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382 PART 4 Looking Backward and Forward

competitors. Many study missions to Japan, technical societies, business schools, and
politicians attempted to explain how the Japanese had made such great gains.
Among many factors, attention centered on just-in-time (JIT) and kanban “pull sys-
tems” and quality circles. One effect was to revive interest in group technology, newly
named manufacturing cells, in which one or more machines and operators produce a fam-
ily of similar parts or products very quickly and flexibly in small lots. Cells, renamed flex-
ible manufacturing systems (FMS), became highly automated as electronic controls were
applied to storage systems, material handling equipment, and production machines.
Details of these are beyond the scope of this book.
The evolution of these systems made obvious the need for integration of procure-
ment, preproduction, production, and postproduction activi ties. Design and process
engineering, tooling, purchasing, production, quality assurance, and of course, planning
and control personnel had to become tightly knit teams to achieve the benefits enjoyed
by the best Japanese firms. Even traditional cost-accounting practices had to be changed.
All these are now evolving—too fast for some and too slow for others.

PLANNING, EXECUTION, AND CONTROL
These three terms are very common and are used frequently by many people at all orga-
nization levels in manufacturing firms. Their meanings are often different among these
people, however. Here are the generally accepted definitions:
Planning—assigning numbers to future events to create plans
Execution—converting plans to reality
Control—tracking execution, comparing execution to plans, measuring deviations,
sorting the significant from the trivial, and instituting corrective actions in either
the plans or the execution

These definitions and statements of purpose make eminently clear why planning
and execution will require different techniques and that control activities provide inter-
faces between the two. The planning, execution, and control (often misnamed “informa-
tion”) system must support both purposes, recognizing their differences. Five principles
apply to these systems:
1. There is one system framework common to all types of manufac turing. As startling
as this is and as unlikely as it seems, it derives inevitably from the common
logic, the similarity of needs of the major parties, the nature of the resources
employed, and the identical types of data involved. As will become evident
when the elements of the system are defined, the impor tance of each element
along with the techniques employed can differ among various types of
businesses.
2. There is no single best way to control a manufacturing business. The second princi-
ple may seem at first glance to contradict the first, but it is simply saying that