Both academia and the real world are showing a vastly increased interest in international logistics. Although this book covers the entire topic, it may not contain sufficient detail to answer all questions. The topic-and the challenge is much larger than any single book can cover! A number of people helped us, and their assistance should be recognized. They include Robert L. Argentieri, Eunice Coleman, Patricia J. Daugherty, Robert Derbin, Robert Hannus, Ken Knox, Douglas Long, Eugene L. Magad, Dale S. Rogers, Robert Rouse, John Silvey, and Clyde Kenneth Walter. This book is designed for both the business world and the classroom. A separate Instructor's Manual has been prepared and may be requested on school letterhead from Chapman & Hall. International Logistics 1 Introduction This book is about international logistics and the international logistics system. International means that it will deal with transactions involving indi viduals or firms in more than one nation. Logistics means the organized movement of goods, ser vices, and, sometimes, people. Logistics was originally a military term. For exam ple, in author Tom Clancy's novel, Red Storm Rising, Russian General Alekseyev thought to himself about a battlefield situation: "The tactics ... no, amateurs dis cuss tactics. Professional soldiers study logistics. ,,1 When one speaks of the intema tionallogistics system, he means that huge array of carriers, forwarders, bankers, traders, and so on that facilitate international transactions, trades, and movements of goods and services. Communications are important, and a logistics system in cludes whatever communication capability it needs.

Our two organizations, Northern Telecom Europe Limited and Oracle Corporation UK Limited, share a number of things in common. Both are striving to become world class in markets where technology is moving fast and market change is moving even faster. Both are responding urgently to the challenge of meeting the current requirements - and anticipating the future needs - of customers at the international, national and local level. We both recognize that customer and employee satisfaction now rank with market share as measures for business success. We accept that there are clear links between delighted customers and profitability, customer loyalty and long-term survival. We are committed to achieving excellence, both as business partners and as employers. There is already strong co-operation between the growing number of professionals in this field as they work together and exchange experiences for benchmarking and best practice studies. In this spirit of collaboration, we have encouraged Peter Donovan and Timothy Samler to share some of our early experiences with our customer-driven programmes and to stimulate further debate. Their book provides a wealth of guidance for any organization that has set its sights on delighting its customers and becoming customer-driven. The ten step approach to delighting customers breaks new ground and offers a blueprint for others to follow. It exemplifies the practical approach that is taken throughout the book.

Purchasing and Supply Management includes the latest management, procurement, and negotiation techniques and the authors have taken great care to integrate the impact of global commerce on the buyers job. Historically, purchasing evolved as a weak part of manufacturing, gained its independence, and expanded to a financial contributer to a company's success. A major challenge of the buying job is to manage supply management. To do this, the buyer must know and use the full range of techniques and procedures available to the true professional. This book is dedicated to these functions of supply and all they entail.

Quality is a topical issue in manufacturing. Competitive quality performance still eludes many manufacturers in the traditional industrialized countries. A lack of quality competitiveness is one of the root causes of the relative industrial decline and consequent trade imbalances which plague some Western economies. Many explanations are advanced for poor quality performance. Inadequate levels of investment in advanced technology, together with insufficient education and training of the workforce, are perhaps the most prominent. Some believe these problems are caused by a lack of awareness and commitment from top management, while others point to differences between industrial cultures. The established remedy is known as Total Quality Management (TQM). TQM requires a corporate culture change, driven from the top, and involving every employee in a process of never-ending quality improvement aimed at internal as well as external customers. The techniques deployed to achieve TQM include measures to improve motivation, training in problem-solving and statistical process control (SPC). Quality is, however, only one of the competitive pressures placed It is also upon the manufacturer by the modem global economy. imperative to remain economical and efficient, while increasing the flexibility and responsiveness of the design and manufacturing functions. Here the reduction or elimination of stock is of great importance, particularly as financial interest rates in the less successful manufacturing nations are frequently high. Product life cycles must become ever more compressed in response to the phenomenal design to-manufacture performance of some Pacific rim economies."

Changes in production processes reflect the technological advances permeat ing our products and services. U. S. industry is modernizing and automating. In parallel, direct labor is fading as the primary cost driver while engineering and technology related cost elements loom ever larger. Traditional, labor-based ap proaches to estimating costs are losing their relevance. Old methods require aug mentation with new estimating tools and techniques that capture the emerging environment. This volume represents one of many responses to this challenge by the cost analysis profession. The Institute of Cost Analysis (lCA) is dedicated to improving the effective ness of cost and price analysis and enhancing the professional competence of its members. We encourage and promote exchange of research findings and appli cations between the academic community and cost professionals in industry and government. The 1990 National Meeting in Los Angeles, jointly spo sored by ICA and the National Estimating Society (NES), provides such a forum. Presen tations will focus on new and improved tools and techniques of cost analysis. This volume is the second in a series. The first was produced in conjunction with the 1989 National Meeting of ICA/NES in Washington, D.C. The articles in this volume, all refereed, were selected from about 100 submitted for presen tation at the Los Angeles meeting."

The current marketplace is undergoing an accelerated pace of change that challenges corporations to innovate new techniques to respond rapidly to an ever-changing environment. At the center of this changing environment is a new generation of empowered buyers (customers) equipped with fast evolving technologies that allow them to buy from markets scattered across the globe. Empowering the customers has deprived organizations of what was once their right-to introduce new products slowly, at their own leisure. Organizations used to introduce new products every few years, and, for the most part, products offered limited functionalities and features. A low-priced quality product-irrespective of customer satisfaction-was a guaranteed ticket for success. New global economies and global markets changed business practices and focused on the customer as the major player in the economy. Organizations now fail or succeed based upon their ability to respond quickly to changing customer demands and to utilize new technological innovations. In such an environment, the advantage goes to the firm that can offer greater varieties of new products with higher performance and greater overall appeal. In order to compete in this fast-paced global market, organizations need to produce products that can be easily configured to offer distinctive capabilities compared to the competition. Furthermore, organizations need to develop new methods and techniques to react rapidly to required changes in products and market trends and to shorten the product development cycle, which will enable them to gain more economic competitiveness.

The need exists in the private sector and government manufacturing sites to reduce product development time, production lead times, inventory, and non-value added activities. At the same time, there is increased pressure to improve manufacturing process yields, produc tion efficiency, and resource utilization. Much of the technology required to meet these needs already exists, but an integrated structure that can demonstrate the potential for the technology in a concurrent engineering context does not. This book provides a road map for building the integrated technology environment to evaluate existing products, manufacturing processes and system design tools. This book details innovative approaches that will significantly improve design/manufacturing technology development and deploy ment capabilities for civilian and defense applications. These approaches are integrated product, process, and system design (IPPSD) initiatives which will greatly enhance the manufacturing competitiveness of the economy. These approaches involve the use of simulation, modeling tools and computerized virtual workstations in conjunction with a design environment which allows a diverse group of researchers, manufacturers, and suppliers to work within a comprehensive network of shared knowledge. The IPPSD infrastructure consists of virtual workstations, servers and a suite of simulation, quantitative, computa tional, analytical, experimental and qualitative tools. Such an IPPSD infrastructure will permit effective and efficient predictions of complete product design, manufacturing proces design, and customer satisfac tion.

Multiobjective Scheduling by Genetic Algorithms describes methods for developing multiobjective solutions to common production scheduling equations modeling in the literature as flowshops, job shops and open shops. The methodology is metaheuristic, one inspired by how nature has evolved a multitude of coexisting species of living beings on earth. Multiobjective flowshops, job shops and open shops are each highly relevant models in manufacturing, classroom scheduling or automotive assembly, yet for want of sound methods they have remained almost untouched to date. This text shows how methods such as Elitist Nondominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm (ENGA) can find a bevy of Pareto optimal solutions for them. Also it accents the value of hybridizing Gas with both solution-generating and solution-improvement methods. It envisions fundamental research into such methods, greatly strengthening the growing reach of metaheuristic methods. This book is therefore intended for students of industrial engineering, operations research, operations management and computer science, as well as practitioners. It may also assist in the development of efficient shop management software tools for schedulers and production planners who face multiple planning and operating objectives as a matter of course.

Cutting and packing problems such as the cutting of sheet metal and the loading of contain ers or, in a more abstract sense, capital budgeting or assembly line balancing have been treated in scientific literature of various disciplines for about fifty years. Since the pioneer work of Kantorovich in 1939, which frrst appeared in the West in 1960, there has been a steadily growing number of contributions of increasing importance in this research area, particularly in the past decade. As of today more than 700 contributions exist even when applying a strict categorisation. Since comprehensive monographies and compiled studies are still lacking, it is very time consuming and thus expensive to search for a suitable solution procedure for concrete problems in the available literature. Thus, an apparently simpler way is often chosen, which is to develop ones own approach. For this reason there is not only the danger of unnecessary effort and scientific repetition, but it is reality. With the goal of improved research coordination an interdisciplinary Special Interest Group on Cutting and Packing (SICUP) was founded in 1988, which meets every two years (1988 Paris, 1990 Athens, 1992 San Francisco) and issues a semi-annual newsletter (SICUP Bulletin) with up-to-date information. This book is intended to assist in the coordination of research work in this area."

Manufacturers are increasingly, under pressure from their major stakeholders to integrate environmental issues in the design and management of their products. These stakeholders include customer, regulators, employees, communities, and interest groups who have a common stake in protecting the earth from pollution and in limiting the exploitation of earth's limited natural resources. Manufacturers recognize that being environmentally responsible also offers competitive advantage to the firm. Hence the Handbook of Environmentally Conscious Manufacturing is written as a state-of-the-art reference to environmentally conscious manufacturing (ECM). The chapter authors were carefully selected. All the chapter authors have done extensive research and / or practice work in the field of ECM. The Handbook covers all the major topics in Environmentally Conscious Manufacturing. There are specific chapters to deal with sustainable manufacturing, recycling, eco-labelling, life cycle assessment, and ISO 14000 series of standards, as well as decision-making aspects of Environmentally Conscious Manufacturing. Decision-oriented topics on supply chain, decision models, quality initiative, environmental costing and decision support systems are also covered. The influence of ECM on marketing imperative is also covered. The Handbook is the most comprehensive treatment of Environmentally Conscious Manufacturing available to-date. It is the definitive, state-of-the-art reference to ECM and its applications to today's manufacturing firms.

Most organizational leaders are locked into conducting annual or bi-annual performance reviews with their staff although they know the system is not working. Performance reviews are costly, time consuming, and often a one-way experience without follow up. Companies need an entirely new approach to performance management.
The End of the Performance Review is a thoroughly tested, distinctive alternative that draws on well established principles of organizational behavior. Based around Tim Baker's unique "5 Conversations," each lasting ten minutes, the reader is offered a new model for performance management that better reflects the changing needs of both sides of the employment relationship. With a timely focus on fostering innovation, the book is practical and easy to use--featuring case studies, interviews, and useful templates.

Japanese semiconductor firms are well known for obtaining dynamics in a short period of time and achieving even global leadership. A significant portion of their success are attributable to cooperative interfirm relations and the development of intermediate organizational structure based on long-term relationship between firms. The purpose of this book is to explain how interfirm relations contributed to their dynamics during the golden age of the semiconductor industry. Meanwhile this book clarifies the real source of dynamics in interfirm relations and how the firms have interacted. The author concludes that the competitive-cum-cooperative (CCC) interfirm interaction are observed. Quantitative and qualitative findings show that firms enjoy not only flexible cooperation based synergy effects, but also dynamics market-like effects by creating competition among partners through CCC interaction.

E-Business covers a broad spectrum of businesses based on the Internet, including e-commerce, e-healthcare, e-government and e tailing. While substantial attention is being given to the planning and development of e-business applications, the efficiency and effectiveness of e-business systems will largely depend on management solutions. These management solutions demand a good grasp of both the technical and business perspectives of an e-business service. There have been many books on the Internet based on e-commerce, Internet protocols, distributed components etc. However, none of these books address the problem of managing e business as a set of networked services. They do not link enterprise management with network and systems management. This book provides an overview of the emerging techniques for IT service management from a business perspective with case studies from telecommunication and healthcare sectors. It integrates the business perspective with relevant technical standards, such as SNMP, WBEM and DMI. This book presents some concepts and methodologies that enable the development of effective and efficient management systems for networked services. The book is intended to familiarize practicing managers, engineers, and graduate level students with networked service management concepts, architectures and methodologies with reference to evolving standards. It should be useful in a number of disciplines, such as business management, information systems, computers and networking, and telecommunications. Appendix 2 is based on TeleManagement (TM) Forum's documents on TOM (GB921,GB910 and GB908). While this appendix has explained the basic management concept of an e-telco, TMForum now recommends the use of eTOM as explained in www.tmforum.com. An overview of eTOM is available in the report The TeleManagement Forum's enhanced Telecom Operations Map (eTOM) by Michael Kelly appearing in the Journal of Network and Systems Management in March 2003.

Because of their mutually influencing interactions, information systems and modern manufacturing systems are intertwined. They have been so integrated that information systems have become an embedded and critical component of any effective manufacturing system. The impact of the increasing focus on information permeates throughout the manufacturing life cycle, from product conceptualization, design, process planning, all the way to production, order fulfilment, and customer services. For these reasons, it is critical that we study information-based manufacturing in its entirety, crossing the traditional functional boundaries and building as much synergy between Information Systems (IS), Information Technology (IT), and manufacturing as possible.This is the motivation for this book and, to this end, the purpose of this book is threefold: * to establish an up-to-date interdisciplinary research framework for information-based manufacturing that builds on the research foundation from IS and IT and manufacturing research; * to develop a forward-looking research agenda for information-based manufacturing for identifying future directions for research and applications; and * to foster a joint academic and industrial research agenda in information systems and manufacturing by identifying the greatest synergy possible between academic research and industrial practices.

Edited by IP communications expert Bruce Berman, and with contributions from the top names in IP management, investment and consulting, "From Assets to Profits: Competing for IP Value and Return" provides a real-world look at patents, copyrights, and trademarks, how intellectual property assets work and the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which they are used for competitive advantage. Authoritative and insightful, "From Assets to Profits" reveals the most relevant ways to generate return on innovation, with advice and essential guidance from battle tested IP pros.

Project management has become a widespread instrument enabling organizations to efficiently master the challenges of steadily shortening product life cycles, global markets and decreasing profit margins. With projects increasing in size and complexity, their planning and control represents one of the most crucial management tasks. This is especially true for scheduling, which is concerned with establishing execution dates for the sub-activities to be performed in order to complete the project. The ability to manage projects where resources must be allocated between concurrent projects or even sub-activities of a single project requires the use of commercial project management software packages. However, the results yielded by the solution procedures included are often rather unsatisfactory. Scheduling of Resource-Constrained Projects develops more efficient procedures, which can easily be integrated into software packages by incorporated programming languages, and thus should be of great interest for practitioners as well as scientists working in the field of project management. The book is divided into two parts. In Part I, the project management process is described and the management tasks to be accomplished during project planning and control are discussed. This allows for identifying the major scheduling problems arising in the planning process, among which the resource-constrained project scheduling problem is the most important. Part II deals with efficient computer-based procedures for the resource-constrained project scheduling problem and its generalized version. Since both problems are NP-hard, the development of such procedures which yield satisfactory solutions in a reasonable amount of computation time is very challenging, and a number of new and very promising approaches are introduced. This includes heuristic procedures based on priority rules and tabu search as well as lower bound methods and branch and bound procedures which can be applied for computing optimal solutions.

1 Oxford and Webster's dictionaries,2 give trans-Atlantic agreement in English with a common definition for 'Quality' as 'degree of excellence'. Compared with the many words taken up by other authors' definitions, this is remarkably brief and no doubt unsatisfactory to many people. Yet if 'degree' means a stage in an ascending or descending series, in intensity or in amount, then measurement is by definition explicitly required if terms such as 'quality level', 'good quality', 'high quality' etc. are to have any real meaning. Using measurement is inherent in the methods of all the major writers on the achievement of business improvement through quality. Results from measurements allow improvement by using tools commonly grouped under the heading Statistical Process Control (SPC). Results also form part of the judging criteria of Total Quality Management (TQM) models such as the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in the USA and the more recent European Quality Award. Future revisions of the ISO 9000 series of quality management system standards will specifically require measure ment of defects. However, it is not easy for quality professionals or line managers to find examples of what they should measure and how to do it in their own particular functions in their own particular industries; case st\}dies always seem to refer to others."

This book serves as a textbook for an introductory course on performance management. It gives an overview over various aspects of managing performance of the modem enterprise by focusing on performance evaluation and measurement and performance improvement techniques. Most of the material is based on a thorough literature search and an extensive reference list has been included. The book has been sponsored by the Norwegian productivity research program TOPP and by the COMETT program of the European Community Commission. It has been applied as the text for a continuing education course both within TOPP and the COMETT project APECE. It will also serve as part of a course material for a master's degree in technology management. The book is aimed at an audience of business and technology oriented personnel at middle and higher management level in manufacturing industry. At the same time it is suitable as a textbook for business and engineering schools and colleges. is organized in five parts discussing productivity and The book performance, performance planning, performance review, performance improvement and performance influencing factors. The authors have worked closely together to obtain a well coordinated text without overlap. They have provided a draft. This draft has been circulated for comments amongst the authors and amongst external experts. Based on their input the manuscript has been revised. Eivald RfI}ren and Einar Printz Moe, chairman of the board and program manager for the TOPP research program respectively, have also provided valuable input to the book.

The goal of Inventory Management will be to explain the dynamics of inventory management's principles, concepts, and techniques as they relate to the entire supply chain (customer demand, distribution, and product transformation processes). The interrelationships of all functions will be defined. The book concentrates on understanding the many ramifications of inventory management. In today's competitive business environment, inventory management has proven to be most critical, and this book is directed to the management of inventory to assist in better understanding the body of knowledge required to operate in a competitive world. Almost all functions such as sales, engineering, and accounting have an impact and are impacted by inventory management. The book will assist in the training of students as well as APICS CPIM (Certified in Production and Inventory Management) candidates. As such it will not only be a textbook, but also a desk reference for those employees responsible for controlling inventories, and thereby assist in reducing cost, improving customer service, and maximizing capacity. Each chapter concludes with a case study and suggested solution. The case studies tell the story of a growing company, Smith Industries, and the related inventory management problems it had to address. The problems addressed relate to the subject matter of the chapter.

Creating Value in Financial Services is a compilation of state-of-the-art views of leading academics and practitioners on how financial service firms can succeed in today's competitive environment. The book is based on two conferences held at New York University: the first, 'Creating Value in Financial Services', held in March 1997, and the second, 'Operations and Productivity in Financial Services', in April 1998. The book is essentially designed to be a compendium of leading edge thinking and practice in the management of financial services firms. There is no book today that has this focus. It contains ideas that can apply to other service industries. Topics addressed are increasingly important worldwide as the financial services industries consolidate and search for innovative new directions and ways to create value in a fiercely competitive environment.

Scheduling is a resource allocation problem which exists in virtually every type of organization. Scheduling problems have produced roughly 40 years of research primarily within the OR community. This community has traditionally emphasized mathematical modeling techniques which seek exact solutions to well formulated optimization problems. While this approach produced important results, many contemporary scheduling problems are particularly difficult. Hence, over the last ten years operations researchers interested in scheduling have turned increasingly to more computer intensive and heuristic approaches. At roughly the same time, researchers in AI began to focus their methods on industrial and management science applications. The result of this confluence of fields has been a period of remarkable growth and excitement in scheduling research. Intelligent Scheduling Systems captures the results of a new wave of research at the forefront of scheduling research, of interest to researchers and practitioners alike. Presented are an array of the latest contemporary tools -- math modeling to tabu search to genetic algorithms -- that can assist in operational scheduling and solve difficult scheduling problems. The book presents the most recent research results from both operations research (OR) and artificial intelligence (AI) focusing their efforts on real scheduling problems.

In the fall of 1992 a conference honoring Elwood S. Buffa was held at the Anderson Graduate School of Management of the University of California, Los Angeles. This book is a collection of the work presented at that conference. The scholars who gathered to honor El are the prominent researchers in the field of Operations Management. Their collective work published in this book represents the richness of the field and provides the reader with valuable insights into its important issues and problems. While any grouping of the articles by these distinguished scholars will be arbitrary, I have organized the book in four sections. In the first section the articles dealing with the strategic issues in Operations Management are compiled. The articles deal with continuous improvement, quality, services, supply chain management, and creating value through operations. The articles that explore the interface of Operations Management with other functional areas, e.g. engineering and marketing, are grouped in the second section. The third section of the book contains articles that attempt to model some important planning problems that arise in the management of production and operations. Some of the papers in this section provide state of the art reviews of selected topic areas. Finally, the fourth section contains articles that deal with future directions for Operations Management. The authors offer several insights into the future evolution of the field. The book begins with the keynote address given by El Buffa at the start of the conference on November 2, 1991.

Group Technology and Cellular Manufacturing (GT/CM) have been widely-researched areas in the past 15 years and much progress has been made in all branches of GT/CM. Resulting from this research activity has been a proliferation of techniques for part-machine grouping, engineering data bases, expert system-based design methods for identifying part families, new analytical and simulation tools for evaluating performance of cells, new types of cell incorporating robotics and flexible automation, team-based approaches for organizing the work force and much more; however, the field lacks a careful compilation of this research and its outcomes. The editors of this book have commissioned leading researchers and implementers to prepare specific treatments of topics for their special areas of expertise in this broad-based philosophy of manufacturing. The editors have sought to be global both in coverage of topic matters and contributors. Group Technology and Cellular Manufacturing addresses the needs and interests of three groups of individuals in the manufacturing field: academic researchers, industry practitioners, and students. (1) The book provides an up-to-date perspective, incorporating the advances made in GT/CM during the past 15 years. As a natural extension to this research, it synthesizes the latest industry practices and outcomes to guide research to greater real-world relevance. (2) The book makes clear the foundations of GT/CM from the core elements of new developments which are aimed at reducing developmental and manufacturing lead times, costs, and at improving business quality and performance. (3) Finally, the book can be used as a textbook for graduate students in engineering and management for studying the field of Group Technology and Cellular Manufacturing.

In today's business environment, reliability and maintenance drastically affect the three key elements of competitiveness - quality, cost, and product lead time. Well-maintained machines hold tolerances better, help reduce scrap and rework, and raise consistency and quality of the part in addition to cutting total production costs. Today, many factories are still performing maintenance on equipment in a reactive manner due to a lack of understanding about machine performance behaviour. To improve production efficiency, computer-aided maintenance and diagnostic methodology must be applied effectively in manufacturing. This book focuses on the fundamental principles of predictive maintenance and diagnostic engineering. In addition to covering the relevant theory, techniques and methodologies in maintenance engineering, the book also provides numerous case studies and examples illustrating the successful application of the principles and techniques outlined.

Scheduling theory is an important branch of operations research. Problems studied within the framework of that theory have numerous applications in various fields of human activity. As an independent discipline scheduling theory appeared in the middle of the fifties, and has attracted the attention of researchers in many countries. In the Soviet Union, research in this direction has been mainly related to production scheduling, especially to the development of automated systems for production control. In 1975 Nauka ("Science") Publishers, Moscow, issued two books providing systematic descriptions of scheduling theory. The first one was the Russian translation of the classical book Theory of Scheduling by American mathematicians R. W. Conway, W. L. Maxwell and L. W. Miller. The other one was the book Introduction to Scheduling Theory by Soviet mathematicians V. S. Tanaev and V. V. Shkurba. These books well complement each other. Both. books well represent major results known by that time, contain an exhaustive bibliography on the subject. Thus, the books, as well as the Russian translation of Computer and Job-Shop Scheduling Theory edited by E. G. Coffman, Jr., (Nauka, 1984) have contributed to the development of scheduling theory in the Soviet Union. Many different models, the large number of new results make it difficult for the researchers who work in related fields to follow the fast development of scheduling theory and to master new methods and approaches quickly.