Virtual manufacturing enterprises (VMEs) are a current, viable, and strategic form of organization for business and other organizations. The perspectives described in this literature review are based upon a basic cluster analysis that identified and classified papers into homogenous subgroups with meaningful themes, or categories. These general themes are related to strategies for business orga...

The smooth running of small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises (SMEs) presents a significant challenge irrespective of the technological and human resources they may have at their disposal. SMEs continuously encounter daily internal and external undesirable events and unwanted setbacks to their operations that detract from their business performance. These are referred to as ‘disturbanc...

This paper examines characteristics of survived small manufacturing enterprises (SMEs) competing to be suppliers to mass merchandisers. It intends to examine various product and management characteristics of small manufacturing enterprises (SME) to determine the critical factors that lead to their long-term survival. Since survey data are usually correlated, fuzzy, inconsistent, and incomplete,...

Small and informal enterprises are preponderant in Africa’s manufacturing sector. Their growth is negligibly low except when young and small, but little is known beyond this. This paper reports the results of our field study of a metalworking cluster in Nairobi. As competition was intensified by the entry of new enterprises, the education level of entrepreneurs became important in determining e...

..................................................................................................................xi 1 SMEs and the Defense Industrial Base..........................................................1 2 TIDE Program: Charter and Activities ............................................................3 2.1 The TIDE Mission ...............................................................

Simulation modeling has been acknowledged as one of the key engineering tools of the 21 century and many large enterprises, such as automotive and aerospace, have taken advantage of its benefits. Unfortunately, these benefits have not generally been available to Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) due to various barriers. An example of one of these key barriers is the time and level of expertis...

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Compared with modularized enterprises, continuous Process (CP) enterprises exhibit differing characteristics in manufacturing flexibility. Relative to the vast literature on the flexibility of modularized enterprises, the manufacturing flexibility of CP enterprises has aroused little attention in current literature. In this paper, we develop a new theory to give a reasonable explanation for the...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate the current level of best manufacturing practices in Malaysian ISO 9000 certified small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Design/methodology/approach: The authors conducted a survey on 270 ISO 9000 certified manufacturing SMEs. Based on an extensive search of literature on performance requirements, eight areas were identified. Thus, the question...