Improving Competitiveness in Craft Manufacturing - Quality Improvement in the Automotive and leisure Boat Industry

High quality craft manufacturers adapting industrialized approaches to design and manufacturing face the challenge of maintaining the unique quality in their craft manufacturing while realizing improvements in efficiency through their industrialization process. We studied how quality is ensured and built into the products of one highly industrialized lean manufacturer and one craft manufacturer in order to better understand these challenges, comparing and contrasting the two companies’ approaches to quality. Based on our empirical study of the two companies, we discuss how the craft manufacturer could adopt lean principles without sacrificing the company’s productand customer knowledge and its unique product quality, thus improving the competitive position of the company.