1The Advanced Centre for Biochemical Engineering, University College London, London, UK 2The Harvard Stem Cell Institute, Cambridge, MA, USA 3Harvard Business School, Boston, MA, USA 4London Regenerative Medicine Network, London, UK 5Harvard Medical School, Center for Excellence in Vascular Biology, Boston, MA, USA 6Future Medicine Ltd, London, UK 7Lonza Walkersville, Inc., MD, USA *Author for ...

Servitization is a process of creating value by shifting from merely selling products to selling solutions that integrate products and services. It is a strategy often used by manufacturing SMEs to avoid or escape the commodity trap. Research has illustrated that servitization can lead to a competitive advantage in the marketplace, but many SMEs still fail to servitize successfully. In this pap...

While the focus of electronic commerce has often been on “dot coms” or pure Internet based companies, a major transformation is under way in many traditional “bricks-and-mortar” organizations. The latter are investing heavily in Internet based technologies and applications in order to attain new heights of efficiency, productivity and business value. While anecdotes in the business press sugges...

The manufacturing enterprises are now experiencing high pressure of competition. In addition, the advancement in computer software, hardware, networks, information technologies and integration has been gradually reshaping the manufacturing companies by shifting from the industrial age to the information and knowledge era. Due to these elevated competitiveness and advanced computer technology, a...

To form a foundation for a national quality improvement campaign, American industry and government jointly established and support the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. Created by public law in 1987, the Award promotes an understanding of quality excellence, greater awareness of quality as a crucial competitive element, and the sharing of information and successful strategies through con...

Improvement can be understood as a project that is undertaken to obtain additional benefits to the organization and its customers. In the literature, the term is most often present in the context of pro quality activities as a “continuous improvement”. In the companies’ practice it is striving for excellence that manifests itself through the implementation of various concepts, methods and impro...

In the current competitive scenario, SMEs need to adopt advanced technology in order comprehend dynamics of Industry 4.0 and sustainable operations for operational excellence. The present study discusses relationship between with A research model is proposed assessed through structural equation modelling (SEM). shows that if practices use robotics minimize human intervention, as well smart logi...

In this study, we investigate the relationships between competitive dimensions of manufacturing strategy and competitive performance in two clusters. One consists of plants in countries known for their manufacturing excellence (i.e., "JUG" referring to Japan, the United States and Germany); and the other of plants in emerging manufacturing countries (i.e., "BC" referring to Brazil and China). D...

The lean philosophy, which denotes business excellence through continuous improvement, originates from Japanese car manufacturer Toyota’s Production System (TPS). An area where lean is not fully explored is remanufacturing, a business that brings used products back to useful life. Remanufacturing is often a more complex process than manufacturing due to uncertainty of process steps/time and par...