Improving productivity through international exchange visits

Earlier research highlighting the poor comparative productivity performance of manufacturing in Northern Ireland provided the background to a set of exchange visits by managers in the Northern Ireland and West German clothing industries. International productivity differences have more often been examined by bringing managers from the relatively weak performer (i.e. the UK) to factories in best-practice economies but the novelty in this study was to supplement visits to Germany by bringing a senior German manager into factories in the low productivity area. He examined the following characteristics: markets served; comparative physical productivity; product quality; machine type and appropriateness, attitudes and skills of the shop-floor labour force; quality of management and premises. The Northern Ireland managers made a return visit to four German factories and assessed those companies on the same criteria. This article analyses areas of agreement and difference in the light of research evidence on international comparative productivity and raises the question of how far management from a low productivity country can recognize what changes should be made in order to close the productivity gap.