Georgia Tech Policy Project on Industrial Modernization
HOME | THE PROJECT | PUBLICATIONS | SEARCH | CONTACT US | WHATS NEW

Philip Shapira, Jan Youtie, Gordon Kingsley
Georgia Institute of Technology

A key element of the Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) is the development of coordinated local networks of service providers in the public and private sector to serve the needs of area manufacturers. This project is probing changes and developments in how MEP centers coordinate services with partner organizations, assessing the impacts of service coordination on centers and firms, and refining and disseminating recommendations for best practices in service coordination. Three major questions are being addressed by the project:

• How do partnerships change and evolve over time, and how does this affect the coordination and delivery of services? There are ongoing changes in how MEP centers structure their partnership arrangements. Centers and partners learn more about each others’ capabilities, needs and interests over time; relationships are tightened, loosened, or terminated; and new partners or services are added as perceptions of needs change, center strategies are altered, and difference mixes of funding become available. The project aims to identify and verify best practices in the operation of partnerships and the coordination of services that can guide center managers.

• What best practices at the customer level are most likely to lead to successful services delivered jointly or through partners? At the service delivery level, there are certain "decision rules" and processes that field agents use (both implicitly and explicitly) to select and deliver services to small and medium-sized manufacturers, particularly to determine what services providers should be used for a firm in a particular situation. This would provide insights into the characteristics of firms and partners which centers consider in making matches.

• What role can NIST play to enhance partnerships? What can and should NIST do to help partnerships operate most effectively?

Two sources of information will be used to address these questions: aggregate data (particularly from NIST reporting databases) and case studies from MEP centers, including several MEP centers examined in Phase I of the study. The centers examined in Phase I of the study included: Chicago Manufacturing Center (Chicago, Illinois) area, Georgia Manufacturing Extension Alliance (state of Georgia), Great Lakes Manufacturing Technology Center (Cleveland, Ohio area), Manufacturing Extension Partnership of Southwest Pennsylvania (Pittsburgh, PA area), Minnesota Manufacturing Technology Center (state of Minnesota), Oklahoma Alliance for Manufacturing Excellence (state of Oklahoma).

The design of Phase II calls for revisiting four of these centers--Chicago Manufacturing Center, Georgia Manufacturing Extension Alliance, Great Lakes Manufacturing Technology Center, Manufacturing Extension Partnership of Southwest Pennsylvania--and adding two new centers as case study subjects--Florida Manufacturing Technology Center (state of Florida), and Industry Network Corporation (New Mexico,Arizona).

The principal investigators of the study are: Dr. Philip Shapira of the School of Public Policy at Georgia Institute of Technology and Dr. Jan Youtie of the Georgia Tech Economic Development Institute. Dr Gordon Kingsley, on the faculty of the School of Public Policy at Georgia Institute of Technology, is also a member of the study team.

Preliminary results from the study will be available in November 1997. The final report will be available in January 1998.

The project builds on a previous study of service coordination in the MEP (see below).

Contacts

Philip Shapira
School of Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332-0345
Tel: 404-894-7735; Fax: 404-853-0535; ps25@prism.gatech.edu
http://www.cherry.gatech.edu

Jan Youtie
Economic Development Institute, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332-0640
Tel: 404-894-6111; Fax: 404-894-0069; jan.youtie@edi.gatech.edu

Summary of Best Practices: Phase I

The initial study of service coordination in the MEP system identified several best practices, including:

• a shared system-wide vision of the partnership
• joint marketing efforts
• cross-training
• information sharing via electronic systems, meetings, and informal communications
• cooperative development and use of assessment protocols, database systems, and other tools
• coordinated referral systems
• collaborative service delivery
• establishment of specific mechanisms to promote, monitor, and facilitate paperwork and other requirements of partnerships
• partnership performance reviews

For further details on the first study, see summary [HTML] and full report [ACROBAT PDF]

TOP | HOME PAGE