ABSTRACT
It is often important for manufacturing companies to deliver goods to their customers on time, and the struggle to do so engages the attention of production managers and others. This chapter addresses two questions: Why are orders often delivered late? Why is the German performance different from the British one? It has long been popularly held that British companies in general have a poor record on delivery punctuality, and that this is a handicap in export selling. The very strong commitment to modernising and replacing plant and machinery which is so obvious in West Germany, is largely absent in Britain. Britain has had more than its share of great engineers and engineering triumphs, but it is not a country that has a strong engineering culture. To take Germany as the contrast again, in that country engineering enjoys higher status and tends to attract more talent, and in business companies more thought, energy and money go into the technical aspects.
