Companies and firms, nowadays, due to mounting competition and product diversity, seek to apply virtual cellular manufacturing systems to reduce production costs and improve quality of the products. In addition, as a result of rapid advancement of technology and the reduction of product life cycle, production systems have turned towards dynamic production environments. Dynamic cellular manufact...

ith the growing proliferation of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, including among midsize companies, it becomes critical to address why and under what circumstances one can realize the benefits of an ERP system. In contrast to previous research, this study examines how managers (president, CFO, production VP, etc.) assess ERP success in specific modules (e.g., suppliers and purchase ...

The cost reduction of green tea processing, the control of fossil fuel resources, and the curbing of corresponding greenhouse gases emission depend on the energy efficiency of tea processing units. Therefore, it is imperative to identify and analyze factors determining energy efficiency of these agro-industrial units. To this end, the present descriptive survey was carried out on 40 managers of...

A start-up company in Florida, called World Response Group (WRG), developed an unusual woven mat for the horticulture industry that was made from all-natural fibers. Horticulture growers in the U.S. produce hundreds of millions of potted plants each year. The product, called SmartGrow, dramatically reduced weed growth in potted plants and simultaneously provided important nutrients – all with n...

In this paper we present a canonical setting that illustrates the need for explicitly modeling interactions between manufacturing and marketing/sales decisions in a rm. We consider a single rm that sells an innovative product with a given market potential and incurs lost sales when unable to supply the product due to capacity constraints. For such rms, we present a new, deterministic model of d...

In most industrial Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SME) communication with customers is conducted exclusively by marketing, sales and service. Nowadays those business units apply Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems to systematically gather information for the operational support of customer processes. Several studies illustrate that in the respective processes a vast body of addi...

To what extent can exporters cushion the impact of currency appreciation shocks by using imported intermediates? We apply a partial equilibrium model with heterogeneous firms. Producers can serve the domestic market, export final goods, or import inputs. In the model, an exogenous exchange rate shock simultaneously affects the variable costs and revenues associated with exports and imports. The...

Introducing and innovating services is advocated as a means by which manufacturing firms in advanced economies can retain or enhance their competitiveness. But little is known about how manufacturers innovate services, nor about the impact of service innovation on manufacturers’ performance. Using two consecutive waves of the UK Innovation Survey, this paper first examines how manufacturers inn...

This paper is about estimating productivity in the presence of product differentiation and in the absence of ideal data. By appealing to standard notions of market equilibrium and imposing structure on consumer demand, we show how one can estimate productivity when: 1) plant-level information about the physical attributes of output are not available; 2) the available measure of output is plant ...