Advanced Manufacturing Technologies (AMTs) are widely used by manufacturing organisations all over the world. Unfortunately, the process of implementation of AMT projects has been unsatisfactory and sometimes led to
total failure. In the literature, various reasons are brought forward for the deficiency of companies to deal with such technologies. Most cited reasons were
managerial incompetence, organisational inertia and lack of and/or insufficient Technology Learning Process (TLP). Particularly, the Technology Learning Process (TLP) was widely recognised as a significant factor influencing
technological change management. For instance, several authors believed that the failure of companies to manage technological change was due to the absence of
effective TLP. Hence, studying and identifying the impact of TLP on the technological change management and on operations management is of real importance to reduce this rate of failure.
In order to understand how TLP was implemented and what measures were used to determine the practice level of TLP, face-to-face interviews with experienced industrial project managers were held. Based on these interviews, this study
developed 46 parameters in order to assess the practice level of TLP in Irish organisations. These parameters were classified into four levels including Basic Level, Average Level, Advanced Level, and World-Class level.
To examine the impact of these parameters on the technological change management, postal and online questionnaires were designed and dispatched to all pharmaceutical and chemical firms in Ireland. This was a two-fold objective survey. The first objective was to verify the suitability of this set of parameters over a larger sample of pharmaceutical and chemical organisations. The second objective was to determine the level of TLP practice within the pharmaceutical and chemical firms in Ireland and to investigate the impact of each parameter of
this set of parameters on the process of implementation of AMT projects and also on the organisation performance as a whole. The suitability of the proposed conceptual model on wide population was verified. The developed set of
parameters was found not only to have significant impact on the process of AMT implementation but also have an influence on the organisation performance.