Abstract

Process innovation is an important source of increased productivity and competitive advantage. Instances of product innovation projects in manufacturing abound with reported experiences of successful and not so successful implementation. It is increasingly recognised that crucial is pre-implementation phase which includes attaining an appropriate level of readiness to deploy. Retrospectively, deployment readiness is the extent to which deployment has run smoothly and relatively problem-free. Methods of accessing deployment readiness have been reported in the literature. Of interest in this paper is the distribution of  process innovation deployment readiness bands adopted in manufacturing. Through a survey of practitioners in manufacturing management in UK, this paper reports on a range of process innovation deployment readiness bands adopted in manufacturing. The results show that the typical readiness band is 71 – 80% with very few quoting 41-50%. Rarely would the readiness bands go above 95% and none of the reported readiness bands quoted is found to be below 40%.   The findings led to a preliminary discussion on deployment readiness thinking in the context of readiness bands. Limitations of the study are discussed, and areas of future work are highlighted.