Annual reports of nine major pulp and paper companies from the post nine years were analyzed to assess their value creation capability, inventory levels, and operational speed capability. When scaled by sales, the differences in operational efficiency between companies are small. Large companies perform similarly with their large and similar product palettes. Medium sized companies show slightly greater differences are greater. However, in several cases it is the small firms with local and focused operations which completely outperform the global players. Apparently, in contrast with other industries, the pulp and paper industry is still competing based on volume and share rather than on speed and efficiency. The larger companies who first focus on operational speed will have a major advantage over their competitors in the future. Our trend analysis over the nine years of the study indicates that competition based on speed is about to start in this industry.

This longitudinal study is based on nine in-depth case studies carried out over the past 9 years, entailing observation of and participation in the actual innovation processes taking place at the interface of big-science-industry cooperation. The resulting mutually benefiting innovation model integrates industrial and big-science R&D at moments when they best catalyse technological innovation processes by matching specific needs from both sides and facilitating their joint efforts during the cooperation. The big-science centre being CERN2 with its multiple skills, diverse assets and technology validation practices generate, when needs from both sides are clearly defined and well coupled, a most fertile ground to enable and boost industrial innovation. The big-science centre benefits from the cooperation through access to cutting edge technologies at reasonable cost and through manufacturing prospects which both bring optimal performance per cost ratio in instrument design and production. At the same time, it generates meaningful social practice and input into industrial innovation and new business creation. A successful matching process includes: industrial scouting and scanning to find applicable new technologies in the industry; assessment of related business development needs in order to find and create the right motivations for mutually benefiting cooperation; identification of functional specifications for big-science instruments: and an active match-making of needs, motivations and people as well as timing. The research documented in this report complements previous research efforts by providing detailed recommendations to all parties present in big-science collaborations, namely the big-science centres, member state policy-makers and industry experts and managers. (C) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

We employed the grounded theory method to construct a framework describing the distinctive mechanisms through which big-science centers generate industrial knowledge spillovers in the economy. Our focus is on large-scale big-science installations typically associated with experimental physics. We draw on social network, social capital, and inter-organizational learning theories to examine knowledge spillovers accruing to industrial partner companies in big-science–industry dyads. The context for the study is provided by CERN’s new particle accelerator project, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In addition to building a grounded theory framework for the study of industrial knowledge spillovers, our study demonstrates the distinctive potential that big-science centers offer as a source of knowledge spillovers in national innovation systems.

Supply networks where operational control extends well over organizational boundaries have emerged in industries producing relatively complex and customized products with tight profit margins. Products like ships, automobiles and telecommunication systems incorporate complex design and engineering skills that are produced through a tier-structured, multi-level supply networks. Efficiency in these networks has stemmed from specialization and cost efficiency in individual value adding operations. This paper demonstrates how supplier networks have evolved and how the inherent dynamics of these networks generate constantly new business opportunities for fast moving companies with a clear focus on operational efficiency. We use action research methodology on cases from the shipbuilding and constructions industry to document some of the dynamic features of supply networks. This insight is then applied to the electronics manufacturing services business to explain the fundamentals of successful operations in this highly competitive business with ever narrowing margins. In this dynamic market of contract manufacturing companies with constant focus on the reduction of production lead times by incorporating value added operations either physically or logically to maintain and recreate profitable business. To succeed in doing this, issues related to industrial parks, local tacit knowledge and reverse/repair logistics must be managed in cross-organizational manner. We conclude that there is an ever-changing limit to the expansion of supplier networks through specialization and cost efficiency, and that at one point contracting and integrating parts of the supply network will create operationally outperforming business models that further boost the inherent dynamics of supply networks.

To improve demand chain performance, is it better for parties in a supply chain to focus first on lead time reduction, or instead concentrate on improving the transfer of demand information upstream in the chain? Even though the theory of supply and demand chain management suggests that lead time reduction is an antecedent to the use of market mediation (i.e., adjusting production to fit actual customer demand as it materializes) [Harvard Business Rev. 75 (2) (1997) 105] to reduce transaction uncertainty in the chain, which can be conceptualized as the primary goal of supply chain management [J. Operat. Manage. 11 (3) (1993) 289], demand chain parties often are observed in practice to begin with information transfer improvement, ignoring the problem of long lead times. In this paper, we propose a framework for prioritizing lead time reduction in a demand chain improvement project, using a typology of demand chains to identify and recommend trajectories to achieve desirable levels of market mediation performance.

This paper address problems related to distributed engineering projects (DEP) and how World Wide Web (WWW)-based technologies can improve projects' efficiency and success rate. The focus is on how WWW can improve project organisations to manage their knowledge, be it in the form of documents, formal communication or the tacit aspect of human interaction. In order to study the research hypotheses related to improved efficiency and leaner organisations resulting from networked operations, a layered framework is presented on organisational processes taking place in the distributed project business. This framework is applied to two industrial cases harnessing advanced networking technologies in their distributed operations. The cases have been picked to show diversity, the other one describes a global delivery process of complex investment goods and the other a smaller scale knowledge intensive company with rapid product release cycles. Basing on these cases the paper concludes that deploying advanced WWW-technologies to distributed engineering processes their punctuality, cost control and workflow can be improved. The cases indicate also, that the new tools enable the initiation of learning processes based on the quantitative information that accumulates in the network servers during the execution of the project. This information can be used to refine the organisation and focus the processes on the truly value-adding activities, which all support the research hypotheses set for the study.

The main results from the operational analyses of 12 fine paper machines are compared and discussed. The key metrics studied for each machine were annual production volume, number of paper grodes produced, and average through put time with its variation in the whole supply chain from paper machine to customer. The variation in throughput time has been calculated in terms of the cost saving potential that would be realised if the whole material flow passed each step in the chain within 7 weeks from its initial production date. To justify this calculation, the assumptions made in relation to inventory carrying costs are discussed. The results indicate that machines turning out numerous paper grades tend to have longer throughput times in their supply chains, although exceptions do occur. Neither annual volume nor paper machine capacity has any clear correlation with throughput time. It is also shown that longer throughput times entail more variation in the supply chain. The fundamental result of the benchmark study indicates that, independent of the paper machine's size or the number of products being produced, a mill can be operationally efficient and outperform others in the market. The mills in the sample were studied during 1995 and 2000.

Research on complex adaptive systems has generated several conceptual parables to explain systems with emergent behaviour. One prominent use for terms such as self‐organization, evolutionary trajectories, co‐evolution and punctuated equilibrium has been in understanding human organizations. In such systems, emergent behaviour is demonstrated in novel structures, processes and spin‐offs that cannot be explained just by studying single components of the organization and the intelligence embedded in them. Instead of solely exploiting the qualitative explanatory power of the evolutionary concepts, this paper focuses also on quantitative methods to track emergent behaviour in a globally distributed, constantly fluctuating and highly networked project organization. The underlying case is that of CERN (CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, has its headquarters in Geneva. At present, its Member States are Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, the Slovak Republic, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Israel, the Russian Federation, Turkey, Yugoslavia (status suspended after the UN embargo, June 1992), the European Commission and UNESCO have observer status.) and its decade long accelerator project, which strongly relies on electronic communication and networking to achieve its major objectives due to be accomplished by the year 2006. By using time series and self‐organizing maps to analyse the global interaction among project groups and individuals the paper provides new insight to the understanding of emergent behaviour in human organizations. The key result of the study concerns the rigid deep structure of each case organization that seems to remain intact for the duration of the whole project. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

By drawing from field studies on three different types of business projects the paper outlines a improved document management approach. The three global cases, which comprise business process re-engineering (BPR), new product development (NPD) and one-of-a-kind manufacturing, enable to track a common set of document based operations which hold the vital information for the success of respective cases. This information reveals what is the true active organisation of the enterprise, what are the document usage profiles of the people and how knowledge-related creative processes are really performed by the organisation. In addition, the management is provided with new means to measure operational performance with better encompassing metrics. The approach and its partial implementation act as glue between various systems used within and between the collaborating companies.

Projects in big science generate technology that may have considerable impact on industry. Technology transfer is widely regarded as valuable in creating new products and companies, but the most effective modes of operation for this activity are rarely understood. This paper documents the catalyzing events, key obstacles and other influences at CERN during the 4-year journey of the TuoviWDM software project from its initiation in 1995 to the launching of a spin-off company in late 1998. The description proceeds in chronological order and focuses on the technological and organizational factors that have affected the innovation process. The TuoviWDM software is a WWW-based extended enterprise interface to product data management systems and to data vaults residing in proprietary information systems. A group of organizations uses this integrated whole to store and access information and to manage operational processes. The large projects and global user base at CERN provided the development team with an extremely flexible, occasionally surprisingly benign, and always challenging environment to develop the system. The opportunities to exploit the diversity hidden in the world's largest particle physics laboratory are immense. However, this case has again demonstrated that in a public sector organization the climate, the procedures, and the decision-makings bodies, which are related to creation of technology and to technology transfer, may be supportive, irrelevant or even counter-productive, The goal of technology transfer activity should be to fertilize the industries of the participating countries rather than to try to obtain additional finance for the research organization. Policy makers need to compare the weight of these two aspects when technology transfer policies are formulated for big science organizations. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

This paper studies the benefits of establishing configuration management procedures and using an engineering data. management systems (EDMS) in a large-scale project by dividing the overall effort into successive processes. Through the identification of the main functional groups who will use the EDMS, the paper outlines the basic motivations and services provided by such a system to each process during the life-cycle of the project. The implications of strict configuration management on the daily operation of each functional user group are also discussed. The main argument of the paper is that each and every user of the EDMS must act in compliance with the configuration management procedures to guarantee the overall benefits from such a system. In truly global projects? special emphasis is placed on the management of distributed operations, which sets the flexible and universal access to all engineering and project related documents: into a crucial role in the overall success of the project. As an example of the given challenge, this paper documents a World Wide Web-based system to manage documents and interface in-house document vaults and commercial EDM systems. The underlying environment of the case is that of CERN and the ongoing, decade-long, Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project.

This paper describes a practical model and procedure on how to tender products based on new, emerging technologies. This situation prevails in large-scale scientific projects and in other, mostly publicly funded, efforts to construct systems of significant technological scale. The paper proposes a double-blind communication and tendering procedure for establishing the means, partners and economic framework for the projects that finally commit to accomplish the task. This procedure sets a dedicated technological broker in to central position of the information exchange between the buyer and supplier. The presented procedure reduces any political interference, ensures more accurate cost estimates and helps the project to obtain better financial basis to kick-off. When in operation, the procedure can be used for determining the costs and most prominent technological trajectories for a proposed solution. The approach presented paves the ground towards the emergence of virtual markets for products yet-to-be-engineered.

The paper shows that it is possible to reconstruct the dynamical attractors of demand at different levels of the supply chain by using time series duplication and techniques for normalisation. The objective of reconstructing dynamical attractors is to learn more about the long‐term dynamical behaviour of supply chains. Typical patterns that can be encountered through phase space reconstruction are discussed. Based on the analysis of real life supply chains first results are presented on how attractors can be used to better understand the dynamical behaviour of supply chains. The cases show that clear attractors can be identified for consumer and retailer demand. When this demand is compared with supply the phase space analysis becomes an effective tool for identifying distortion in the supply chain. The paper concludes by presenting two examples on how a better understanding of demand attractors have been used to improve operational and tactical planning.

The paper describes the motivations, process and results of an activity defining the quality classification categories for a complicated system product. The underlying case project shares an objective to construct one of the largest scientific instrumentation ever built by mankind. This 10-year effort with significant technological, scientific, political and financial risks has reached manufacturing and partially the installation phase. It was realized that the key criteria to define the quality classification category for each equipment, item, part, subassembly and system must be done in relation to external world. A failure of an item or part must be assessed in respect of its anticipated hazard on environment, on expected performance of the system and on financial stability of the project. During the work, it was realized that each part should be evaluated separately, meaning that inheritance of quality categories cannot take place in the system. Once defined, quality categories dictate the level of detail used in engineering change, documentation and operational procedures of each part of the system. A more in-depth look on contact impact analysis between components of a complex system product is also provided. It is concluded that the approach provided in the paper can be applied to any system or artifact requiring design, production and assembly.

Six paper machines, three in Scandinavia and three in the middle of Europe, are studied for their end-market and mill demand patterns. The well-known demand amplification effect is proven valid for mills with long supply chains, while the situation is different for mills located close to their end-markets. The paper shores that the existing reaction time for market demand information is not being exploited and that production allocation is not being well matched with real demand Mills close to demand do have an advantage over those in Scandinavia, but it is also shown that this advantage could be overtaken by shorter production cycles and better integrated supply chain operations that add up to reliable operational performance with no safely margins and buffers. It is concluded that the physical distance between mill and market should only show up in transportation costs, but not in poorly managed material flow with high buffers and poor customer service resulting from biased demand information at the mill.

Advanced manufacturing companies are facing a shift in their focus of development efforts. Improvements on manufacturing itself and on operations management are, in many cases, pushed already to the extreme. Only small adjustments and investment-based development work exists. Against this facet, the underlying hypothesis of the paper is that the near future winners are companies mastering information/data/document management, while the ultimate goals of the development remain the same: increase productivity, reduce lead times, shorten design cycles, etc. The paper studies empirically the state-of-the-art of information systems supporting the delivery process in one-of-a-kind companies. Eight case studies based on interviews show that current applications seldom provide flexible means to maintain coherently all of the product related information during the main phases of products life-cycle. All of the studied companies, which operate on global markets, are increasingly focusing on documentation management with multiple ways, as the study found in-house development work, companies waiting for suitable tools and simple ad hoc solutions. Finally, the implications of networked information technology on the controllability of the delivery process in a one-of-a-kind environment is discussed.

We live and work in an era when seemingly every waking minute brings an invitation to visit yet another site on the World Wide Web. Inundated with calls to check out www.whatever.com, we can easily lose sight of the fact that the birth of the Web is part of our very recent history. And notwithstanding the proliferation of personal and corporate vanity pages on the Web, this world of hyperlinks and hot spots has brought about dramatic changes in the means by which many individuals and organizations communicate, work, and trade. For new‐products professionals interested in the processes that give rise to radical innovations, what lessons can be learned from the development of the World Wide Web?To gain insight into the process that resulted in the development of the first Web browser and Web server software, Ari‐Pekka Hameri and Markus Nordberg examined project proposals, e‐mail exchanges, and other documentation, and they interviewed key personnel who were involved in the process. From this research, they were able to document the process and the environmental constraints that shaped the development and diffusion of the tools and technologies that form the foundation of the World Wide Web.Although a staggeringly diverse range of Web‐related services and applications have surfaced during the past few years, the original Web tools and technologies were targeted for a relatively small, focused community of researchers. Specifically, the origins of the World Wide Web are found in efforts aimed at meeting the information‐sharing needs of researchers in the realm of high‐energy physics. This far‐flung group required a global network that could facilitate the interchange of documents stored in diverse formats on a wide variety of computing platforms.Meeting those needs required neither excessive R&D investments nor radically new core technologies. Instead, the solution involved the integration of existing technologies—networking tools and protocols, document formats, and desktop applications and development tools—by an innovator who had both the necessary vision and firsthand knowledge of the practical benefits that were needed. From a management perspective, perhaps the key lesson learned involves giving R&D personnel both the freedom and the support to initiate new projects and studies.

Based on statistical evidence if is argued that the paper and pulp industry is, in general terms, much slower in its operational procedures than other industries. Industries in which there is intense global competition, like the automotive and electronics industries, show a strong correlation between operational speed and productivity. However this relationship is far from being linear, as speeding up the material flows seems to have a delayed but, after a threshold point, significant impact on overall efficiency. Differences between national paper industries exist and the analysis indicates that the Finnish paper industry is a particularly poor performer From the point of view of efficiency and operational speed. Still, Finland's main competitors are not doing much better. The main objective of this article is to show that true competence in the operational skills needed to control manufacturing and logistic processes has not yet really been acquired in the paper and pulp industry. Competition based on raw material prices and production volumes will eventually come to an end, and the winners will be those with the most efficient and expeditious supply chain processes. Finnish paper mills still have the opportunity to achieve a competitive advantage over their rivals by speeding up their supply chain processes.

The paper focuses on the principal issue of production control, i.e. to manage the cumulative effects of individually insignificant factors which together contribute to the difficulties to allocate resources efficiently.In the communication between all actors in the value adding chain there are delays and distortions which affect how the industrial enterprise perceives its business environment. The consequences of these delays and distortions can be substantial; end consumption is severely distorted and the factory gets caught in a vicious circle where false information feeds a capacity load situation that appears nearly chaotic. The phenomena causing the unmanageable situation are commonly known as Forrester's demand amplification effect and the Burbidge's load surge effect.It is proposed that the control methods of the enterprise and the reliability of the communicated information directly affect how successfully the enterprise is able to avoid the aforementioned situation. The discussion is founded on results from a number of operations development projects in the automotive, sweets, electronics and textile industry. The paper describes the effect of demand distortion and control surges in a number of enterprises and presents ways of solving the problems occurring. In conclusion, the significance of the results for directing development efforts in manufacturing operations is discussed.