The aim of this paper is to highlight the differences between technology driven change projects that fail and those who succeed. The main differences are the motivation among the employees and the companies ability to build knowledge and to a lesser extent management involvement.

Outsourcing has increased rapidly in volume and scope during the last 10 years (Bedford, 1996 and Bailey et al., 1998). There is a risk that new concept that has worked well in one business may not be successful when transplanted elsewhere (Cox, 1996) and massive outsourcing has in some cases has failed to achieve anticipated savings (Berggren & Bengtsson, 2004). This has led to that the outsourcing trend has weakened and there are several examples of companies that are insourcing. An activity, once outsourced is not so easily insourced again since the structures and conditions surrounding the activity has changed (Wasner, 1999). Because of this the description and analysis of insourcing cases is an interesting area to study. There is however very limited number of papers that build theoretical framework regarding insourcing so the theoretical base will be outsourcing theory.

Seven companies were studied with the purpose to discuss learning in production with regard to actual potential and course of action to realize the potential. The study shows that companies that focus on learning in production can reach significant improvements despite low input of resources with a payback time of often less than a year.

It has been argued that continuous improvement is an introduction of different quality tools. In this empirical study the use of tools is very limited but the results are anyhow fairly OK. The results of different improvement groups vary substantially and the reason for this variation is mostly difference in knowledge and skill among the groups.