Challenged by world-class competitors, manufacturing companies in the United States have undergone a renaissance in the last decade. The renaissance started on the shop floor with an emphasis on built-in quality, the elimination of waste, and faster throughputs. But attention quickly turned upstream to product development, where Japanese companies were outperforming U.S. competitors on nearly every measure: speed to market, design quality, product-design manufacturability, cost, and productivity. Observers concluded that the key to Japanese success, and U.S. industry’s weakness, was integration—both between product design and manufacturing-process design, and with marketing, purchasing, finance, and other business functions.
A version of this article appeared in the July–August 1998 issue of Harvard Business Review.
