Research Summary
Research Summary
Information and Control in Modern Manufacturing
Description
Ratna Sarkar's research in management accounting focuses on the effect of information and incentives on performance. She has investigated the role of worker empowerment, training and inventory in modern manufacturing settings and her findings suggest that these initiatives have a complementary effect on product and process quality and cost. Low inventory levels, in particular, play more than the usual informational role that has been emphasized in the operations literature. Her research clearly suggests that limiting inventory can motivate workers to 'work smarter' and also provide a co-ordinating mechanism among empowered workers who may otherwise have a parochial view of their work. This body of work explains the differential success achieved by plants that have all adopted popular new manufacturing methods, but may or may not have leveraged the inherent complementeraties that exist among these methods.