This paper examines a widely cited work in operations management, the theory of production
competence, advanced initially by Cleveland, Schroeder, and Anderson (CSA). This intuitively
appealing proposition asserts that production competence leads to improved business
performance. However, CSA's empirical work has been criticized by Vickery and her
collaborators and by Safizadeh, Ritzman. and Mallick (SRM). Moreover, SRM's own empirical
work suggested that the CSA proposition only holds for batch processes. Using data
from two large studies, we avoid the problems that plagued CSXs analysis, improve
on their result, and call into question the SRM finding that restricts that result
to batch operations. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
