The Evolution of an International Academic Manufacturing Survey

The Global Manufacturing Research Group (GMRG) is a multi-national community of researchers dedicated to the study and improvement of manufacturing supply chains world-wide (www.gmrg.org). A major part of its effort has been the collection and analysis of empirical data gathered directly from manufacturing firms. Over the past 20+ years, new manufacturing issues have arisen, the operations management research community’s understanding of questionnaire design and data collection methods have improved, and empirically based academic research has expanded. As a consequence, the GMRG questionnaire has been revised three times. In each instance an international group of researchers was involved in the effort. This article describes the evolution of the GMRG survey. Table 1 summarizes the GMRG survey periods, data collection results, and related theoretical background since 1986. The First GMRG 1.0 (1986-1989)