Effective service delivery requires a transition from high-volume, long-run operations to low-volume, short-run output. In conventional terms, inefficiency is inherent in such a shift. The Japanese experience suggests, however, that this convention is in error; success is available if we can only organize operations away from capital toward labor intensiveness with emphasis on multipurpose machinery and multiskilled workers as the foundation. Wholly new devices that accept the inevitability of bottlenecks and focus on managing them are required for managing work flow. A century of mass production has set in place habits and concepts of operations management that are inappropriate to the need. A new vision is needed. This book outlines an operations vision based on proven principles of management and organization science that can guide the way into an emerging service era.

Glenn Bassett looks at a variety of service industries from the perspective of cost and quality management. He argues the basic inevitablitity of suboptimized plant and equipment utilization. The potential for conflict between commodity and noncommodity dimensions of service is examined. Basic methods of cost control and work flow management are described. The varied and sometimes shifting bases of service quality are described in considerable detail, industry by industry where necessary. Methods for selecting and training effective service-providers are reviewed. Reform of government service as metaphor and model for the service revolution is detailed. The focus always is on sound, cost-effective, high-quality service delivery using the best available operations methods. It is sound operations management that will contribute genuine value to tomorroW's service industries. The basics of that discipline are the subject of this book.

Energy efficiency represents a cost-effective and immediate strategy of a sustainable development. Due to substantial environmental and economic implications, a strong emphasis is put on the electrical energy requirements of machine tools for metalworking processes. The improvement of energy efficiency is however confronted with diverse barriers, which sustain an energy efficiency gap of unexploited potential. The deficiencies lie in the lack of information about the actual energy requirements of machine tools, a minimum energy reference to quantify improvement potential and the possible actions to improve the energy demand. Therefore, a comprehensive concept for energy performance management of machine tools is developed which guides the transition towards energy efficient machine tools. It is structured in four innovative concept modules, which are embedded into step-by-step workflow models. The capability of the performance management concept is demonstrated in an automotive manufacturing environment. The target audience primarily comprises researchers and practitioners challenged to enhance energy efficiency in manufacturing. The book may also be beneficial for graduate students who want to specialize in this field.

The competence-based perspective on strategy and management emerged in the 1990s as a new approach to developing strategy and management theory and practice. In the past decade, the focus on organizational competences -- and the resources, capabilities, and processes that create competences -- has provided a highly productive "broad church" for theory development, research, and practice in both strategic and general management.

Authored by a multidisciplinary group of scholars and practitioners working within the competence perspective, the papers in this volume contribute to developing a better theoretical and practical understanding of internal processes that significantly affect an organization's competences by exploring the dynamic, systemic, cognitive, and holistic aspects of internal processes. The papers present both theoretical developments and empirical research based on a variety of case studies and other research in diverse industrial and geographical contexts.

The papers in this volume develop four themes. Part I includes papers that address the key issues of defining and communicating the strategic logic that directs and guides an organization's competence building and leveraging. The papers in Part II investigate the need to develop strategic flexibilities that enable a firm to respond effectively to a range of future environmental uncertainties. Part III includes papers that focus on ways to identify and operationalize an organization's competences -- the ultimate source of an organization's ability to compete effectively in its environment. Part IV presents several papers that investigate the systemic interdependencies of an organization's competencebuilding and leveraging activities.

Optimization in Quality Control presents a broad survey of the state of the art in optimization in quality, and focuses on industrial and national competitiveness. Each chapter has been carefully developed and refereed anonymously by experts in the area of optimization in quality control. Some of the topics covered in this volume include: fundamentals of optimization techniques contemporary approaches to optimization models in process control economic design of control charts determining optimal target values in multiple criteria economic selection models examining quality improvement schemes by trading off between expected warranty servicing costs and increasing manufacturing costs designing optimal inspection plans. This book will serve as an important reference source for academics, professionals and researchers.

This book provides the reader with inside knowledge about the application and workability of the concept of benchmarking in different industrial contexts. It takes a practical approach, including case studies in benchmarking applications from a cross-section of industry and commerce, and promotes state-of-the-art thinking and innovation through the use of benchmarking. It is the key text for senior managers, project teams, trainers and consultants in benchmarking and quality management. Effective Benchmarking features include: 20 case studies from nine different sectors; evidence that benchmarking can help achieve competitive advantage; numerous tips and useful information.

For undergraduate and graduate courses in Logistics. A market-leading text, Contemporary Logistics eplores modern logistics from a managerial perspective. These are characterised by geopolitical tensions in parts of the world, steadily increasing trade, supply chain vulnerabilities caused by severe natural disasters, and an unabated pace of technological advancement. In it, readers see theory come to life through timely, practical, and eciting coverage of logistics fundamentals, and challenges and opportunities for logistics managers in today's dynamic global landscape. This edition provides the most up-to-date insights and perspectives sourced from reviewers, adopters, and other stakeholders.

After the Second World War, the economics of the western capitalist countries were based on a production system called fordism, but in the mid 1970s this system began to break down, and it has been in crisis since. But does resolving this crisis imply a complete break with the past, notably with the principles of Taylor and Ford?;Based on an analysis of the transformations currently taking place in several international companies, this book reveals the complexities and subtleties of today's transitions.

The aim of the book is to present the emerging environmental issues in organization and management of transport logistics. The scope of the book includes set of solutions which show different stakeholders' viewpoints on sustainability. It points out how the transport operations organized and conducted in companies and regions might be consistent with the concept of sustainable development. The scope of the book takes into consideration trade-off relations between actors directly and indirectly involved in transport networks. Therefore, the authors present, in individual chapters, innovative approach to eco-friendly organization and coordination of transport processes, as well as management of transport networks.

Logisticsisan integralpartofoureverydaylife.Todayit in?uencesmorethanevera largenumberofhumanandeconomicactivities. Inthisbook, authorstryto illustrate some advanced logistics and supply chain management topics, recently mentioned by academic and industrial personnel. This book has been organized in 12 chapters such that the reader can study each chapter not only independently as shown in Fig. 1; but also as part of a whole. If someone wants to study the book more deeply, the suggested approach for this study is shown in Fig. 2. So the readers of this book may be divided into at least two groups: (1) students in Master's courses or higher, who can use this book in their courses as a whole, and (2) experts who want to learn more about a new topic in logistics and supply chain management; this group may want to read a chapter about a special topic that is found in this book. In the context of global competition, the more latent topics in logistics supply chain management are fast growing. This book falls within this perspective and presents 12 chapters that well illustrate the variety and complexity of these topics. This book is organized as follows: Chapter 1 introduces logistics and supply chain management and contains some primal de?nitions about these two concepts; some obstacles, prerequisites and infrastructures of modernized logistics and supply chain management and global supply chain management are illustrated.

Suitable either as a reference for practising engineers or as a text for a graduate course in adaptive control systems, this is a self-contained compendium of readily implementable adaptive control algorithms. These algorithms have been developed and applied by the authors for over fifteen years to a wide variety of engineering problems including flexible structure control, blood pressure control, and robotics. As such, they are suitable for a wide variety of multiple input-output control systems with uncertainty and external disturbances. The text is intended to enable anyone with knowledge of basic linear multivariable systems to adapt the algorithms to problems in a wide variety of disciplines. Thus, in addition to developing the theoretical details of the algorithms presented, the text gives considerable emphasis to designing algorithms and to representative applications in flight control, flexible structure control, robotics, and drug-infusion control. This second edition makes good use of MATLAB programs for the illustrative examples; these programs are described in the text and can be obtained from the MathWorks file server.

Multidisciplinary Scheduling: Theory and Applications is a volume of nineteen reviewed papers that were selected from the sixty-seven papers presented during the First Multidisciplinary International Conference of Scheduling (MISTA). This is the initial volume of MISTA the primary forum on interdisciplinary research on scheduling research. Each paper in the volume has been rigorously reviewed and carefully copyedited to ensure its readability.

The MISTA volume focuses on the following leading edge topics: Fundamentals of Scheduling, Multi-Criteria Scheduling, Personnel Scheduling, Scheduling in Space, Scheduling the Internet, Machine Scheduling, Bin Packing, Educational Timetabling, Sports Scheduling, and Transport Scheduling.

In an era of intense knowledge-based globalization and technology-based competition, the central role of networks, alliances and partnerships is now becoming recognized. By looking at the dynamics of these strategic organizational activities, leading authors in the field examine, in this book, how firms align themselves, how they use networks and enter into partnerships in order to develop new or radically improved processes, and how they introduce new or radically improved products to the market. The topic excludes, as the primary interest, spatial effects, such as those found in geographic clusters, or in regional innovation systems. The focus here is instead on the innovation process, and therefore examines framework issues about how we can assess networks of innovators, measurement issues for both researchers and official statisticians, and impact issues for both industry strategists and policy makers.

Using an evolutionary perspective, and drawing on a range of disciplines, Networks, Partnerships and Alliances explores important issues at the conceptual, methodological and comparative levels concerning the construction of comparative advantage.

Although world-class firms like GE and Motorola have relied on Six Sigma to build their performance cultures, these processes are all too often left out of human resources (HR) functions. This lack of Six Sigma principles is even more surprising because preventing errors and improving productivity are so critical to the people management processes of hiring, retention, appraisal, and development.From the history and evolution of the Total Quality movement to initiatives for introducing a Six Sigma continuous process improvement strategy in your HR department, Achieving HR Excellence through Six Sigma introduces a new way to envision your role within the organization. It explains how this powerful methodology works and supplies a roadmap to help you find and eliminate waste in your HR processes.Describing exactly what HR excellence means, the book outlines dozens of proven approaches as well as a hierarchy of the exact steps required to achieve it. It illustrates the Six Sigma methodology from the creation of a project to its successful completion. At each stage, it describes the specific tools currently available and provides examples of organizations that have used Six Sigma within HR to improve their organizations.The text presents proven approaches that can help you solve and even eliminate people management problems altogether. Filled with real-world examples, it demonstrates how to implement six sigma into the transformational side of your organization. It also includes a listing of additional resources to help you along your Six Sigma journey.Explaining how to build a new business model for your HR organization, the book supplies the new perspective and broad view you will need to discover and recommend game-changing alternatives to traditional HR approaches in your organization.

Adapting the development of information systems for operations management is essential for the effectiveness of an organization s business strategy. Optimizing, Innovating, and Capitalizing on Information Systems for Operations presents research on the applications of information systems and its influence on business and operations management. Highlighting case studies, frameworks and methodologies, this book aims to be useful for practitioners and academics in the fields of decision, management, and social sciences.

Projects are risky undertakings, and modern approaches to managing projects recognise the central need to manage the risk as an integral part of the project management discipline. Managing Risk in Projects places risk management in its proper context in the world of project management and beyond, and emphasises the central concepts that are essential in order to understand why and how risk management should be implemented on all projects of all types and sizes, in all industries and in all countries. The generic approach detailed by David Hillson is consistent with current international best practice and guidelines (including 'A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge' (PMBoK) and the 'Project Risk Management Practice Standard' from PMI, the 'APM Body of Knowledge' and 'Project Risk Analysis & Management (PRAM) Guide' from APM, 'Management of Risk: Guidance for Practitioners' from OGC, and the forthcoming risk standard from ISO) but David also introduces key developments in the risk management field, ensuring readers are aware of recent thinking, focusing on their relevance to practical application. Throughout, the goal is to offer a concise description of current best practice in project risk management whilst introducing the latest relevant developments, to enable project managers, project sponsors and others responsible for managing risk in projects to do just that - effectively.

Project management as a discipline has experienced near-exponential growth in its application across the business and not-for-profit sectors. This original, authoritative guide provides both practitioner and student researchers with a complete guide to research practice on project management. In Designs, Methods and Practices for Research of Project Management, Beverly Pasian has brought together original chapters from a veritable who's who of project management research including authors such as Harvey Maylor, Christophe Bredillet, Derek Walker, Miles Shepherd, Janice Thomas, Naomi Brookes and Darren Dalcher. The collection looks at research strategy, management, methodology, techniques as well as emerging topics such as social network analysis. The 38 chapters offer an international perspective with examples from a wide range of project management applications; engineering, construction, mega-projects, high-risk environments and social transformation. Each chapter includes tips and exercises for the research student, as well as a complete set of further references.

Steel is the foundational material of modern civilization and constitutes the core of industry, and yet, it is overproduced across the world. This supply glut is reducing margins and turning steel into a sunset industry. Steel consumes as much as four times the amount of raw materials as its produced volume, and the sheer bulk of the steel makes it costly to transport. Because of this, countries prefer to make their own rather than to source it across land and sea. The Indian steel industry has grown from being the tenth largest steel producer in the world in 1991 to emerging as the second largest, after China. This book aims to reveal, through data and the use of simple economic concepts, the mistakes that abound in the discourses surrounding the steel industry. Its main objective is to dispel the many myths that are perpetuated by policy makers and the industry in order to benefit a small coterie of large firms, and discusses how through such favours the Indian steel industry is set to lose out in terms of margins, products and growth in technology. It covers the unique role of the Indian state in the development of the broad base of steel production, and observes the change in the direction in policy, which reverses the economic equality of the past and promotes collusion among oligopolies leading to overexpansion in capacities. Economics of the Indian Steel Industry will be of interest to students of industrial economics and corporate strategy, as well as financial managers and policy makers.

Environmentally Improved Production Processes and Products introduces students at institutes of higher education, company management, civil servants, professional designers and process engineers to the field of environmentally oriented product and process improvement. The book deals with improvements that are integrated into processes and products. It differs from other books currently available in that it covers both production and products. It is also different because both social/economic and technical aspects of the improvement of products and production processes are dealt with, rather than the more usual focus either on technical or on social and/or economic aspects. Another characteristic is the wide range of production processes and products covered, ranging from bakeries to olive growing, from nuclear power plants to glues, from office chairs to breweries, and from television sets to steel plants. Geographical coverage ranges from Sweden to China and from India to Italy and the USA.

How Can Reliability Analysis Impact Your Company's Bottom Line? While reliability investigations can be expensive, they can also add value to a product that far exceeds its cost. Affordable Reliability Engineering: Life-Cycle Cost Analysis for Sustainability & Logistical Support shows readers how to achieve the best cost for design development testing and evaluation and compare options for minimizing costs while keeping reliability above specifications. The text is based on the premise that all system sustainment costs result from part failure. It examines part failure in the design and sustainment of fielded parts and outlines a design criticality analysis procedure that reflects system design and sustainment. Achieve the Best Cost for Life-Cycle Sustainment Providing a framework for managers and engineers to develop and implement a reliability program for their organizations, the authors present the practicing professional with the tools needed to manage a system at a high reliability at the best cost. They introduce analytical methods that provide the methodology for integrating part reliability, failure, maintainability, and logistic math models. In addition, they include examples on how to run reliability simulations, highlight tools that are commercially available for such analysis, and explain the process required to ensure a design will meet specifications and minimize costs in the process. This text: Demonstrates how to use information gathered from reliability investigations Provides engineers and managers with an understanding of a reliability engineering program so that they can perform reliability analyses Seeks to resolve uncertainty and establish the value of reliability engineering Affordable Reliability Engineering: Life-Cycle Cost Analysis for Sustainability & Logistical Support focuses on reliability-centered maintenance and is an ideal resource for reliability engineers and managers. This text enables reliability professionals to determine the lowest life-cycle costs for part selection, design configuration options, and the implementation of maintenance practices, as well as spare parts strategies, and logistical resources.

"Examining reliability, availability, and risk analysis and reviewing in probability and statistics essential to understanding reliability methods, this outstanding volume describes day-to-day techniques used by practicing engineers -- discussing important reliability aspects of both components and complex systems. "

Carbon footprint is one of the important environmental impacts, which has received greater attention from the public, government and media. It is one of the important topics of even any government's agenda as well and every nation is trying its best to reduce its carbon footprint to the maximum possible extent. Every company would like to reduce the carbon footprint of its products and consumers are looking for the products which emit lower carbon emissions in their entire life cycle. Assessment of Carbon footprint for different products, processes and services and also carbon labelling of products have become familiar topics in the recent past in various industrial sectors. Every industry has its unique assessment and modelling techniques, allocation procedures, mitigation methods and labelling strategies for its carbon emissions. With this background, this book has been framed with dedicated chapters on carbon footprint assessment on various industrial sectors. In each chapter, details pertaining to the assessment methodologies of carbon footprint followed in a particular industry, challenges in calculating the carbon footprint, case studies of various products in that particular industry, mitigation measures to be followed to trim down the carbon footprint, recommendations for further research are discussed in detail. This first volume includes the carbon footprint assessment methodology of agricultural sector, telecommunication sector, food sector, ceramic industry, packaging industry, building and construction sector and solid waste sector.

The book covers both theory and applications of locational analysis (LocAn). The reader will see the power of LocAn models in various real-world contexts varying from communication design, robotics, mail delivery, etc. As such it is a valuable source for practitioners, lecturers and students. The book is divided into two parts: The first part contains chapters in which an overview of some of the LocAn methodologies is given. The second part describes in more detail some selected applications. The book is well-suited as source for a graduate course, but also for students, lecturers and practitioners who want to learn about LocAn through self-study. It gives researchers a state of the art review of available location models.

Optimization is a serious issue, touching many aspects of our life and activity. But it has not yet been completely absorbed in our culture. In this book the authors point out how relatively young even the word "model" is. On top of that, the concept is rather elusive. How to deal with a technology that ?nds applicationsinthingsasdi?erentaslogistics,robotics,circuitlayout,?nancial deals and tra?c control? Although, during the last decades, we made signi?cant progress, the broad public remained largely unaware of that. The days of John von Neumann, with his vast halls full of people frantically working mechanical calculators are long gone. Things that looked completely impossible in my youth, like solving mixed integer problems are routine by now. All that was not just achieved by ever faster and cheaper computers, but also by serious progress in mathematics. But even in a world that more and more understands that it cannot a?ord to waste resources, optimization remains to a large extent unknown. R It is quite logical and also fortunate that SAP , the leading supplier of enterprise management systems has embedded an optimizer in his software. The authors have very carefully investigated the capabilities and the limits of APO. Remember that optimization is still a work in progress. We do not have the tool that does everything for everybody.

Low-volume high-variety products like personalized cars or customized engines will be the key issues for manufacturing in the 21st century. The necessary control technology is based on the concept of holons, which are the units of production and behave as autonomous and cooperative agents, providing flexibility, adaptability, agility, and dynamic reconfigurability. This book presents the latest research results in agent-based manufacturing as carried out by researchers in academia and industry within the international "Holonic Manufacturing Systems" project. As this project was driven by industry, the results presented here are of vital interest not just to researchers in agent technologies or distributed artificial intelligence, but also to engineers and professionals in industry who have to respond to rapid changes and new demands in production.