Operations management is a set of disciplines that transform raw materials, labor and capital into finished goods and services. These various disciplines are discussed for an intended audience of executives and operations managers who desire to be updated on the current curriculum in business schools. The book emphasizes why Japan has ascended to its dominant position in global commerce largely at the expense of U.S. manufacturers. The intent is to learn lessons from Japanese achievements that can be applied to make U.S. manufacturers more competitive in the global market. Trends in operations management are augmented with new software tools (Evolver and RISKOptimizer) which can solve previously unsolvable problems in scheduling and other operational matters.

Additional material provides a fuller discussion on certain key managerial issues and problem solving. This readable and informative book examines the various disciplines that managers must integrate into their jobs and key workplace practices that enhance a company's competitiveness in the global marketplace.

Der Sammelband vereinigt Beitrage von uber 50 Autorinnen und Autoren aus Wirtschaftswissenschaft, Informatik und Mathematik zu aktuellen und grund--legenden Problemen und Losungsansatzen der intelligenten Entscheidungs--unterstutzung in Unternehmen und erscheint zum 65. Geburtstag von Hermann Gehring, Professor fur Wirtschaftsinformatik an der FernUniversitat in Hagen.

This is the Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Management Science and Engineering Management (ICMSEM) held from July 25 to 27, 2014 at Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal and organized by International Society of Management Science and Engineering Management (ISMSEM), Sichuan University (Chengdu, China) and Universidade Nova de Lisboa (Lisbon, Portugal). The goals of the conference are to foster international research collaborations in Management Science and Engineering Management as well as to provide a forum to present current findings. A total number of 138 papers from 14 countries are selected for the proceedings by the conference scientific committee through rigorous referee review. The selected papers in the second volume are focused on Computing and Engineering Management covering areas of Computing Methodology, Project Management, Industrial Engineering and Information Technology.

This book explores, in a systematic way, both conventional and unconventional material shaping processes with various modes of hybridization in relation to theory, modelling and industrial potential. The demand for high productivity and high accuracy in manufacturing is continuously increasing, based on improvement and optimization strategies. Hybridization of manufacturing processes will play a crucial role and will be of a key importance in achieving environmental and economical sustainability. Structured in three parts, Hybrid Manufacturing Processes summarizes the state-of-the art hybrid manufacturing processes based on available literature sources and production reports. The book begins by providing information on the physical fundamentals of the removal and non-removal processes in macro-, micro and nanoscales. It then follows with an overview of the possible ways of hybridization and the effects on the enhancement of process performance, before concluding with a summary of production outputs related to surface integrity, specifically with respect to difficult-to-machine materials. Considering the applications of different sources of hybridization including mechanical, thermal and chemical interactions or their combinations, this book will be of interest to a range of researchers and practicing engineers within the field of manufacturing.

First textbook in the literature to treat sustainability as a powerful concept to create optimal workplace experiences FM is a growth area and this book pushes the boundaries to teach sustainability in a new way Most other textbooks dedicated to this topic focus on describing specific best practices or case studies, that is simply not enough to take the next step in truly integrating sustainability in the facility management industry. This book seeks to do that.

Hardbound. This is the fifth volume in the series Advances in the Management of Organizational Quality. Like the previous four volumes, it is designed to highlight quality-related issues and to facilitate bringing quality into the mainstream of organizational effectiveness. The current volume spans a broad range of topics from an investigation of how customers make quality-related judgments to quality practices in health care. As with previous volumes, this volume also attempts to broaden the concept of quality.

Improving the quality of products and manufacturing processes at low cost is an economic and technological challenge to industrial engineers and managers alike. In today's business world, the implementation of experimental design techniques often falls short of the mark due to a lack of statistical knowledge on the part of engineers and managers in their analyses of manufacturing process quality problems. This timely book aims to fill this gap in the statistical knowledge required by engineers to solve manufacturing quality problems by using Taguchi experimental design methodology. The book increases awareness of strategic methodology through real-life case studies, providing valuable information for both academics and professionals with no prior knowledge of the theory of probability and statistics. Experimental Quality: Provides a unique framework to help engineers and managers address quality problems and use strategic design methodology. Offers detailed case studies illustrating the implementation of experimental design theory. Is easily accessible without prior knowledge or understanding of probability and statistics. This book provides an excellent resource for both academic and industrial environments, and will prove invaluable to practising industrial engineers, quality engineers and engineering managers from all disciplines.

Choosing the right location for a business can assure its success, and avoid costly problems. Location, Location, Location examines this foundational aspect of business profitability, and outlines the principles and procedures necessary to identify an optimal site. This practical book offers advice on how to invest wisely on real estate to minimize risks, and maximize returns. This concise guide by Marcel De Meirleir, a leading site consultant with over fifty years of professional practice, explains how to measure the positive and negative attributes of a site. Its useful and accessible format includes anecdotes, cases studies, and tools for evaluating and selecting sites for different kinds of facilities like headquarters, warehouses, call centers, among others. Other topics in Location, Location, Location include: Analysis of critical and intangible factors Taxes and tax incentives Industrial location and ecology Location feasibility studies The BERI rating Infrastructure Costs analysis, and much more! Location, Location, Location is an authoritative and valuable resource for business owners, decision makers, and consultants who wish to find, expand, or relocate their facilities. This comprehensive volume also provides strategies for regional government officials seeking to attract investments in their area.

Purchasers of manufactured goods demand assurance that the purchased product will perform satisfactorily over its expected life. Warranties play a vitally important role in providing this assurance, in two ways. Firstly, warranty terms can provide a promise of protection in the event of a product failure. Secondly, effective warranty service can assure customer satisfaction in the event of a warranty claim. Successful use of both of these requires proper warranty management.

The authors of Warranty Management and Product Manufacture have developed "Stage-3" warranty management, that views warranties from a strategic perspective, beginning with a warranty strategy that is linked to technical and commercial planning from the very start of the product development process.

The aim of warranty management is to achieve the overall business objectives by focussing on both product performance assurance as well as ensuring customer satisfaction, the ultimate goal of warranty management. Warranty Management and Product Manufacture provides guidelines for achieving this goal.

Written by two of the worlda (TM)s leading experts in warranty management, this monograph details the most up-to-date thinking in this key area of product manufacture. It will be an invaluable guide for managers in product development, production and marketing as well as graduate students in business and operations management and industrial engineering.

These proceedings contain research papers presented at the 5th International Conference on Dynamics in Logistics, held in Bremen, Germany, February 2016. The conference is concerned with dynamic aspects of logistic processes and networks. The spectrum of topics reaches from modeling, planning and control of processes over supply chain management and maritime logistics to innovative technologies and robotic applications for cyber-physical production and logistic systems. The growing dynamic confronts the area of logistics with completely new challenges: it must become possible to describe, identify and analyze the process changes. Moreover, logistic processes and networks must be redevised to be rapidly and flexibly adaptable to continuously changing conditions. The book primarily addresses researchers and practitioners from the field of industrial engineering and logistics, but it may also be beneficial for graduate students.

The only pocket guide to the UK building regulations on the market Succinct, portable, reliable guide to UK Building regulations Essential for anyone involved in building works or renovations in the UK

Decision making at the enterprise level often encompass not only production operations and product R&D, but other strategic functions such as financial planning and marketing. With the aim of maximizing growth and a firm's value, companies often focus on co-ordinating these functional components as well as traditional hierarchical decision levels. Understanding this interplay can enhance enterprise capabilities of adaptation and response to uncertainties arising from internal processes as well as the external environment. This book presents concepts, methods, tools and solutions based on mathematical programming, which provides the quantitative support needed for integrated decision-making and ultimately for improving the allocation of overall corporate resources (e.g., materials, cash and personnel). Through a systems perspective, the integrated planning of the supply chain also promotes activities of reuse, reduction and recycling for achieving more sustainable environmental impacts of production/distribution networks. Thus, this book presents, for the first time, a unique integrated vision of the Enterprise Supply Chain Planning and provides a comprehensive account of the state of the art models, methods and tools available to address the above mentioned features of the modern supply chain. It offers a comprehensive review of the associated literature of supply chain management and then systematically builds on this knowledge base to develop the mathematical models representing each of the core functional units and decision levels of the corporation and shows how they can be integrated into a holistic decision problem formulation. Abundant illustrations and tables help maximize reader insights into the problems discussed with several case studies and industry application also examined. This book is intended as a textbook for academics (PhD, MSc), researchers and industry decision-makers, who are involved in the design, retrofit and evaluation of alternative scenarios for the improvement of the supply chain.

Poor quality of data and information can have a harmful impact on decision-making and therefore on the overall effectiveness of an enterprise. Incorrect and misleading information associated with an enterprise's production and service provision jeopardize both customer relationships and customer satisfaction, and ultimately have a negative effect on revenue. ""Challenges of Managing Information Quality in Service Organizations"" presents cases and applications of information quality in various industrial service sectors, and presents twelve chapters organized into four sections: information quality application in healthcare industry, information quality application in banking, real estate and postal industries, information quality application for database management services, and information quality application for research and development. ""Challenges of Managing Information Quality in Service Organizations"" provides insight and support for academic professionals as well as for practitioners concerned with the management of information.

The young investigator with an idea has to negotiate many institutional, federal, and industrial challenges in order to get a product to market. Nowhere is described the steps in the development of new drugs, diagnos tics, or devices; the person with an idea has nowhere to turn for information and details. The young investigator may understand the elements of basic and clinical research, but ordinarily has no insight into novel ways of finding research funding or how to explore to find the funding opportunities that are available. The young investigator has little knowledge of the mecha nisms to bring an idea through the developmental phases to the market. There are other players in this complex endeavor with whom he or she has no contact, including those from industry, the Food and Drug Administration, and the legal community. Exposure to the philosophy of product develop ment and to procedural information would be useful to the scientific com munity, as would contact with those who have successfully taken an idea to a finished product. A first attempt to do this was the symposium on Idea to Product: The Process, sponsored by Serono Symposia USA and held No vember 17 to 20, 1994, in Washington, D.C. This book comprises the pro ceedings of that meeting. The editors are indebted to the many contributors to this volume, and we are especially grateful to Serono Symposia USA and to Leslie Nies and her staff for their expertise in organizing the symposium."

This study fills a gap in standardization literature. It is the first academic analysis of national standardization organizations. These organizations exist in every country and may be private or governmental organizations. The first national standardization th organizations were founded in the early decades of the 20 century and were aimed at rationalizing industrial production. Their mode of operation reflects the sense of co operation at the national level and - in the telecommunications and electrotechnical field - at the intemationallevel as well. Now, however, the scene has changed, with companies operating internationally. Standards for products, processes, and services are crucial factors in determining success or failure on a fiercely competitive market, especially when functional compatibility is a prerequisite, as is the case in computer and telecommunications technologies. As a consequence, rather homogeneous needs of participants in standardization have given way to conflicting interests. This prompts a discussion about the traditional role of national standardization organizations. They increasingly depend on their exclusive links to the international standardization organizations ISO and IEC, and, in the case of Europe, the regional organizations CEN and CENELEC. In many cases, formal standardization organizations are not the obvious bodies for developing standards to meet business needs. Is this inevitable or could they improve performance and regain their market share? Henk de Vries answers this question against the background of current developments in standardization at the international, European, and national levels."

In this monograph, the authors demonstrate how the integration of adaptability, operability, and re-configurability in the design of complex systems is indispensable for the further digitization of engineering systems in smart manufacturing. Globalization of the customer base has resulted in distributed and networked manufacturing systems. However, current design methods are not suitable to address variations in product design, changes in production scale, or variations in product quality necessitated by dynamic changes in the market. Adaptability, operability, and re-configurability are key characteristics that are necessary to address the limitations of the current methods used to design networked manufacturing systems. In recent years, the digital transformation driving Industry 4.0 has had an enormous impact on globally distributed manufacturing. Digitalisation, the integration of digital technology into networked engineered systems, is increasingly being adopted to respond to changes in the market. This is achieved by means of (a) the concurrent design of adaptable systems, (b) addressing flexibility in design parameters, (c) conducting an operability analysis, and (d) employing a reconfiguration strategy to address faults and variances in product quality and re-establish connectivity among the elements in the system. The design of manufacturing systems in the age of Industry 4.0 is addressed in this monograph. The authors introduce the concept of a 'smart platform' and a computational framework for the digitalization of networked manufacturing systems. They also suggest how the framework and techniques in this monograph are applicable beyond the manufacturing domain for architecting networked engineered systems in other industries such as chemical processes and health care, that are being transformed through the adoption of the Industry 4.0 construct.

Implementing ISO 9001:2015 - A practical guide to busting myths surrounding quality management systemsIn his new book, Andrew W Nichols debunks many of the common misconceptions about ISO 9001:2015 and describes the many advantages the standard brings. Drawing on more than 30 years of hands-on experience, he gives clear, practical and up-to-date advice on how to implement a QMS (Quality Management System) to maximum effect. In September 2015, the much-anticipated sixth version of ISO 9001 was published, and, with it, several myths were given life. Implementations of QMSs, based on the requirements of ISO 9001, have been plagued by misunderstood and misinterpreted requirements, from the earliest version back in 1987. New myths have arrived with the publication of the ISO 9001:2015 edition. This book exposes many of the myths and enables a better understanding of ISO 9001:2015 by those who seek to create, implement, and improve an effective QMS for their organizationThousands of organizations worldwide are reaping the benefits from adopting the ISO 9001:2015, and implementing an effective QMS, and this book will provide you with the tools to do the same! Full of real-life examples, this book enables you to read and successfully interpret the ISO 9001:2015 documentation

This book guides process-industry professionals from the implementation of the basic foundations of Continuous Improvement (CI) through to an organization where CI is a "way of life" and a defining feature of the culture of the organization. The readers of this book are seeking solutions to such pressing issues as: * Eliminating accidents and near misses. * Reducing customer complaints. * Improving customer delivery performance. * Elimination of accidents and near misses. * Reducing customer complaints. * Improving customer delivery performance. * Introducing new products. * Improving staff productivity. * Removing costs to meet the budget. * Dealing with absence and poor morale. * Improving staff retention. This book provides them with guidance on how to address issues in these areas in a way that enables improvements to be realized quickly but not at the expense of a long-term goal of a sustainable Continuous Improvement culture. In addition, this book presents the implementation of CI as a cyclical journey with no endpoint. The stages are ordered in a sequence that enables the reader to get started in their area of the company and build up the elements without the need for an overall organizational strategy at the beginning. Continuous Improvement is a vast subject with many takes on principles, approaches, and tools. This book is about how all the fundamentals of these areas fit together and, as such, covers only some of them. However, within the bibliography, I have signposted the books that have guided me during my career and which go into the principles, approaches, and tools further.

This work develops a quantitative structured methodology for managing the development of new products for highly competitive markets. Particular attention has been given to integrating a number of experimental tools and concepts within a common framework including marketing research. Taguchi methods, value benchmarking, value engineering, total quality management, activity based costing, concurrent engineering, statistical quality control, systems engineering, and organization are often treated today as related but separate tools and concepts. The reader should gain an understanding of how these tools complement each other and when they can be used most effectively to aid product decision making.

For many years production management has no longer been confined to individual production facilities. Intensive cooperation with suppliers has become an integral part of production management. In recent years two further developments have gained ground. On the one hand enterprises have been specialising and concentrating on their core competencies with outsourcing as a consequence, on the other hand globalization has intensified the range of choice among suppliers. Increased dependence on suppliers called for new forms of cooperative ventures. Strategic and legal issues had to be considered and production management had to include sophisticated logistic chain management. These developments have led to the concept of Extended Enterprise'. Among many other topics, this book discusses: co-operation between companies; supply chain management; agile and virtual management; integration of the logistic chain; and production and logistical strategies. The book comprises the proceedings of the Working Conference on Organizing the Extended Enterprise, sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP), which was held in Ascona, Switzerland in September 1997. It will be of great importance to researchers, managers and consultants in production, logistics and information and other areas of organizational development.

Scheduling and multicriteria optimisation theory have been subject, separately, to numerous studies. Since the last twenty years, multicriteria scheduling problems have been subject to a growing interest. However, a gap between multicriteria scheduling approaches and multicriteria optimisation field exits. This book is an attempt to collect the elementary of multicriteria optimisation theory and the basic models and algorithms of multicriteria scheduling. It is composed of numerous illustrations, algorithms and examples which may help the reader in understanding the presented concepts. This book covers general concepts such as Pareto optimality, complexity theory, and general method for multicriteria optimisation, as well as dedicated scheduling problems and algorithms: just-in-time scheduling, flexibility and robustness, single machine problems, parallel machine problems, shop problems, etc. The second edition contains revisions and new material.

Predictive and Optimised Life-Cycle Management sets out methodologies to meet the demands of the current trend towards sustainable civil engineering and building.

Encompassing all aspects of construction practice, from design through to demolition and the recycling of materials, Sarja provides tools for optimal property-value protection, including a description of an integrated and predictive Life-Cycle Maintenance and Management Planning System (LMS), which employs a wide range of techniques.

Clear and practical, this guide provides effective methodology required to change a reactive system of management to a predictive one, which will benefit practitioners and students involved in construction, from the architect to local and government authorities; from design engineers to facility managers.

In important branches of manufacturing industries, especially those producing chemicals, polymers, semiconductors, ceramics, metals and alloys, analytical process control is already an integral part of the company. Far reaching decisions with respect to quality, ecology and economy are based on the respective analytical data. The goal of this practice-oriented book is to introduce chemists, engineers and technicians to the strategies, techniques and efficiency of modern process analytical chemistry. The author is especially aiming at those professionals in small and medium enterprises who have to carry out process control tasks in a "solo-run".