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Na semana passada falou-se muito de produtividade.

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Sexta à tarde deparei com este texto de Wickham Skinner retirado do capítulo "The Focused Factory" do livro "Manufacturing in the Corporate Strategy", preparem-se para esta leitura e para a sua comparabilidade com a nossa situação económica portuguesa actual:

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"The conventional wisdom of manufacturing management continues to be that the measure of success is productivity. Now that American companies in many industries are getting beaten hands down by overseas competitors with lower unit costs, we mistakenly cling to the old notion that “a good plant is a low-cost plant.” This is simply not so. A low-cost plant may be a disaster if the company has sacrificed too much in the way of quality, delivery, flexibility, and so forth, to get its costs down.

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Too many companies attempt to do too many things with one plant and one organization. In the name of low investment in facilities and spreading their overheads, they add products, markets, technologies, processes, quality levels, and supporting services that conflict and compete with each other and compound expense. They then hire more staff to regulate and control the unmanageable mixture of problems. In desperation, many companies are now “banging away” at anything to reduce the resulting high costs. But we can only regain competitive strength by stopping this process of increasing complexity and overstaffing."

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Como é que dizia Hill?

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