Annals of Business Administrative Science
Online ISSN : 1347-4456
Print ISSN : 1347-4464
ISSN-L : 1347-4456
New Product Introductions and Activation of Shop Floor Organizational Communication
Nobuyuki INAMIZUMitsuhiro FUKUZAWA
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JOURNAL OPEN ACCESS

2017 Volume 16 Issue 4 Pages 149-163

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Abstract

In the Japanese electrical and electronics industry, examples abound of factory managers proposing and introducing new products for production in factories that have retained their competitiveness. In other words, adding new products activates shop floor communication. This research uses data from a survey to analyze the “openness” (kazetoshi, which literally means "ventilation" in Japanese, is an indicator of communication activity) of the shop floor organization. This analysis, while not revealing a correlation between openness and quality, cost, delivery, and flexibility (QCDF), does reveal a positive, significant correlation between openness, the “number of new product introductions,” and “new product proposal/development.” In reality, factories in which the latter two factors had a greater presence had good openness. This suggests that factory managers’ actions and policies of proposing and adding new products help to activate shop floor organizational communication.

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© 2017 Nobuyuki Inamizu and Mitsuhiro Fukuzawa. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons [Attribution 4.0 International] license.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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