International Manufacturing Strategy Survey, IMSS,
are a network of research institutions from all over the world who periodically surveys manufacturing firms about their manufacturing and supply chain strategies, practices and performance.
We are currently running the Fifth edition, which will be started in 2009, and we are looking for a partner in every country we don’t have any. We usually have one partner per country, each partner collects responses to the common questionnaire in his country (roughly 30-50 firms) and then all the data are gathered by us at Politecnico di Milano (Italy) and distributed to the whole network. Only those countries and partners that contribute to the database receive the whole dataset. This is not a funded project, so generally each institution looks for local funding to administer the survey.
In the previous editions, we gathered data from several hundreds firms in about 20 countries, and this allowed for a wide range of international publications on the most important OM journals (e.g. Journal of Operations Management, International Journal of Operations and Production Management, etc.) as well as one book (published on Koogan Page). Besides, each country generally prepares a national report which is sent back to the participating firms and presented in a seminar, but this is up to each institution.
Every year we have two meetings as a network: one in June at the EurOMA Conference, and one fully dedicated to IMSS in November, where research papers based on IMSS are presented on both occasions. In 2004 the November meeting took place in Mannheim (Germany) and in feb 2006 it took place in Dublin.
The June 2006 meeting took place at the Euroma 2006 conference in Glascow June 2006.
The 2007 meeting took place at the Euroma 2007 conference in Ankara, Turkie in June 2007.
The 2008 meeting took place at the Euroma 2008 conference in Groningen, Netherlands, in June 2008, and in Budapest, Hungary, in November 2008
The 2009 meeting will take place in Gotenburg at the Euroma 2009 conference in June 2009, and is preliminary planned for Stavanger in November 2009.
The public IMSS site (this site) has the address http://imss-researchnet.org
