Market Driven Manufacturing

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 purpose we use customer preferences data from automobiles; these preferences are segmented 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