Abstract
Recently, Japanese car manufacturers and automotive components suppliers have been making efforts to increase the supporting capabilities (e.g., product and process engineering) of their production facilities overseas. As a result, the attention paid by both academics and practitioners to the tasks and functions of manufacturing engineering, and to the overseas transfer of these tasks and functions, has increased. However, compared to Japanese car manufacturers, we could find few academic works in English or Japanese that address the tasks and functions of manufacturing engineering in Japanese automotive component suppliers. Also, these academic works have not provided the reader with "the big picture", an overall view or perspective on the position of manufacturing engineering in the business administration science. In this paper the author argues that there are hints in the literature showing that the formation of the tasks and functions of manufacturing engineering may represent a strategic decision based on the characteristics of the manufacturing process (level of automation, use of manual labor, etc.). The preliminary results of the research from two cases of Japanese suppliers of automotive components: one supplying final assemblies and another supplying sub-components for these final assemblies, show that there are differences in the organization and some of the tasks of manufacturing engineering, which could be explained by the different characteristics of the manufacturing process in these two suppliers.
