Abstract - Quest for Global Competitiveness - Universidad de Puerto ...

Table 4: Demographics of high, middle and low performersPerformersTotalplantemployeesProductionworkersTotalengineersAve ageproductionequipment% salesinvested innewmanufacturingequipment% sales fromproducts fromlast two yearsLow 535 410 77 12,2 0,15 0,30Middle 445 303 59 11,3 0,19 0,35High 601 301 39 12,6 0,22 0,42Total 476 337 64 11,6 0,18 0,33From Table 4. We see that high performers are in fact big companies but they do notnecessary have the highest number of production workers or engineers. In fact highperformers invested most in manufacturing equipment which might explain that theyautomated production so they don’t need as much production workers and total production ischeaper (but naturally necessitate higher initial investments). Probably high performers havealmost half of employees working on ways to innovate products, because as we can see fromTable 4, last column, high performers generate almost 42% of sales from new products.Figure 3: Costs as % of sales for three groups of performersEven for middle performers all costs as % of sales are more then double then high performers.The biggest difference is in cost of materials.~ 10 ~