Why Time Compression?

Abstract

Business is in disarray. The world is getting a smaller place. Countries that a few years ago were sleepy backwaters are now thrusting forth into global markets with a low cost base and a management cadre educated in the best western universities. Their companies have learnt all that we have to teach them and built upon that to gain advantage in the market-place. We react to stay in the game. We try to change the culture of our businesses to take on the challenge, yet the harder we try the more our corporate dinosaurs seem to stand still. Programmes such as MRPII, Total Quality Management and Business Process Re-engineering have promised much but the results show success rates of at best 20 to 30 per cent. Even so, the desire to find the Holy Grail of competitiveness burns ever more fiercely. In the early 1990s the idea of time-based competition became popular in the United States as the next source of competitive advantage. The case studies presented showed enormous benefits, particularly in becoming more responsive to customers through shorter lead-times. In 1992 the Time Compression Programme was set up in the UK. Our mission was to investigate this phenomenon to see if it could be used to aid the competitiveness of UK manufacturing industry. Just as it has helped the competitiveness of companies elsewhere in the world, we found that not only did Time Compression deliver the benefits it promised, but that our approach was able to fill the crucial gap between a company’s processes and its people to accelerate the change process, in effect to time-compress it.