Making Manufacturing Market Driven

World-Class Manufacturing has received a great deal of attention in the past few years, drawing largely on successful Japanese manufacturing practices. There has also been a separate explosion in the use of conjoint analysis to determine customer preferences for marketing purposes. In this paper these two developments are used together to determine the most advantageous manufacturing priorities for a given competitive situation. For illustration purposes we use customer preference data from two product classes (automobiles and office equipment); these preferences are segmented (both a priori and statistically) and we then show how the various segments link to differing sets of manufacturing priorities. Finally, we examine how strategic manufacturing priorities can be translated into specific action-oriented improvement programs.