This book is a novel contribution to a field dominated by conventional approaches to project management, it is about narratives in megaprojects. Some of the questions examined in this original new book include: * What are narratives? * Why are they important in megaprojects? * How are they formed and used in megaprojects? * How do promotors of and protestors against megaprojects craft narratives to their advantage? * What strategies can project managers employ to effectively use narratives in megaprojects? Built from longitudinal research studies in combination with internationally recognised teaching materials, this book will provide readers with a theoretical understanding of narratives and projects, as well as practical international case studies, including HS2, the Eden Project, the Sochi Olympics, Hyderabad and Chennai Metros, Westconnex and Tideway, to support their understanding. The authors explain the different types of narrative, how and why they are important in general and in relation to a megaproject and its life-cycle, but also how to craft narratives in different situations, and how they are changed and maintained over a project life-cycle. Narratives in Megaprojects doubles as a text supporting more advanced courses on project management or aspects thereof, and as a reflection of the state of the art in this particular perspective on megaprojects. It is essential reading for all students and professionals in Project Management, Construction, Infrastructure and Executive Leaders involved in megaprojects and infrastructure delivery.

Renowned airline business visionary and sage adviser, Nawal Taneja, offers insights, inspiration, and practical measures, based on his extensive experience and practices in other businesses, on how high-level airline decision makers can extend the boundaries of their businesses to adapt to the dramatically changing lifestyles of consumers, now accelerated by the global pandemic

This book develops innovative techniques from operational research and management science for the design and implementation of a reconfigurable manufacturing system (RMS), and subsequently analyzes and assesses their performance. A reconfigurable manufacturing system (RMS) is a paradigm that can address many of the challenges posed by the modern market. Accordingly, substantial research is now being conducted on RMS, focusing on various levels of decision-making (strategic, tactical and operational). However, as a relatively new research area, there are still only very few books and articles available on reconfigurable manufacturing system design and management. In addition to filling that gap, this book provides a forum for investigating, exchanging ideas on, and disseminating the latest advances in the broad area of RMS applications in today's industry. Gathering contributions by experts from academia, industry and policy-making, it represents an essential contribution to the existing literature on manufacturing and logistics in general and industry 4.0 in particular.

Operational Excellence is achieved when all employees in your organization can see the flow of value to your customers and can make adjustments to that flow before it breaks down. Operational Excellence in Your Office: A Guide to Achieving Autonomous Value Stream Flow with Lean Techniques presents nine time-tested guidelines for designing business process flow that enable Operational Excellence in the office. Each chapter describes one guideline by using text, illustrations, and practical examples to provide a comprehensive understanding of why creating flow in the office is essential and how to achieve it. Accounting for the reality that most office employees are required to work on many different projects throughout the day, this book details a step-by-step methodology for leveraging traditional value stream flow to establish Operational Excellence in an office environment. In addition, it describes a more advanced form of flow called "self-healing" flow-in which employees are capable of identifying and fixing problems with the flow without requiring management intervention. Explaining how to achieve Operational Excellence and self-healing flow with the nine guidelines, the book also introduces new concepts such as part-time continuous flow processing cells, workflow cycles, takt capability, integration events, pitch in the office, and ways to tell whether your office is on time. With this book, you will be able to take the knowledge provided and immediately apply it by following the step-by-step checklists included at the end of each chapter. In addition to the lists of action items for implementing each guideline, the book includes "acid tests" you can use to determine if you have implemented each guideline correctly. When finished, you will have designed an end-to-end flow for the services in your office as well as visual systems to help employees distinguish normal flow from abnormal flow so they can fix flow problems on their own, before they negatively impact your customers.

Examine the latest practices, trends, and emerging developments as PRINCIPLES OF SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT: A BALANCED APPROACH, 5E guides you step-by-step through the management of all supply chain activity.

You review issues related to both domestic and global supply chains as comprehensive, one-of-a-kind coverage encompasses important processes in operations, purchasing, logistics, as well as process integration. A balanced approach follows the natural flow through the supply chain. Well-organized chapters demonstrate the practical applications of supply chain management in today's workplace with the help of intriguing SCM Profiles and interesting real business examples.

Relevant end-of-chapter questions, problems, and new cases help you put what you learn into practice as you sharpen your management skills.

Recent Advances in System Reliability discusses developments in modern reliability theory such as signatures, multi-state systems and statistical inference. It describes the latest achievements in these fields, and covers the application of these achievements to reliability engineering practice. The chapters cover a wide range of new theoretical subjects and have been written by leading experts in reliability theory and its applications. The topics include: concepts and different definitions of signatures (D-spectra), their properties and applications to reliability of coherent systems and network-type structures; Lz-transform of Markov stochastic process and its application to multi-state system reliability analysis; methods for cost-reliability and cost-availability analysis of multi-state systems; optimal replacement and protection strategy; and statistical inference. Recent Advances in System Reliability presents many examples to illustrate the theoretical results. Real world multi-state systems, such as power generation and transmission, refrigeration, and production systems, are considered in the form of case studies, making the book a useful resource for researchers and postgraduate students.

Brings together an international range of expertise. Designed to facilitate the development of management frameworks adaptable for a wide range of organizations, as well as an overview of the development and integration of technology in advanced and emerging economies. Essential comprehensive source of new and emerging approaches for researchers and advanced students in engineering and technology management, as well as professionals seeking an authoritative global reference source.

Entrepreneurship Trajectories: Entrepreneurial Opportunities, Business Models, and Firm Performance explores several entrepreneurship trajectories recognized by economists and entrepreneurs. It is not possible to talk about growth paths addressed by entrepreneurial ventures without recalling the business model and the type of entrepreneurial opportunity at their foundations. Diego Matricano assumes that the growth paths addressed by entrepreneurial ventures depend on both effective business models and promising opportunities. This pragmatic guide illuminates the entrepreneurial trajectories linking opportunities, business models, and growth paths, offering complete and nuanced views through its extensive use of case studies.

A comprehensive treatment on the use of quantitative modeling for decision making and best practices in the service industries

Making up a significant part of the world economy, the service sector is a rapidly evolving field that is relied on to dictate the public's satisfaction and success in various areas of everyday life, from banking and communications to education and healthcare. Service Science provides managers and students of the service industries with the quantitative skills necessary to model key decisions and performance metrics associated with services, including the management of resources, distribution of goods and services to customers, and the analysis and design of queueing systems.

The book begins with a brief introduction to the service sector followed by an introduction to optimization and queueing modeling, providing the methodological background needed to analyze service systems. Subsequent chapters present specific topics within service operations management, including: Location modeling and districtingResource allocation problemsShort- and long-term workforce managementPriority services, call center design, and customer schedulingInventory modelingVehicle routing

The author's own specialized software packages for location modeling, network optimization, and time-dependent queueing are utilized throughout the book, showing readers how to solve a variety of problems associated with service industries. These programs are freely available on the book's related web site along with detailed appendices and online spreadsheets that accompany the book's "How to Do It in Excel" sections, allowing readers to work hands-on with the presented techniques.

Extensively class-tested to ensure a comprehensive presentation, Service Science is an excellent book for industrial engineering and management courses on service operations at the upper-undergraduate and graduate levels. The book also serves as a reference for researchers in the fields of business, management science, operations research, engineering, and economics.

This book was named the 2010 Joint Publishers Book of the Year by the Institute of Industrial Engineers.

In the industrial world, companies are always seeking competitive advantages to sustain themselves in the globalized market. A supply chain is one of these improvements that managers implement in order to stay ahead of the competition. However, certain methods of supply chains add risks such as the addition of costs, possible accidents, and economic losses. Because of this, companies are looking for techniques in which to progress their supply chain execution. The Handbook of Research on Industrial Applications for Improved Supply Chain Performance is a pivotal reference source that identifies techniques, tools, and methodologies that can improve supply chain performance and enable businesses to generate a competitive advantage in the globalized market. While highlighting topics such as material flow, route optimization, and green distribution, this publication is ideally designed for managers, executives, logistics engineers, production managers, warehouse operations managers, board directors, consultants, analysts, inventory control managers, researchers, academicians, industrial and managerial professionals, practitioners, and students looking to improve costs and quality of supply chains.

This book records the new research findings and development in the field of industrial engineering, and it will serve as the guidebook for the potential development in industrial engineering and smart manufacturing. It gathers the accepted papers from the 24th International conference on Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management held at Central South University of Forestry and Technology in Changsha during May 19-20, 2018. The aim of this conference was to provide a high-level international forum for experts, scholars and entrepreneurs at home and abroad to present the recent advances, new techniques and application, to promote discussion and interaction among academics, researchers and professionals to promote the developments and applications of the related theories and technologies in universities and enterprises, and to establish business or research relations to find global partners for future collaboration in the field of Industrial Engineering. It addresses diverse themes in smart manufacturing, artificial intelligence, ergonomics, simulation and modeling, quality and reliability, logistics engineering, data mining and other related fields. This timely book summarizes and promotes the latest achievements in the field of industrial engineering and related fields over the past year, proposing prospects and vision for the further development.

All project stakeholders have different needs, objectives, responsibilities and priorities. For many project managers it is disturbing to realise that, for any number of personal or professional reasons, some of their stakeholders may not be as co-operative and helpful as they expect. It could be a negative and powerful sponsor (the 'Anti-sponsor'), a demotivated team, low-maturity or unrealistic external clients, maliciously compliant gatekeepers and finance teams, or uninterested internal customers. The reality of project management is that stakeholders can be difficult! Jake Holloway, Professor David Bryde and Roger Joby bring their years of project management experience and combine it with research and insight from social psychology to delve into how and why project stakeholders can be difficult. The book describes some of the common stakeholder types - such as Sponsors, the Team, Gatekeepers, Clients and Contractors - and associated unhelpful or difficult behaviour profiles that you will often come across on projects. It then provides practical ideas, techniques and methods that will help the project manager to effectively manage the impact of these stakeholders on the project. As projects get larger and more complicated, the role and influence of stakeholders grows too. A Practical Guide to Dealing with Difficult Stakeholders will provide your project teams with the basis for a more sophisticated and resilient approach to stakeholder management.

The fundamental reason for the existence of any manufacturing organization is to generate wealth by adding value to the products and services it offers. In this new global industrial environment, value is generated from many sources, such as rapid and flexible fulfillment of orders, developing new innovative products and services, providing rapid and responsive product and service support, delivering innovative turn-key solutions to customers, and so on. In the 21st century most manufacturing organizations will have to respond to these challenges through innovative partnerships, by creating virtual enterprises, by operating in agile networks to generate value by exploiting their existing competencies in design, manufacturing, distribution and customer service, whilst building new competencies in information systems, communications and knowledge management. Just as no man is an island, so no business can operate without being part of a network of businesses, which we call the manufacturing value chain. This book brings together the works of leading researchers to present state-of-the-art research and development on the strategic management of the manufacturing value chain' in the broadest sense. The objectives of Strategic Management of the Manufacturing Value Chain are: To provide insights into potential strategies, methods, tools and techniques which could facilitate competitiveness through innovation agility and partnership. To explore the use of enabling technologies, such as IT, in meeting the challenges of the 21st century. To provide practical case studies which demonstrate the use of new approaches to the generation and management of value in manufacturing. Strategic Managementof the Manufacturing Value Chain is suitable as a secondary text for graduate-level courses of management and manufacturing, and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in industry, commerce and government.

ICT-Driven Economic and Financial Development: Analyses of European Countries demonstrates the effects of ICT diffusion on economic, social and financial development by examining their impact on the structure and dynamics of national economies. It provides the insight into shifts observed in labour markets, international trade activities productivity factors, education and use of innovative financial products. It combines empirical analyses and data sources stretching back to 1990 make it an important contribution to understanding the effects of ICT diffusion on economic and financial development. The book answers questions such as how will national and regional economies react to upcoming ICT developments and growing usage, and what is the magnitude of impact of new information and communication technologies on various aspects of social and economic life.

Many interesting and important results on stochastic scheduling problems have been developed in recent years, with the aid of probability theory. This book provides a comprehensive and unified coverage of studies in stochastic scheduling. The objective is two-fold: (i) to summarize the elementary models and results in stochastic scheduling, so as to offer an entry-level reading material for students to learn and understand the fundamentals of this area and (ii) to include in details the latest developments and research topics on stochastic scheduling, so as to provide a useful reference for researchers and practitioners in this area. Optimal Stochastic Scheduling is organized into two parts: Chapters 1-4 cover fundamental models and results, whereas Chapters 5-10 elaborate on more advanced topics. More specifically, Chapter 1 provides the relevant basic theory of probability and then introduces the basic concepts and notation of stochastic scheduling. In Chapters 2 and 3, the authors review well-established models and scheduling policies, under regular and irregular performance measures, respectively. Chapter 4 describes models with stochastic machine breakdowns. Chapters 5 and 6 introduce, respectively, the optimal stopping problems and the multi-armed bandit processes, which are necessary for studies of more advanced subjects in subsequent chapters. Chapter 7 is focused on optimal dynamic policies, which allow adjustments of policies based on up-to-date information. Chapter 8 describes stochastic scheduling with incomplete information in the sense that the probability distributions of random variables contain unknown parameters, which can however be estimated progressively according to updated information. Chapter 9 is devoted to the situation where the processing time of a job depends on the time when it is started. Lastly, in Chapter 10 the authors look at several recent models beyond those surveyed in the previous chapters.

Multistate System Reliability with Dependencies explains how to select a model of load sharing that best describes the impact of changes in reliability states of components. This is mainly achieved via a generalization of two-state system reliability analysis, where equal load sharing and local load sharing rules are commonly used. The material covers basic concepts of traditional reliability theory, including the concept of probability, failures, series and parallel systems, k-out-of-n systems, and more. It features cutting-edge theorems on the reliability analysis of multistate systems that take into account component degradation and dependencies between subsystems and components in subsystems. Other themes addressed include renewable systems and the availability analysis of multistate systems. Combining results of the reliability analysis of multistate systems with dependent components and the results of the classical renewal theory, the availability analysis of multistate systems under the assumption of imperfect renovation is also provided.

This edited monograph brings together research papers covering the state of the art in cloud computing for logistics. The book includes general business object models for intralogistics as well as user-friendly methods for logistics business process design. It also presents a general template for logistics applications from the cloud. The target audience primarily comprises researchers and experts in the field, but the book will also be beneficial for graduate students.

In the latter half of the 20th century, forces have conspired to make the human community, at last, global. The easing of tensions between major nations, the expansion of trade to worldwide markets, widespread travel and cultural exchange, pervasive high-speed communications and automation, the explosion of knowledge, the streamlining of business, and the adoption of flexible methods have changed the face of manufacturing itself, and of research and education in manufacturing. The acceptance of the continuous improvement process as a means for organizations to respond quickly and effectively to swings in the global market has led to the demand for individuals educated in a broad range of cultural, organizational, and technical fields and capable of absorbing and adapting required knowledge and training throughout their careers. No longer will manufacturing research and education focus on an industrial sector or follow a national trend, but rather will aim at enabling international teams of companies to cooperate in rapidly designing, prototyping, and manufacturing products. The successful enterprise of the 21st century will be characterized by an organizational structure that efficiently responds to customer demands and changing global circumstances, a corporate culture that empowers employees at all levels and encourages constant communication among related groups, and a technological infrastructure that fully supports process improvement and integration. In changing itself to keep abreast of the broader transformation in manufacturing, the enterprise must look first at its organization and culture, and thereafter at supporting technologies.

Over the years, companies have developed independent systems for managing process safety, environment, health, safety, and quality. Many aspects of these management systems are similar. Integrating EHS management systems can yield economies and improved system effectiveness. This book explains how integration reduces cost of delivery through a reduction in the number of management program steps and avoidance of redundancy; how it results in more effective programs, since the best practices can be combined into a single process; and how this integration brings a faster, and more cost effective response to new demands.

Today enterprises must strive to improve their competitiveness in a changing environment. To reach this objective it is necessary for companies to evaluate their performances and to combine modelling, business process re-engineering and benchmarking techniques. This book demonstrates the successful combination and implementation of these various techniques.

Although most supply chains have changed dramatically over the years, the dynamic aspects of supply chains, such as changes in the suppliers, factory and storage locations, production processes, and distribution structures, are rarely studied and considered. Further study on the evolution of supply chains is crucial in order to ensure they are working as efficiently as possible. Frameworks and Cases on Evolutional Supply Chain considers the dynamic aspects of the supply chain and provides frameworks of the evolutional supply chain through symbolic case studies. Covering a range of topics such as industrial clusters, food loss, and the global supply chain, this reference work is ideal for industry professionals, researchers, practitioners, scholars, academicians, policymakers, business owners, government officials, instructors, and students.