There is now agreement that effective rollout of a global manufacturing execution system (MES) is critical to achieving manufacturing excellence across the enterprise and rapidly scaling up production to meet customer demands for new products. Nevertheless, manufacturers still struggle to replicate MES benefits across all of their production facilities. As a result, standardization of processes...

This paper presents an Operations Excellence (OE) audit sheet that enables companies to get a quick assessment of their operations performance. The sheet is based on well known assessment schemes within lean manufacturing developed by Godson, Kobayashi, and Schonberger. These three schemes are combined and enhanced in the audit sheet, which defines 15 areas of operations excellence. The audit s...

The 70’s has often been viewed as the decade of quality improvement, during which companies began to invest heavily in quality improvements, and Total Quality Management became a buzzword. In the 80’s, with quality a given, the competitive landscape shifted to lean manufacturing, focusing on concepts such as just-in-time, flexible manufacturing, and zero inventory, in order to achieve manufactu...

The case featured in this issue of Vikalpa discusses the journey embarked on by the top management of Lucas-TVS Limited in 1985 to make their firm a world-class manufacturing organization. The company's oldest plant at Padi, Chennai acted as a test bed for several of their initiatives. The case describes the steps that Lucas-TVS management took to implement this change process in manufacturing ...

The objective of this paper is to examine the EFQM Excellence Model as an enabler of E-procurement adoption and the effect on purchasing performance. The study utilized a cross-sectional telephone survey of a sample of Spanish manufacturing companies using multiple informants. A total of 200 firms responded making a total of 800 responses. Data was analyzed using structural equations modelling....

Indian manufacturing firms operating in rapidly changing and highly competitive market, over the last few decades, have embraced organization-wide transformation to achieve cultural and operational excellence. In recent years, numerous approaches have been proposed to improve business and manufacturing performance. Lean practices in particular, Total Productive Management (TPM) and Total Qualit...