The last twenty years has seen a relentless shift to offshore manufacturing as retailers chase ever-lower labor costs. The results of this strategy can now be evaluated and we propose that some adjustments are in order. We analyze the case of a North American apparel manufacturer that has successfully emerged from a period of major change with a strong and strategic position in the apparel supp...

this research develops a two-level model based on hypotheses, which concern relationships among role ambiguity, role conflict, job involvement and salesperson performance at individual level and collective sale self efficacy, customer orientation and competitive climate at sale unit level in iranian food industry. data was drawn from 482 sales people in 30 companies , using a 51-item self-repor...

The primary objective of desalination research is the development of a way to produce fresh water at lower cost. The present study investigated two freshwater production methods of Reverse Osmosis (RO) and Multi-Effect Humidification (MEH) (artificial distillation), and analyzed them from an economic standpoint, and subsequently pointed out the important and effective factors in decreasing salt...

Efficiency analysis is commonly used to assess and compare the productivity of similar decision-making units (DMUs). In this research, we broaden the applicability of efficiency analysis to situations where each DMU comprises interconnected sub-DMUs (e.g., departments). Extant research espouses that embracing the connectedness between subDMUs (e.g., marketing–sales interface, marketing–R&D inte...

This study carries out an empirical test of the order-winners framework in manufacturing organizations. Hill [Hill, T., 1985. Manufacturing Strategy: The Strategic Management of the Manufacturing Function, first ed. Macmillan, Basingstoke; Hill, T., 2000. Manufacturing Strategy: Text and Cases, second ed. Palgrave, Basingstoke] proposed the order-winners framework to help managers to improve un...

Nowadays most of manufacturing firms in accordance with continuous changes in the market and the today’s competitiveness world are competing for meeting demand, increasing quality and decreasing costs. For reaching these goals, it is necessary to select a suitable flexible manufacturing system (FMS) for the most of manufactures. The aim of this paper is applying a method for evaluating the flex...

The advantages of contemporary communication and information technologies based on virtual reality techniques offer for companies a totally new approach to cooperation. Use of virtual product models can be extended to product development, manufacturing, marketing, customization and selling of products for Internet based virtual enterprises. The presentation addresses how the virtual product mod...

in competitive markets, the operations strategies of companies are normally formulated based on their competitive advantages. an effective operations strategy should maintain and improve competitive advantages based on the capabilities of the corporate operations resources. considering the market requirements and the operational performance of the rivals is the key for success and survival of a...

Reconfiguration is a significant area of after-sales, esp ecially for companies with configurable products. In this paper, the field of reconfiguration is characterised and a framework for reconfiguration is presented on the basis of experiences gathered from Finnish manufacturing companies. Although the state of the practice leaves much room for improvement, reconfiguration is an important bus...

Special care units express an increasing interest in adopting methods for quality management, previously developed and implemented in manufacturing firms. The paper examines the analogy between service management in special care units and the management of manufacturing processes. This paper is based on the authors’ implementation of ISO 9001:2000 in a neonatal intensive care unit. It maps the ...