This book presents a collection of real cases from industrial practices that production system and quality managers implement to ensure a high quality as well as a low cost in products. This book is divided in sections that are focused on: * The quality and philosophies implemented to production systems; starting from the product design as well as from the supply system. * The principal statistical techniques applied to the quality assurance (statistical quality control, analysis of tests and failure, quality function deployment, accelerated life tests, among others), the process of gathering information, its validation, its reliability process, and techniques for data analysis. * The techniques applied to the integration of human resources in the process of quality assurance, such as managers and operators' participation, training, and training processes. * Use of information and communications technologies, software, and programs implemented to guarantee the quality of the products in the production systems. ISO standards and policies that are used for quality management and monitoring.

The missing manual on how to apply Lean Startup to build products that customers love The Lean Product Playbook is a practical guide to building products that customers love. Whether you work at a startup or a large, established company, we all know that building great products is hard. Most new products fail. This book helps improve your chances of building successful products through clear, step-by-step guidance and advice. The Lean Startup movement has contributed new and valuable ideas about product development and has generated lots of excitement. However, many companies have yet to successfully adopt Lean thinking. Despite their enthusiasm and familiarity with the high-level concepts, many teams run into challenges trying to adopt Lean because they feel like they lack specific guidance on what exactly they should be doing. If you are interested in Lean Startup principles and want to apply them to develop winning products, this book is for you. This book describes the Lean Product Process: a repeatable, easy-to-follow methodology for iterating your way to product-market fit. It walks you through how to: * Determine your target customers * Identify underserved customer needs * Create a winning product strategy * Decide on your Minimum Viable Product (MVP) * Design your MVP prototype * Test your MVP with customers * Iterate rapidly to achieve product-market fit This book was written by entrepreneur and Lean product expert Dan Olsen whose experience spans product management, UX design, coding, analytics, and marketing across a variety of products. As a hands-on consultant, he refined and applied the advice in this book as he helped many companies improve their product process and build great products. His clients include Facebook, Box, Hightail, Epocrates, and Medallia. Entrepreneurs, executives, product managers, designers, developers, marketers, analysts and anyone who is passionate about building great products will find The Lean Product Playbook an indispensable, hands-on resource.

This impactful volume demonstrates the application and power of psychology and behavioural economics in the pursuit of quality and continuous improvement. It focusses on how the works of stalwarts such as Daniel Kahneman, Richard Thaler, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and many others can be used to build an organization that is known for quality products and flawless service delivery. The application of psychology and behavioural economics is still new to quality improvement, and in this book, Debashis Sarkar shares 25 lessons, featuring specific examples based on real life, that show how their application can increase the effectiveness of outcomes. Behavioural Science for Quality and Continuous Improvement: 25 Lessons from Psychology and Behavioural Economics is ideal for business improvement professionals of all hierarchies and across different functional areas and industries seeking to understand the potential of psychology and behavioural economics and their applications, as well as in training and executive development programmes and for scholars of operations management, quality management, and engineering.

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.

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.

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.

Unique selling point: * Based on years of personal leadership and mentoring experience Core audience: * Emergency workers and business leaders are the primary market. Place in the market: * Will help people to navigate personal leadership issues in the post-COVID world

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.

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.

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.

"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. "

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.

In many businesses brands account for the majority of shareholder value. It is crucial to understand how the economy of brands works and can be exploited to create sustainable value. The purpose of this book is to develop and enhance the understanding of the brand as an economic asset, to make better business and investment decisions.

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.

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.

The principal aim of this book is to help practising managers to develop and implement a strategy for the introduction of Total Quality Management (TQM) within their own organizations. "TQM in Action" prvides a practical guide to the stages, key considerations and potential pitfalls of implementation. The book provides a template for implementation which should help managers get started and keep the process going. The authors recognize that the main difficulty encountered by managers in introducing TQM is changing "organization culture". The planning process outlined for TQM is therefore based on an examination of the prevailing culture. This allows individual organizations to tailor the installation process to their own needs rather than imposing a theoretical framework which may or may not fit.

There are as many views on audits and auditing auditing as there are people who have ever thought about the subject and the process. Any author writing about it is faced with some common problems, such as how to make a description of a technical process anything less than dry to read. How to deal with the general belief that anyone can conduct an audit without any specific training or experience. Auditing is often viewed as a waste of time, money and resources with little, if any, real value to an organization. It is seen as something of a judgemental process. People see themselves as being under scrutiny and examination and as very few of us enjoy such a process, audits are not generally welcomed at first. I cannot claim to have found solutions to these problems or to have come up with an easy five-minute way of understand ing the detailed points that make up this whole subject. As with any form of technical textbook, this work must not be viewed as a volume to be read in one sitting from cover to cover but used to dip into as and when required. Thankfully the practice of auditing, in real life has compensa tions for those involved. Those being audited, the auditees, if sensible, will be able to learn from what is hoped will be an objective and skilled overview of the areas and subjects being audited."

It is widely believed that energy efficiency improvement is one of the most interesting options to limit the emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. But, it also has become clear that it is not easy to stimulate companies to adopt measures in this area. Therefore, a main question is: how can governments implement effective policies to stimulate energy-efficiency improvement? The Netherlands and some neighbouring countries in Europe have implemented a variety of policy instruments since 1990. These include investment subsidies, voluntary agreements on energy-efficiency, direct regulation and taxes. How effective are these measures? This book presents improved theoretical insight in the investment behaviour of firms, and moreover it provides a wealth of empirical results on the effectiveness of policy instruments.

The competitive environment is becoming increasingly more complex and intense. In order to cope, business decisions related to various areas have to become more interrelated. Firms need to couple their operations strategies to the marketing strategies to best support the competition of their products in the marketplace. The perspectives on production management systems are getting more strategic. A more integrated approach is thus called for, bringing together the various perspectives on production management systems and operations strategy. This relationship is important in any type of operation, perhaps more so in supply chains, production networks and global operations.

This book brings together some of the latest thinking by leading experts from around the world on integrating systems and strategies in production management and related issues that are relevant for making production into a competitive resource for the firm. This book is composed of five parts, each focused on a specific theme:

• Linking systems and strategies
• Strategic operations management
• IS/IT applications in the value chain
• Modelling and simulation
• Improving operations

Each of the chapters in this book have been peer reviewed and presented by the authors at the International Conference on Advances in Production Management Systems a" APMS 2007, held in LinkAping, Sweden on 17-19 September 2007.

Advances in Production Management Systems is essential reading for managers in manufacturing and service industries, systems analysts, IT specialist and systems engineers, and post-graduate studentsof manufacturing, business and IT-related fields.

Jan Olhager and Fredrik Persson are based at LinkAping University, Sweden.

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.

The goal of Just-in-Time (JIT) manufacturing is to strengthen a company's competitiveness in the market place through a series of dedicated, concerted and continuous efforts aimed at eliminating waste of all kinds within the company. JIT manufacturing works on the principle that the necessary products are only produced in the necessary quantities at the necessary times. While this JIT production principle sounds simple, to implement it in practice is by no means a simple task.

The leading academic authorities contributing to this book have been involved in major studies carried out for international organisations, individual governments, and national trades' union organisations; in Vulnerable Workers they consider the growth of job insecurity, the prevalence of flexible or temporary work, and the emergence of precarious forms of self-employment. They look at the new market economies of post-communist Eastern Europe and China, where economic development may occur at the expense of workers' lives and health; 'misclassification' by employers of workers as 'contractors', denying them access to rights; and the plight of migrant, transient and 'invisible' workers. The impact of supply chain business strategies on the most vulnerable workers; and on the complex relationships between levels of job security and the presence of different kinds of risks are similarly assessed. The contributors also propose responses to the challenges they highlight. The role of employee representatives is examined, together with the potential to enhance worker capability through organisational change. New legislative approaches, and changes to traditional compensation and social security systems are considered. Academics and researchers, policy makers, regulators, trades unionists and occupational health professionals - and wise employers - will all find a use for this book.

This volume describes how frontier efficiency methodologies such as Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and other techniques such as multi-criteria decision makingcan help service industries to improve their performance by providing a ranking of best-practice efficient service units and by identifying sources of inefficiency for each service unit. It explains how they can be used to determine potential improvement targets for each of the inefficient service units, to identify peers for each service organization and to provide a basis for continuous performance improvement. Presenting applications in a variety of industries, this book will be useful for the service management to improve service productivity, profitability, sustainability and quality and effectiveness of service deliveries. A free trial version of the World s leading Data Envelopment Analysis Software (PIM-DEA) is available for readers of this book. "