures. Woodward’s contribution was to identify relationships between the type of manufacture and the organisation structure. She related “configuration” aspects of the structure of manufacturing organisations, such as number of levels of authority, to different production systems according to the “controlability and predictability” of the process. Woodward’s technology was the conventional classification of production into unit/mass/process sub-divided into ten categories, as shown in Table 1. Pugh et al. and Hickson et al. attempted to define more precisely the Woodward “technology” classification according to a scale of production continuity, e.g. batches were called “small” if re-setting occurred once or more each week. Another measure of “technology” used was called workflow integration and, although this had affinities with the production continuity scale, it was not based on the unit/batch/ mass/process notion as such.