Handbook of Management Scales/Advanced manufacturing technology: design

Description
Research has identified three broad categories of advanced manufacturing technologies (AMT): design, manufacturing, and administrative. The measures presented here, based on the initial categorization of Adler (1988), have been used in a variety of research. These measures exist and continue to be used for several reasons. First, these measures have good psychometric properties. The items for each category tend to have very strong reliabilities that have been replicated across multiple studies. In addition there is strong evidence of construct validity because the measures converge and diverge as expected. However, measures such as these that tap the level of investment in a technology as being from low to high suffer from some shortcomings. In particular, the subjective nature of such likert scale items sacrifices a degree of specificity for greater generalizability.

Definition
Design-based AMTs are technologies such as CAD that reduce design cycle times and hence time to market. In addition to reducing design cycle times, these technologies also reduce design costs.

Items
Indicate the amount of investment your manufacturing plant has in the following activities:


 * Computer-aided design (CAD)
 * Computer-aided engineering (CAE)
 * Computer-aided process planning (CAPP)

(Likert scale ranging from 1 - no investment, to 4 - moderate investment, to 7 - heavy investment)

Source

 * Boyer/Pagell (2000): Measurement issues in empirical research: improving measures of operations strategy and advanced manufacturing technology. Journal of Operations Management, Vol. 18, No. 3, pp. 361-374.