in the recent past the roles of research and development and manufacturing organizations have changed dramatically.

this change has focused a considerable amount of attention on the interface between the development ariented organizations (the inventors) and implementation oriented organizations (the builders). todays rapidly changing society requires highly responsive R&D and manufacturing organization to develop new products and processes in order to offset competitive forces, reduce manufacturing coasts, meet productivity and conversion of batch processes to continous processes reduce equipment and manufacturing coasts and are crucial to business profitability in todays high interest rate, high inflationary economy. if new processes and new products can be manufactured in existing equipment in reduces plant equipment coast, and also compresses time. however, the ability of the two organizations to respond in harmony to these demands is a key management challenge and brings us to the R&D/manufacturing interface. THE ORGANIZATIONS BASIC CHARACTERISTICS AND DIFFERENCES THE KEY TO THE PROBLEM before we discuss the issue of improving the R&D/manufacturing interface, it is worthwhile to examine some of the basic characteristics of the to organizations, for example. the typical research and development organization considers independence a valuable asset. the ability the pursue new. creative ideas, independent of businesses. need led to many new, innovative and profitable businesses. Each of us can point to many highly successful ventures whice arose from a blue sky experiment with little or no thought of potensial business opportunity. we certainly would not want to ever close the door on such activities. however, from the viewpoint of manufacturing organization in need of a particular development at a specific critical time, this nondirected approach is waste, and the reason for the excessive time delay between discovery and successful implementation of new ideas. the manufacturing organization is typically characterized as a huge monolith incapable of change and tremendously staid. in contrast to the R&D organization, whose goals are often relatively broad and somewhat arbitrary, manufacturing has several precise measurements or goals for each year. for each quarter, and, in fact, for each week. their precise goals require, from the R&D organization, a workable process or manufacturing product on time. in many cases the conceptual information passed down from the R&D organization does not represent a finished product to the manufacturing organization, resulting in either expensive investment overruns, off-spec products, of lengthy delays. it is not surprising, considering the two organization contrasting characteristics, that interfacial difficulties develop. these difficulties can often lead to the building of brick walls and thus to the total isolation of both organizations, with letter writing the only from of communication. Managements ability to organize the two groups effectively to achieve overall business goals is the bottom line. with both organizations shooting at each other and the developmet of the NIH factor (not invented here) the basic development sequence becomes nothing but a set of blocks in series with no information traveling between groups for consideration or optimization.

AN INTEGRATED TEAM APPROACH THE KEY TO THE SOLUTION The key to achieving organizational effectiveness in the development of either new products or processes is the utilization of the team approach. this approach of processes is the utilization of the team approach. this approach integrates goals, management, and planning which provides for the elimination of the NIH factor and thus encourages feedback of information. one example of a traditional organization for the implementation of new products and processes consists of R&D and manufacturing management reporting to a common business manager. each respective organization has its own sub-units: R&D management would handle research and process development; manufacturing would handle both engineering and production.