Focuses on the synchronous manufacturing system (SMS), a manufacturing management methodology that introduces various operational measures that help increase the performance of the system for optimum production quantity. Enlightens the effects of bottleneck resources and capacity constraints and suggests remedies for synchronized flow in the shop floor. Also recommends methods for production control in synchronous manufacturing, brings together the concepts and elements of marketing and manufacturing along with production quantity. Gives information about several factors that should be taken into consideration while applying synchronous manufacturing methodology in marketing and manufacturing. Shows the results, conclusion and future scope.
Presents work carried out in the wider context of the IST Adrenalin project whose aim is to facilitate formation and lifecycle management of networked enterprises utilising concepts from two key information research areas. The approach described places heavy emphasis on the notion of mobile agent technologies and their adaptation for achieving the IT realisation of the above theoretical background. It covers specification, design and conceptual realisation of how information supply chains and routes can be organised and navigated across networked enterprise activities within the context of a branch independent model. Builds on the distribute and integrate concept as well as on the fractal idea by supporting self‐similarity, self‐organisation, self‐optimisation and dynamic organisational behavior. The harmonised combination of the concepts formulated in the Adrenalin theoretical framework and their IT realisation are employed within the context of a real‐world case study in an industrial ERP system.
Industrial relationships among companies within the supply chain and procurement processes are changing to cope with new threats and opportunities arising from Internet technologies. The adoption of Web‐based tools in the procurement process allows firms to either reduce transaction costs or improve internal procurement process efficiency, or even increase collaboration with suppliers. The aim of this research is to analyze and understand main factors driving the adoption of Internet‐based tools in customer‐supplier relationships. The evidence presented is based on four in‐depth case studies (two European and two American) carried out within a joint‐research project of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Politecnico di Milano.
Getting the right information at the right time is one of the success factors of product development. However, there exist a great variety of data formats which make the bi‐directional data interchange among various development groups inefficient and costly. Due to the lack of adequate product and engineering data, design practitioners may find it difficult to transform the customer’s requirements to a value‐added product. This paper attempts to propose a hybrid database approach (HDA) to support effective data exchange among a case based reasoning knowledge repository and a corporate relational database model, presenting an integrated view of a company’s knowledge sources so as to enable better decision‐making by providing immediate access to key business information. To introduce machine learning capability to the whole system, case based reasoning (CBR) is embraced to capture past experience and knowledge for case matching in terms of product development issues. The significance of this research is the provision of a cross‐platform data exchange system, which is able to facilitate the creation of a conducive product development environment.
This article deals with the evolution of customer service practices in grocery products distribution in Brazil (1994‐2001), based on a longitudinal survey of grocery retailers. Data were collected on retailers’ expectations on four relevant dimensions of customer logistics service provided by manufacturers, as well as on their perceptions of logistics service performance of the typical supplier and the best supplier. The evolution of the gaps between retailers’ expectations and manufacturers’ perceived distribution performance was investigated, as well as a trend in terms of an increase or decrease in customer satisfaction with service provided by suppliers in such dimensions. Results indicate that retailers typically tend to be satisfied with the service provided by their suppliers. In addition, there may be an adjustment of distribution performance to expectations of retailers and to the provision, in some cases, of service above customer expectations.
Rolling bearings are basic mechanical elements for supporting rotational and reciprocating motion in engineering products. Many approaches have been proposed by researchers in order to facilitate the procedure of bearing design, but mainly concentrating on the development of PC‐based systems or relative software packages.The authors present a novel approach to implementing a design support system for rolling bearings based on the World Wide Web so as to achieve agility in rolling bearing design. The system was developed based on the philosophy of agile manufacturing by integrating various information resources, artificial intelligence, and Web technology with expertise. This Web‐based distributed system will be globally accessible by the user on the Internet and can be automatically sized according to the demand of application requirements. The system implementation issues are discussed in detail in this paper.
This article analyses the moderation effect of co‐operation on electronic data interchange (EDI) adoption, and the influence of EDI use on the co‐ordinating activities in the automotive supply chain. The empirical results from a survey of 116 Spanish automotive suppliers indicate that EDI adopters perceive more operational benefits, more external pressure and mutual understanding, and fewer technical and organisational difficulties than do non‐adopters of EDI. The use of EDI is greater among suppliers that perceive more strategic benefits and fewer cost and organisational difficulties, have a proactive management, are less dependence on suppliers, and adopt EDI earlier. Co‐operation is a moderator of organisational difficulties for EDI adoption and use, and strategic benefits for the use of EDI. The results also show that companies use EDI to become more co‐ordinated with suppliers and customers.
The work presented in this article is part of an action research project carried out in collaboration between Bang & Olufsen (B&O) and the Center for Industrial Production (CIP) of Aalborg University. The aim of the project is to investigate how end‐manufacturers can source new technology via innovative NPD‐related supplier relationships. Whereas prior work on buyer‐supplier relationships is dominated by a product‐oriented view, the present research has adopted a resource‐based (competence) view to develop a framework to guide companies in developing and handling competence‐based relationships with technology suppliers. The framework suggests four different types of inter‐organisational competence development, two of which will be illustrated using empirical data obtained through two in‐depth case studies of innovative partnership projects between B&O and some of its sub‐suppliers.
This paper introduces a modified single linkage clustering heuristic (MOD‐SC). The proposed MOD‐SLC objective is to test the application of Baroni‐Urban and Buser (BUB) similarity coefficient to the manufacturing cell formation (MCF) problem instead of Jaccard’s similarity coefficient. The MOD‐SLC has been compared and evaluated against three cluster formation‐based heuristics for MCF. The three heuristics are: the single linkage clustering, enhanced rank order clustering, and direct clustering algorithm. The MCF methods considered in this comparative and evaluative study belong to the cluster formation approach of solving the MCF problem. The comparison and evaluation are performed using four published performance measures. A total of 25 published and ten hypothetical and randomly generated problem data sets are used in the proposed evaluative study. Results analysis is carried out to test and validate the proposed BUB based MOD‐SLC. Finally the pros and cons of each method are stated and discussed.
Next generation manufacturing is a strategic tool, which identifies the paths that manufacturing companies may follow in order to stay competitive in today’s changing world. This paper describes the background and the development of a tool to be used in companies with the aim of identifying areas on which the company can and should concentrate its development efforts. The tool has proven workable in practice and approximately 200 Danish manufacturing companies have tested it. Some general trends regarding the future development of these companies can be concluded within the fields of flexible organisations, innovation, utilisation of IT, and collaboration between companies.
Considering the significance of organisational attributes and competitiveness, it is necessary to explore how the attributes affect enterprise competitive capabilities. This paper intends to identify the dominant and critical attributes with the greatest influence on each priority. The present research intends to identify the potential for the use of a neural network in the area where statistical modelling approaches have traditionally been used. A method of artificial neural network (ANN) has been proposed. For the ANN, capability of a multi‐layer perceptron with back propagation algorithm is made use of. The proposed network configured can detect, classify and estimate the extent of effects of agile attributes on competitive capabilities. The potential of the above approach is illustrated with an empirical study to show that a neural network approach is a very promising tool for the manufacturing enterprise design.
The importance of incorporating customer preferences into product specifications for successful customized product design has been well recognized. An approach based on the identification of customer need patterns is proposed in this paper for better understanding of customer preferences and accordingly to enhance the product definition for customization and personalization. A tree‐structured classification algorithm is formulated for the identification of customer need patterns. Accordingly, a two‐phase methodology is developed for effective product definition. A case study of power supply products is reported to illustrate the feasibility and potential of the proposed approach.
Whilst much of the e‐business evolution has been referred to as an additional and complementary marketing channel, there has been little concern about the impact on manufacturing. However, since a manufacturing strategy should be closely linked to the marketing strategy, developments in marketing are likely to impact manufacturing. In this paper, we explore the ways in which e‐business is impacting the manufacturing strategy in manufacturing firms. We study seven Swedish manufacturing firms and investigate the relationship between e‐business and manufacturing strategy. The findings indicate that e‐business mainly affects two decision categories – vertical integration, and manufacturing planning and control systems – through new ways to communicate and exchange information between buyers and sellers at both business ends. Improvements in these decision categories lead to potential gains in delivery speed and reliability, but only for make‐to‐order companies, whereas the impact on quality, price and flexibility is more or less negligible. Make‐to‐stock firms report only limited impact on manufacturing.
The “robust networks” concept of Ferdows is examined and related to other key theories from the manufacturing strategy literature, resource‐based and other conceptualisations of the organisation of innovation in international networks, and the international business debates on “operational flexibility”. The cases of seven international automotive assemblers with operations in Brazil are then considered in the light of Ferdows’ framework and the external factors bearing on the country and the sector within it. It is evident that, among the global assemblers, the “world” car strategy is dominant, leading to a concentration on the “source” and “lead” roles for individual plants, often combined with radical logistical arrangements. This seems in turn to support the argument for “robustness” rather than “operational flexibility”. Suggestions are made for further work to study the luxury car assemblers and other sectors where economies of scale are less important and where there is a greater degree of global dispersion of production facilities.
This paper examines a new model of production in a developing nation, the Electronics Contract Manufacturing Industry. It explores issues related to manufacturing management, competence building, organisation and implementation of manufacturing best practice. It argues that the understanding of both contextual institutional factors and soft operational issues is crucial for implementing manufacturing practices that support competitiveness building.
Describes the reengineering of a production line for household heating tubular radiators, assuming as a reference scenario the facility of one of the leading Italian manufacturers. After a preliminary characterization of products and manufacturing process, a thorough analysis of the production system has been carried out in order to highlight current problems and improvement strategies in the light of lean manufacturing concepts. Subsequently, suggests some corrective actions and also assesses their expected effectiveness in economic terms. In particular, improvement possibilities have been found in the areas of internal logistics through streamlining of materials flow and layout modifications, as well as process quality increase. Reengineering activities are especially aimed towards layout optimization mainly by resorting to a U‐shaped cell‐based architecture. Further, the reduction of rework percentage during the assembly phase has been pursued by properly modifying the operations sequence and through integration of a new automated testing station in the production line.
This paper reviews and compares the concepts of theory of constraints (TOC) and activity‐based costing (ABC). The primary objective of this study is to investigate the integration of both theories so as to provide management with the capability of making better operations decisions in the presence of diverse activities and committed costs. First, the assumptions of each theory are discussed against traditional cost accounting. Next, based on numerical examples, we discuss the managerial implications of the two theories in various decisions such as pricing, make‐or‐buy and product mix. Numerical results show that both ABC and TOC can provide management with better performance measurement of diverse production activities especially when committed costs are a significant factor. Accordingly, suggestions for integrating the two theories are provided.
The competition is becoming truly global with fragmented markets and customers expecting to get the best product at the best price with immediate availability. In this business environment we need to be agile to handle changes within the production system as well as changing the system to new circumstances. This paper is investigating the concept of agility and how it can be applied within industry. A proposal on how to make an "Agility" analysis from a production system perspective is presented and a case study has been performed to test this analysis in practice.
This article reviews research findings related to the “art” of constructing survey questionnaires. It discusses some of the important issues that should be considered in gathering quality data via questionnaires, provides general suggestions for their construction, includes a comprehensive list of important reference sources, and examines some of the survey‐based studies published in Integrated Manufacturing Systems. Constructing a good questionnaire requires a thorough grasp of the intricacies of the topical area and detailed knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses of the different survey administration modes. In addition, questionnaire construction entails close attention to details about the wording of questions, their instructions, their response choices, and their sequence. Most importantly, the research instrument should be refined based on guidance from repeated pretests. Well‐constructed questionnaires can ensure the consistent meaning of the questions across respondents and can contribute to data quality by decreasing both item and unit nonresponse.
This article is about managing industrial buyer‐supplier relations as seen from the customer perspective. Two successful examples of supplier network management are described, and the limits to broader applicability of these supply management principles discussed. Next the focus is on managing the dyadic relation. Contributions from four of the most influential groups of researchers on the subject are overviewed. Empirical findings from a case study from industry are presented, leading to a short conceptual presentation of an alternative supply management approach. The empirical contribution comes from two case studies carried out at the Danish industrial company Danfoss Drives, which produces frequency converters and is a division of the Danfoss industrial corporation. One case study is about the characteristics of a supplier network supplying aluminum components to Danfoss Drives. The other is about the evolution of one of the industrial buyer‐supplier relations in the aluminum network – between Danfoss Drives and a supplier of extruded aluminum components.
