This book provides an overview of approaches to internationalization as experienced by smaller manufacturing enterprises over a relatively long period of time - the 35-year period from 1974 to 2009. The original research on which this study is based dates back to the mid-1970s, when academic interest in export studies, market entry modes, and internationalization approaches, among others, have their origins. With practical examples of companies from both inside and outside the USA, readers will be able to understand how smaller manufacturing enterprises approach the world of international commerce, how they prepare themselves for it, and what really draws them into the world of international commerce.

This book analyses the development of strategic supply chain modelling and its role in optimising decision-making in business, in relation to advances in technology and increased demand due to globalisation. The authors examine existing supply chain models in order to create a conceptual framework for a new diagnostic tool, offering a useful, realistic and meaningful contribution to the field, both theoretically and practically. Using the real-life context of a major international automobile manufacturer, this study satisfies the demand from industry for guidance in the complex world of strategic supply chain modeling in the growing logistics business sector. Readers of Strategic Supply Chain Management will find this work instructive and informative, and it will be of particular interest to students, researchers and policy-makers in the supply chain management industry.

Root Cause Analysis, or RCA, "What is it?" Everyone uses the term, but everyone does it differently. How can we have any uniformity in our approach, much less accurately compare our results, if we're applying different definitions? At a high level, we will explain the difference between RCA and Shallow Cause Analysis, because that is the difference between allowing a failure to recur or dramatically reducing the risk of recurrence. In this book, we will get down to basics about RCA, the fundamentals of blocking and tackling, and explain the common steps of any investigative occupation. Common investigation steps include: Preserving evidence (data)/not allowing hearsay to fly as fact Organizing an appropriate team/minimizing potential bias Analyzing the events/reconstructing the incident based on actual evidence Communicating findings and recommendations/ensuring effective recommendations are actually developed and implemented Tracking bottom-line results/ensuring that identified, meaningful metrics were attained We explore, "Why don't things always go as planned?" When our actual plans deviate from our intended plans, we usually experience some type of undesirable or unintended outcome. We analyze the anatomy of a failure (undesirable outcome) and provide a step-by-step guide to conducting a comprehensive RCA based on our 3+ decades of applying RCA as we have successfully practiced it in the field. This book is written as a how-to guide to effectively apply the PROACT (R) RCA methodology to any undesirable outcome, is directed at practitioners who have to do the real work, focuses on the core elements of any investigation, and provides a field-proven case as a model for effective application. This book is for anyone charged with having a thorough understanding of why something went wrong, such as those in EH&S, maintenance, reliability, quality, engineering, and operations to name just a few.

Transforming Industrial Policy for the Digital Age argues that digital globalization is inducing deep and productive transformations, making industrial policy necessary in order to reorientate development towards inclusive and more sustainable growth. It demonstrates that industrialization remains an important development process for emerging economies. Featuring contributions by leading scholars, this timely book unpacks the dynamics of 'Industry 4.0', including computer-based algorithms, integration with cloud computing, and the Internet of Things. As existing global value chains take advantage of the new technologies to reorganize production, the contributors explore the implications of new industrial policies, and to what extent they have promoted structural changes that maintain sustainability. This book reflects on the lessons that can be drawn from the history of national industrial policies from across the globe, covering the successes and failures of national policy in promoting industry in response to productive transformations in industrial organization. Insightful and nuanced, this book will benefit scholars of both economics and industrial public policy. International experts and policy-makers will also appreciate this book's critical insight into the transformative shifts in global industrial organization and policies.

This work examines a trade that covered the backs of sailors and soldiers, that shirted labouring men and skirted working women, that employed legions of needlewomen and supplied retailers with new consumer wares. Garments, once bought, returned again to the marketplace, circulating like a currency and bolstering demand. The agents in this trade included military contractors for clothing, female outworkers and dealers in used clothes. Each was affected by a changing demand for new-styled 'luxuries' and necessities in apparel.

First published in 1990. Patterns of Labour explores the interaction between home, paid work, and the individual. It looks at how the social relations of work both shape and are shaped by the context in which they occur. In a detailed examination of the pottery industries of Britain and America over two centuries, Richard Whipp looks at the far-reaching effects of key issues, such as industrialisation and economic transformation. However, he also examines changing notions of gender, the family, community and unionisation. The book centres on the difficulties of organising, controlling and describing work - not least because of the human act of its making.

This book covers the application of algebraic inequalities for reliability improvement and for uncertainty and risk reduction. It equips readers with powerful domain-independent methods for reducing risk based on algebraic inequalities and demonstrates the significant benefits derived from the application for risk and uncertainty reduction. Algebraic inequalities: * Provide a powerful reliability improvement, risk and uncertainty reduction method that transcends engineering and can be applied in various domains of human activity * Present an effective tool for dealing with deep uncertainty related to key reliability-critical parameters of systems and processes * Permit meaningful interpretations which link abstract inequalities with the real world * Offer a tool for determining tight bounds for the variation of risk-critical parameters and complying the design with these bounds to avoid failure * Allow optimising designs and processes by minimising the deviation of critical output parameters from their specified values and maximising their performance This book is primarily for engineering professionals and academic researchers in virtually all existing engineering disciplines.

The years since the global financial crisis have seen something of a renaissance in the manufacturing industry. The United States has launched its Advanced Manufacturing Partnership, and China owes much of its spectacular economic boom in the last decades to its being the 'world's factory'. Is there room for the EU in this landscape? This timely new book explores Europe's role in this evolving environment. It argues that on the one hand, in terms of sheer numbers, the role of the manufacturing industry in the EU is on a par with other major global economies. However, the book also states that Europe falls short of its global competitors (the USA in particular) in terms of its involvement in the most innovative manufacturing sectors. The volume therefore argues that this creates the opportunity for a new European industrial policy. Exploring the development of current EU policy, the book puts forward suggestions as to how the EU can improve in terms of the competitiveness of its technology policy. Placing the EU's position in the context of the industrial structures of the USA, Japan and the BRICs, the book blends theoretical models and practical examples in order to offer a the state of the art look at the current and future direction of Europe's industrial policy. This book will be of relevance to all those with an interest in European economics, industrial economics, public policy, European politics and European studies.

This rich account of potters in a southern Catalan village traces the history of pottery production and marketing and the responses of the potters to changing contexts of consumption. By juxtaposing the local, micro-history of a small group of producers (numbering no more than fifty people) with that of Spain's changing economic and social climate, the author presents a local perspective of producers as affected by and acting upon global developments, ultimately localizing the European transition to one single integrated market economy. Maintaining a dual focus on subject and object, and thereby combining social and material history, this book demonstrates how physical transformations in the pottery resulted from and affected its role in the social relations people formed as they produced, marketed and consumed it. Rob van Veggel obtained his PhD in anthropology from the University of Chicago and has since been applying his insights into material culture in product development research, marketing, brand strategy and governmental policies.

Technical standards play an important role in business as well as everyday life. They provide opportunities for market growth and competition. They enable interoperability. They make customers happier. They bring order out of chaos. Existing technical standards are being updated constantly, and new ones are being produced in increasingly greater numbers.

But do you know what it takes to create an "effective" standard?

The 'Ten Commandments for Effective Standards, ' written by computer chip industry veteran Karen Bartleson and illustrated by corporate cartoonist Rick Jamison, will not only provide you with ideas for creating better standards, it will also provide you with a newfound understanding of standards and their importance, respect for the standardization process, and ways you can leverage others' industry expertise to help you succeed in creating more effective technical standards.

Based upon twenty years of experience in the area of standards for electronic design automation and ideas drawn from other industry experts, the 'The Ten Commandments for Effective Standards' provides you with a list of procedural imperatives about what works and what doesn't work when developing effective technical standards.

This book will teach you how applying Bartleson's commandments to day-to-day standards activities can help make your resulting standards more effective and easier to adopt. From the Golden Rule of effective standards -- "cooperate on standards, compete on products" -- which points to the essence of standardization, to the tenth commandment -- "know that standards have technical and business aspects" -- which declares the importance of a standard's commercial implications, this book will provide you with a foundation for preparing for and performing in the technical standards arena.

Whether you are already involved in the process of creating technical standards or are interested in learning more about it, Bartleson's 'Ten Commandments for Effective Standards' is standard reading for anyone pursuing knowledge, excellence, and success in the field of technical standards.

A solid, rigorous, yet comprehensible analysis of process capability indices, this work bridges the gap between theoretical statisticians and quality control practitioners, showing how an understanding of these indices can lead to process improvement.

The global electronics industry is one of the most innovation-driven and technology-intensive sectors in the contemporary world economy. From semiconductors to end products, complex transnational production and value-generating activities have integrated diverse macro-regions and national economies worldwide into the "interconnected worlds" of global electronics. This book argues that the current era of interconnected worlds started in the early 1990s when electronics production moved from systems dominated by lead firms in the United States, Western Europe, and Japan towards increasingly globalized and cross-macro-regional electronics manufacturing centered in East Asia. By the 2010s, this co-evolution of production network complexity transformed global electronics, through which lead firms from South Korea, Taiwan, and China integrated East Asia into the interconnected worlds of electronics production across the globe. Drawing on literature on the electronics industry, new empirical material comprising custom datasets, and extensive personal interviews, this book examines through a "network" approach the co-evolution of globalized electronics production centered in East Asia across different national economies and sub-national regions. With comprehensive analysis up to 2021, Yeung analyzes the geographical configurations ("where"), organizational strategies ("how"), and causal drivers ("why") of global production networks, setting a definitive benchmark into the dynamic transformations in global electronics and other globalized industries. The book will serve as a crucial resource for academic and policy research, offering a conceptual, empirically driven grounding in the theory of these networks that has become highly influential across the social sciences.

This book addresses the question of how competition takes place in international manufacturing industries. It examines patterns of rivalry among firms from different countries across national boundaries and their influences on international trade and investment. By using various data on Japanese firms in manufacturing industries from the late 1950s through the early 2000s, the first part of this book presents a series of empirical analyses that examines effects of market structure on export pricing, linkages of domestic and foreign market structures on trade performance, and patterns of oligopolistic interactions among firms from different countries in exporting. The second part of this book deals with the impact of strategic interactions on foreign direct investment. In particular, the book examines 'bunching' in foreign direct investment, strategic interactions in intra-industry cross-market foreign direct investment, and their effects on entry patterns and post-entry performance.

First published in 1955, this book offers a detailed history from the past to the mid-20th century on economic control. The book examines economic competition, particularly regarding the British economic system, and Fogarty looks at its scope, as well as its limits. This analysis considers working conditions in the mid-20th century, examining the impacts of industry on the life and work of the British agricultural population. The book first examines production decisions, arguing that a systematic and periodic overhaul of control mechanisms are required. Fogarty goes to give a detailed analysis on decisions about industry objectives. Ultimately, a broader look is given on the wider economic setting, and the definition of the economist is itself examined, taking into account the wider role that economics played in 20th century society.

Divided into three basic sections, this unique resource provides an understandable and implementable approach to inserting Lean in a manufacturing operation, pointing out the stumbling blocks and pitfalls to avoid. Its goal is to to help American manufacturing more effectively go about the task of making Lean a viable process. The significance of the work is that, if followed, it could change the entire course of how Lean Manufacturing is implemented in the United States and help manufacturing, in general, to become more competitive on a world wide scale. The first section addresses the typical difficulties that manufacturing operations in the United States have with the implementation of Lean Manufacturing - pointing to three basic issues which if addressed and resolved, would serve to move the process forward in a much more rapid and effective manner. The second section focuses on how to fully resolve the issues noted and details four levels of Lean Implementation and how they can be measured, in terms of progress. The third section deals with the more advanced aspects of Lean Manufacturing, including such things as how to engage administrative and supporting functions in the process (Accounting, Materials, Sales and Marketing, etc.); How and why to perform a Core Process Analysis (in order to decide which processes should be considered for outsourcing); How to incorporate "Owner-Operators" in the process; the importance of 18 month rolling implementation plan and more. It is sure to be found useful by high level manufacturing executives and leadership at a factory level, as well as students in a Manufacturing and Industrial Engineering curriculum. Provides readers with a clear path to inserting Lean in a manufacturing operation and a step by step approach to getting there. Includes numerous charts, graphs and window diagrams associated with the "how to" - along with specific training, schedules. Offers some unique insight into where Toyota placed a very important focus verses what is typically understood and/or accepted as the general path of implementation it took. Contains a list of important "Key Reflections" at the end of each chapter. Introduction The Basic Flaws and Misconceptions About Lean As a Plant's Equipment Goes, so Goes Lean Accepting the Need for Change Setting the Stage Examining Level One Lean in Closer Detail Putting It All Together and Making It Happen The Search for Greatness

This is an innovative analysis of the agrarian world and growth of government in early modern Germany through the medium of pre-industrial society's most basic material resource, wood. Paul Warde offers a regional study of south-west Germany from the late fifteenth to the early eighteenth century, demonstrating the stability of the economy and social structure through periods of demographic pressure, warfare and epidemic. He casts light on the nature of 'wood shortages' and societal response to environmental challenge, and shows how institutional responses largely based on preventing local conflict were poor at adapting to optimise the management of resources. Warde further argues for the inadequacy of models that oppose the 'market' to a 'natural economy' in understanding economic behaviour. This is a major contribution to debates about the sustainability of peasant society in early modern Europe, and to the growth of ecological approaches to history and historical geography.

First published in 1990, this book provides an overview of the global distribution of the electronics industry and the structural factors which promoted this distribution by the end of the 1980s. Regarded as a 'flagship' sector in both advanced and developing countries, the electronics industry is encouraged by governments everywhere. Covering both the civilian and the military sides of the industry, Professor Todd reflects on the future of civilian electronics in the light of its global segmentation, and hints at the fundamental role of governments in the unfolding of both civilian and defence-electronics developments. He also endorses the overwhelming significance of strategies being played by electronics enterprises in both the USA and Japan.

First published in 1957, this book is a detailed analysis on Christian Democracy, a movement backed by Protestants as well as Catholics, which has become one of the great social forces of Western Europe. It is strong in eight countries. The first half of Fogarty's book sets out what the many Christian-Democratic movements stand for. The second part of the book shows how these movements began, how they have grown, changed, and consolidated, and how they developed into the mid-20th century. This is a broad and useful survey which delves the history, nature and significance of the Christian Democratic movements in Europe. In Fogarty's analysis, Christian Democracy may indeed bring about a renewed unity of the Christian tradition in Western society.

To the surprise of many, regionally embedded clusters of small to medium sized businesses have continued to exist in spite of industrialisation and mass production. While scholars have discovered that the advantages of embeddedness in terms of industrialisation were situated in interfirm cooperation and conflict resolving mechanisms, it is far less clear how changing historical circumstances on the world market, i.e. globalisation, affected such systems. Taking a look inside Leipzig, a capital of the global fur industry between 1870 and 1939 with its numerous highly specialised businesses, both in production as well as trade, World Market Transformation examines the robustness of district firms within the highly volatile international fur business. This book examines how firm embeddedness not only served to overcome challenges related to industrialisation, but also strengthened the abilities of cluster firms to deal with changing world market circumstances. World Market Transformation integrates the "interior-biased" research tradition on local business systems and industrial districts into the "exterior" fields of global and transnational history. It is demonstrated that the local business district not only emerged because of the expansion of international trade, but that district processes of interfirm cooperation also gave shape to the spatial distribution, conventions and structures of the very same world market. The analysis of embedded communities thus offers an important instrument to examine phenomena of economic globalisation, but also how such macro-economic developments have been shaped and actively constructed by local actors.

First published in 1991, this book offers a thorough examination of the decline of heavy industry in industrialised countries in the West, which focuses on problems in the shipbuilding industry. Todd argues that three points are central to its demise: industrial life cycles, the international division of labour and the energy crises of 1973. His work begins with despondency in western shipbuilding, going back as early as 1956, when Japan usurped Britain as the pre-eminent ship producer. The book goes on to explore international trade and industry in the second half of the 20th century, with analysis on industrial reorganisation and East Asian conglomerates, diversification with the marine industries, and shipbuilding in Brazil, India, and China.

This edited book focuses on the organization and meaning of craft work in contemporary society. It considers the relationship between craft and place and how this enables the construction of a meaningful relationship with objects of production and consumption. The book explores the significance of raw materials, the relationship between the body, the crafted object and the mind, and the importance of skill, knowledge and learning in the making process. Through this, it raises important questions about the role of craft in facing future challenges by challenging the logic of globalized production and consumption. The Organization of Craft Work encompasses international analyses from the United States, France, Italy, Australia, Canada, the UK and Japan involving a diverse range of sectors, including brewing, food and wine production, clothing and shoe making, and perfumery. The book will be of interest to students and academic researchers in organization studies, marketing and consumer behaviour, business ethics, entrepreneurship, sociology of work, human resource management, cultural studies, geography, and fashion and design. In addition, the book will be of interest to practitioners and organizations with an interest in the development and promotion of craft work.

Thinking: A Guide to Systems Engineering Problem-Solving focuses upon articulating ways of thinking in today's world of systems and systems engineering. It also explores how the old masters made the advances they made, hundreds of years ago. Taken together, these considerations represent new ways of problem solving and new pathways to answers for modern times. Special areas of interest include types of intelligence, attributes of superior thinkers, systems architecting, corporate standouts, barriers to thinking, and innovative companies and universities. This book provides an overview of more than a dozen ways of thinking, to include: Inductive Thinking, Deductive Thinking, Reductionist Thinking, Out-of-the-Box Thinking, Systems Thinking, Design Thinking, Disruptive Thinking, Lateral Thinking, Critical Thinking, Fast and Slow Thinking, and Breakthrough Thinking. With these thinking skills, the reader is better able to tackle and solve new and varied types of problems. Features Proposes new approaches to problem solving for the systems engineer Compares as well as contrasts various types of Systems Thinking Articulates thinking attributes of the great masters as well as selected modern systems engineers Offers chapter by chapter thinking exercises for consideration and testing Suggests a "top dozen" for today's systems engineers

3D Printing for Product Designers closes the gap between the rhetoric of 3D printing in manufacturing and the reality for product designers. It provides practical strategies to support the adoption and integration of 3D printing into professional practice. 3D printing has evolved over the last decade into a practical proposition for manufacturing, opening up innovative opportunities for product designers. From its foundations in rapid prototyping, additive manufacturing has developed into a range of technologies suitable for end-use products. This book shows you how to evaluate and sensitively understand people, process, and products and demonstrates how solutions for working with additive manufacturing can be developed in context. It includes a practical, step-by-step plan for product designers and CEOs aimed at supporting the successful implementation of 3D printing by stakeholders at all levels of a manufacturing facility, tailored to their stage of technology integration and business readiness. It features a wide range of real-world examples of practice illustrated in full colour, across industries such as healthcare, construction, and film, aligning with the strategic approach outlined in the book. The book can be followed chronologically to guide you to transform your process for a company, to meet the unique needs of a specific client, or to be used as a starting point for the product design entrepreneur. Written by experienced industry professionals and academics, this is a fundamental reference for product designers, industrial designers, design engineers, CEOs, consultants, and makers.