-------------------------------------------------------ABSTRACT--------------------------------------------------Lean Manufacturing (LM) is considered as a rapid growing manufacturing culture. The companies are facing cut throat competition and so are compelled to continuously perform better than their competitors. Hence the organizations are growing at a faster pace, to enhance their position ...

The paper addresses which customer values, related to sustainable management of operation for Functional Products, are of interest during manufacturing companies’ marketing and sales processes. Based on an empirical study covering five manufacturing companies, a set of customer values, which are categorized using Hill’s [28] framework in order to understand whether they are important and why, i...

Currently, the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries are moving through a period of unparalleled change. Major multinational pharmaceutical companies are restructuring, consolidating, merging and more importantly critically assessing their competitiveness to ensure constant growth in an ever-more demanding market where the cost of developing novel products is continuously increasing. The pha...

Lean manufacturing (LM) evokes images of efficiency and minimizing unnecessary costs, an attractive value for many companies. But other companies are already as lean as they can be. Does LM have practical limits? This paper demonstrates how the Theory of Constraints (TOC) can take the business performance of those organizations currently pursuing lean to the next level.

This case study was completed by the Siemens IA & DT (Industrial Technology and Drive Technologies) Divisions. These divisions focus on providing state-of-theart solutions for electronic manufacturing and process industries. As the leading provider of industry software, they optimize entire value-added chains of manufacturing companies—from product design and development to production, sales, a...

In today’s manufacturing community, flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) are becoming important. There is a global trend towards flexible manufacturing systems with an increasing number of countries competing for a share of the world market. FMS are increasingly required for companies to meet the demand for high quality, reasonably priced products. FMS allow a manufacturer to quickly change pro...

This paper describes the application of discrete event simulation to study continuous material flow. Logistics is an integrated part of most manufacturing companies. The purpose of this study is to determine the required logistics operations to allow continuous operations of a chemical manufacturing plant. The application has been used to provide critical decision support.

Lean is a systematic approach to identify and eliminate non-value-added activities or waste through continuous improvement process. While traditional lean manufacturing focuses on the activities within a single organization, lean supply chain consists of the same processes, but it views these processes over multiple organizations. This research addresses an important yet under-studied area – le...

Based on a random sample of 500 South Yorkshire non-hi-tech manufacturing small, medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) the quantitative findings support the hypothesis that size, strategic, and market orientation associate with innovation. The results show that prospectors are medium-sized companies and small companies, defenders. Prospectors are more innovative and market-oriented than defenders. Th...