The purpose of this paper is to investigate factors affecting the success of lean implementation in Thai logistics companies. Data was collected from the logistic companies implemented lean. Questionnaire survey was used to collect the data. Factor analysis and multiple regression analysis were conducted to understand the relationship between these factors and lean implementation success. The r...

Excessive leverage is one of the most important problems facing Italian agricultural cooperatives as the competition in the EU intensifies. An empirical study of 500 agricultural cooperatives supports the hypothesis that cooperatives characterized as having “powerful managers” have a capital structure that is significantly different from the “nonpowerful manager” cooperatives. Powerful manager ...

The research proposes to model the way households and their assets move back and forth between the informal rural economy and the formal economy, particularly financial equity, entrepreneurs and workers. Several hypotheses are tested to establish understanding about the functions of the informal economy in the co-evolution of rural and urban economies. This work should lead to strategic options...

This study evaluates a model of the relationship between HR strategy and organizational performance in locally owned Taiwanese companies and in Taiwanese-owned firms operating in China. The pressure many East Asian economies feel as a consequence of globalization and the fallout from the 1997 Asian financial crisis means that flexible and adaptive employment systems are potentially useful in ai...

An economic era has ended: Most companies can no longer sustain competitive advantages in product quality, functionality, or cost (Cooper, 1995; Fine, 1998; Schonberger, 1996; Wheelwright and Clark, 1992). The familiar struggle among domestic companies for market dominance has become a global struggle among lean competitors for economic parity. Core competencies that once delivered enduring adv...

Innovation is broadly seen as an essential component of competitiveness, embedded in the organizational structures, processes, products, and services within a firm. The objective of this paper is to explore the effects of the organizational, process, product, and marketing innovations on the different aspects of firm performance, including innovative, production, market, and financial performan...

Corporate governance is concerned with the institutions that influence how business corporations allocate resources and returns. A system of corporate governance shapes who makes investment decisions in corporations, what types of investments they make, and how returns from investments are distributed. Retained earnings—undistributed profits and capital consumption allowances—have always provid...

In multi-unit auctions, such as auctions of commodities and securities, and financial exchanges, it is necessary to specify rationing rules to break ties between multiple marginal bids. The standard approach in the literature and in pratice is to ration marginal bids proportionally. This paper shows how bidding can be made more competitive if the rationing rule instead gives increasing priority...

For decades now Total Quality Management (TQM) has been a dominant management concept for improving competitiveness and financial results. In recent years, however, TQM seems to have lost some of its nimbus with other concepts and approaches such as Lean Enterprise and Six Sigma launched and increasingly in vogue. The aim of this paper is to look at TQM and Six Sigma, their backgrounds, definit...

With the rapid spread of international financial crisis and the stagnation of world economic growth, the Xinjiang international trade is facing a very serious challenge. How to improve the international competitiveness is not only the need of the development of their own living, but also related to the development of national economy is healthy sustainable and stable or not in Xingjian. Therefo...