How fast is fast enough? I'm sure you have asked yourself this question many times. When it comes to the business of manufacturing, though, the question takes a number of possible forms. How fast must my company develop new ideas? How quickly do I need to get a product to market? How rapidly must I respond to a request for customer service? The question of "how fast" has almost endless application.

The answers to these questions, obviously, can't be discovered in a vacuum. Each question must be posed in the context of "relative to what?" For example, must my company develop new ideas faster than it has done so far? Or should those ideas be developed faster than a rival's in order to create a competitive advantage? The answer to both questions is yes, depending upon the objective.

Speed may be relative depending upon the context, but some think it is an absolute necessity in today's highly competitive global market. One person who believes this is Anton Huber, a group vice president in Siemens' huge Automation & Drives division in Nuremburg, Germany. He and I had an interesting conversation in July when I was traveling in Europe.

Huber believes that greater speed holds the key to a manufacturing company's competitiveness, particularly companies grappling with how to compete with manufacturers in China and elsewhere in the Far East. Central to achieving greater operational speed, he says, is more automation aided by much deeper functional integration in companies. Huber is the A&D executive on the board of UGS, the design software company Siemens purchased earlier this year for $3.5 billion, and a champion of the Digital Factory concept, which advocates greater integration between design and production. The objective, of course, is greater speed to market.

Following our meeting, I kept thinking about the speed factor. Many questions came to mind. How do you know how much faster you need to be to create a sustainable advantage relative to competitors, which are also attempting to increase their speed? Is there a limit to how much you can improve time to market? Are there trade-offs with other process-related activities — the context variable again — such as quality? Does speed mean different things in different types and sizes of organizations?

These questions may seem suitable only for theoretical physicists, but I believe that a clear understanding of the role of speed in a manufacturing company is essential to making wise investment decisions. Investing in state-of-the-art automation systems is surely one of the keys to improving speed, but so, too, may be investing in educating workers in lean manufacturing practices, or in organizational streamlining, or even in culture than engenders greater creative thought.

Moreover, the speed element may really be an intermediate consideration. After all, a company can certainly get faster at producing a product that people don't want. Speed, to be effective, must be attached to sound vision and strategy. Otherwise it may not be focused enough to produce a desired result. In addition, the notion of market timing may be more important than speed. Your company may try to bring a product to market rapidly, but it had better be sure than it doesn't over-shoot what that market is ready to buy.

Speed, then, is indeed relative. And the answer to "how fast is fast enough?" is that there isn't just one.

How fast does your company think it needs to be? Write to me at Dbrousell@thomaspublishing.com.