Questionnaire validation to measure the application degree of alternative tools to mass production

Abstract

The most popular alternative systems to mass production at an academic level (lean manufacturing, agile manufacturing, flexible customization, mass customization...) share many characteristics. Our article identifies an extensive set of alternative practices to mass production; analyzes the classification of practices in categories (bundles); creates a questionnaire to measure the degree of use, from the items in a questionnaire validated in other researches; and verifies the adjusted goodness of the proposed scales. In order to achieve these objectives, the questionnaire was provided to 128 Spanish companies. The results allow us to identify 81 sets of practices already compared in published researches and to verify the adjusted goodness of the scales (14 in total), leaving for a future research any detailed analyses of the factorial structure of the scales with worse adjustment.