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Frederick H. Abernathy
- Gordon McKay Professor of Mechanical Engineering; Abbott and James Lawrence Professor of Engineering
Contact Information
| Office: | Pierce Hall 326 |
| Email: | fha [ AT ] seas [ DOT ] harvard [ DOT ] edu |
| Office Phone: | (617) 495-4709 |
| Office Fax: | (617) 495-9837 |
| Assistant: | Marina DiDonato-McLaughlin |
| Office: | Pierce Hall 328A |
| Email: | marina [ AT ] seas [ DOT ] harvard [ DOT ] edu |
| Office Phone: | (617) 495-1508 |
| Office Fax: | (617) 495-9837 |
Websites
Education
- B.S., 1951, Mechanical Engineering, Newark College of Engineering
- S.M. 1954, Ph.D., 1959, Mechanical Engineering, Harvard University
Research Areas
- Mechanical Engineering: Manufacturing Systems
Research Profile
Professor Abernathy and colleagues in SEAS, the Economics Department,
Harvard Business School, and the Boston University School of Management
are concerned with the productivity of the entire manufacturing channel
from raw materials to finished products sold at retail. These interests
led to the formation at Harvard of a Center for Textile and Apparel
Research, which is a part of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's Industry Centers Program.
The competitive dynamics in the textile-apparel-retail industries are
being transformed by significant changes in retailing, especially
technological innovations that allow retailers to offer consumers a
growing variety of products while reducing their own exposure to
inventory risk.
The Center research has documented the responses of apparel and textile
suppliers to these changes, and provides significant analysis and
recommendations for the industry. These themes are developed in a major
book, A Stitch in Time: Lean Retailing and the Transformation Of
Manufacturing – Lessons from the Apparel and Textile Industries,
available from Oxford University Press.
Among other findings, the book shows how apparel-manufacturing firms
using information technology extensively can hold less than half the
inventory, and bear substantially less risk while earning twice the
profits of companies that do not invest in these practices.
Professor Abernathy, his students, and collaborators are involved in
developing understanding of how to achieve optimal sourcing of the
steps of the production process while minimizing inventory risks. The
current focus of the research concerns product proliferation, the
logistics of items in production, overall production cycle time, and
real options to reduce inventory risk.