Technological advances will continue to have profound effects on manufacturing firms. But the most important changes will come in the ways companies manage their supply chains and inventories, said L. Joseph Thomas, professor of manufacturing at Cornell University's Johnson Graduate School of Management. Such changes require a major investment, he added, but those companies that come to it late are going to be left out.

Thomas will be a featured speaker at "The Workplace Revolution," a Johnson School-sponsored symposium in London on March 16. Thomas will discuss "Information Technology and the Manufacturing Firm: Work and Competition in the Next Decade." The symposium begins at 8:45 a.m. at the Four Seasons Hotel (formerly Inn on the Park) on Park Lane.

"The bulk of the effort that turns raw materials into a finished product in a customer's hands is spent passing both physical materials and information -- both design and manufacturing specifications -- around the world," Thomas said. "Companies that can shorten this process, delivering new product lines to the marketplace in advance of their competitors -- can achieve a significant competitive advantage."

He points to companies such as The Limited and Benetton as examples of those who have taken this point to heart. Traditionally, a shirt can take up to a year to process and ship the raw materials and specifications back and forth along the supply chain. But The Limited and Benetton can develop and deliver a new product -- from design to stock on the store shelf -- in as little as two to three weeks. The key: fast information and fast freight. The companies lease 747s to move materials rapidly and pass designs and other information between headquarters, factories and retail outlets electronically.

"In the apparel industry, those companies that can respond to the latest fashion trends within the same season can blow the competition away," Thomas said. "Those that cannot are left guessing what will sell the following year. And when it doesn't sell, they're left with end-of-season sales to move the merchandise."

As for the impact of robotics and other technologies on the factory floor, Thomas said they've been overstated. "Companies invested heavily in such technologies only to realize that they'd gone too far. In terms of flexibility, nothing is as flexible as a person," he said. Finding new ways to pass materials and information also will require a major investment. "There are huge gambles involved, but those that come to it late are going to be left out," he concluded.

The challenge now: to reassess the impact of technology on how people work and how such work is organized. In his latest research, Thomas is testing several of the most popular approaches to workplace management, such as work- sharing, by running "laboratory" experiments and seeing how people actually behave. While the models may look good in theory, they are based on unrealistic assumptions about human behavior.

"Many of these models make very strong assumptions about human behavior that aren't even true," he said. "For example, work sharing models assume that people work as hard as they can, even if other workers are lazy. They assume that people all respond to the same situation in the same way. But we know that people are different; the system ought to account for that. We should know what kinds of people work best in these systems so companies can best utilize the flexibility that people bring to a work situation."

In addition to Thomas, the Johnson School symposium will feature presentations from Michael Chamberlain, founder of Marketing Week, who is currently involved in over 150 electronic publishing projects for United News and Media plc; Peter Schwartz, renowned futurist and business strategist and author of The Art of the Long View; John Suchet, newscaster for Independent Television News; John Thompson, senior adviser to CSC Consulting and CSC Index; and Franklin Becker, Cornell professor of human-environment relations and director of Cornell's International Workplace Studies Program.