VERSO UN NUOVO MODELLO DI GESTIONE: DAL WORLD CLASS MANUFACTURING ALLA WORLD CLASS STRATEGY

During the last decades, the evolution of technologies and societies, the changes in markets and industries, have determined the emergence and implementation of new production techniques with consequent changes in the managerial and organizational systems of companies. Over time, various production philosophies have spread, such as the continuous improvement, total quality management, lean production until the development of the world class manufacturing. The world class model introduces a new paradigm in which all the actors, involved in their relative tasks, work together to increase the competitiveness of the company, aiming at achieving the excellence. The aim of this work is to analyze the evolution and research trends on world class manufacturing from the managerial perspective in order to provide the scientific community with a contextualization and representation of the state of the art of this complex, multidisciplinary and of growing interest topic. In fact, through a scientific mapping of the reference literature, this work intends to offer a summary of the main results achieved, current trends, links with other relevant topics and provide suggestions for future research in the direction of managerial strategies for world class manufacturing. With this aim, this work is based on the qualitative method of the literature review on the world class manufacturing in the area of management. The publications have been analyzed with a bibliometric analysis that allowed to identify the most important works and authors based on the citation index and the H-index. In a second phase, through a scientific mapping study, the different scientific contributions were grouped on the basis of the co-occurrence of the words and each cluster was analyzed to facilitate the identification of the relationships between the various dimensions involved in the research. The results show that the world class model has determined the humanization of the factory which becomes integrated, intelligent, agile, synchronized and attentive to the care and safety of the worker. The main implications are for the value chain of the company which is no longer considered a cathedral in the desert, indifferent to the community, but it is identifiable as a "body" of the territory in which it is located, involving the other productive realities that orbit around it and the same community to which it belongs, bringing a social and economic well-being. The results of this research provide managers with guidance on the evolution of the conceptual basis of a production philosophy, which requires in-depth knowledge to identify its dimensions and interactions, in order to make them effectively operational. Since there are no other bibliometric and scientific mapping studies on world class manufacturing in the field of management, this work allows to fill a gap in the literature by providing useful information both on a scientific and managerial level.