Title: Measurements of productivity: key to survival

Authors: D. Bruce Merrifield

Addresses: Walter Bradstrom Executive, Professor of Management, Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania, USA.

Abstract: Industrial survival in a hyper-competitive global market-place increasingly will depend upon development of a sustainable competitive advantage. A competitive advantage, in turn, increasingly will require knowledge-intensive high-value-added content in each operating system. The degree of value-added is measurable in terms of various forms of |productivity| (performance/cost), but conventional measures of productivity are limited in their usefulness. Output divided by labour, or output divided by labour plus capital, do not adequately assess the degree of knowledge-intensive value-added content of an operation. More sophisticated forms of productivity measurement have been developed which have been demonstrated to have a high correlation with success. Much improved strategic allocation of always limited resources can result.

Keywords: productivity measurement; value-added; competitive advantage; return on investment; ROI; PIMS productivity benchmarking; learning curve; constraint analysis; strategic allocation; resource allocation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJTM.1994.025601

International Journal of Technology Management, 1994 Vol.9 No.5/6/7, pp.771 - 783

Published online: 23 May 2009 *

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