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Lean as a business strategy is used to improve quality and service, eliminate waste, reduce time and costs, and enhance overall organizational effectiveness. Heightening challenges in competition in recent years have prompted many small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to adopt lean to enhance firms' competitiveness. This paper attempts to present an all-inclusive study and it examines various factors associated with the implementation of lean in SMEs in the U.S. The findings suggest that most of SMEs have a relatively accurate understanding of lean concept and philosophy. The primary reasons to implement lean are mainly internal, including reduce cost, improve profit margin, improve utilization of plant/facility, and maintain competitive position. A hierarchical cluster analysis was conducted to investigate lean status. It was discovered that both advanced adopters and beginners of lean are discovered. ANOVA test results show that there exist quite significant differences in terms of the degrees of lean implementation in SMEs. Varied lean tools and programs have been applied and they are positively related with firms' performance. Lastly, the paper provides evidences that major lean barriers are encountered by SMEs regarding management or people related factors as well as key knowledge and know-how. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pathways toward 'overshoot and collapse' futures are not always or exclusively determined by international trends, national governments, wars and large-scale events. While these gain considerable attention their overall impact is arguably no greater than the constant 'drip, drip, drip' of conventional decision-making around more mundane activities that fall under familiar headings like 'business strategy', 'economic growth' and 'development'. While cities have master plans and strategic goals most of them evolve within, and are expressed through, a continuous series of commercially inspired projects founded on narrow short-term economic assumptions. They emerge from a typically up-beat, entrepreneurial (profit-oriented) and finance-based worldview that is little short of delusional. As a result, many large-scale projects are poorly conceived and end up working against shared community interests. The central purpose of this paper is to contribute toward a broad re-appraisal of such projects in the hope that future 'developments' can be turned toward more consciously proactive and socially responsible ends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - This paper investigates how a firm's human resource capability can affect the deployment and effectiveness of corporate mergers and acquisitions strategy. Design/methodology/approach - Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) is treated as a long-term strategic orientation based on human resource advantage rather than a tactic to pursue short-term goals. Using a sample of 267 US banking firms, the main and interaction effects of M&A intensity, HR capability, and in-state propensity on four firm performance measures were examined. Findings - The findings confirm that banking M&A could be very effective when the firm had high HR capability. Evidence was also found that HR capability had a direct impact on firm performance. Although in-state M&A strategy was in general superior to out-of-state M&A strategy, a firm with excellent HR capability might narrow the performance difference between in-state and out-of-state M&A. Research limitations/implications - An obvious drawback of using this sample of banking firms is that it raises questions about the generalizability of these findings to smaller financial firms and firms in other industries. This study considers firms having at least one M&A over a three-year period, so we should not generalize our findings to those firms preferring to use internal growth strategies or greenfield start-ups. Practical implications - The main message of this paper is that human resource capability is critical for M&A strategy to be effective. Originality/value - By extending previous investigations which showed that M&A strategy and HR capacity should be independently treated, this study highlights the critical role of internal HR capability in performance implications of M&A strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many U.S. government agencies and their contractors have subscribed to using the prescriptive metric of technology readiness level (TRL) as a measure of maturity of an individual technology, with a view toward operational use in a system context. A comprehensive set of concerns becomes relevant when this metric is abstracted from an individual technology to a system context, which may involve interplay among multiple technologies that are integrated through a system development life cycle. This paper proposes a system-focused approach for managing system development and making effective and efficient decisions during this life cycle. A system readiness level (SRL) index that incorporates both the current TRL scale and the concept of an integration readiness level is presented with methods for determining current and future readiness of a system. Using techniques in evolutionary algorithms, the SRL index is optimized based on resource allocation to provide a decision support approach that enhances managerial capabilities in the system's development life cycle. The optimization model for the SRL is then executed with a case example and resource constraints of 75%, 60%, 45%, 30%, and 15% to demonstrate how it can be used to make strategic planning decisions in the system's development life cycle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: A significant amount of software is developed all over the world by small and medium size software organizations. These organizations do not have enough infrastructures and resources to implement an austere quality plan. Software inspection is a fundamental component of the software quality assurance process. Formal review methods are rigorous and their implementation is cumbersome for small and medium enterprises. In this paper, we have presented a new simplified inspection process which is easy to implement, requires fewer resource and almost no documentation. Also, people who are conducting this inspection need not be present at the same place during most stages of the inspection process. We have also compared this process with IEEE and NASA standards for software inspection and found that it meets almost 99% of both standards. While there has been much research on inspection, little attention is paid towards compliance with international standards. These results could be used as a basis for further research in software inspection and process towards aligning with international standards. This process has been successfully implemented in a CMM level 3 software development organization which is striving to accomplish higher maturity levels to establish at the international level. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The article focuses on the issues surrounding offshore outsourcing in the U.S. Accordingly, it presents a theoretical argument that offshore outsourcing can serve as a sensible governance compromise between the traditional extremes of markets and hierarchies. It then discusses the possibility that international businesses will engage in offshore outsourcing as falling transaction costs press organizational contracting to its theoretical limits. The paper also examined the rise in complex business outsourcing transactions to illustrate how firms might balance important fundamental variables.

The central idea of this paper is that creativity is now the decisive source of competitive advantage. This concept is intertwined with corporate strategy development by which businesses recognise the competitive advantage over time. We discuss the ideas and applications of "The Rise of the Creative Class" (Florida 2002). As he heavily elaborates the concepts in the context of the United States, we try to make comparison between the U.S. and some less developed nations to observe the applicability of his argument worldwide. Creative capital theory explains the underlying factor of people's choosing a location, labelled as 3T's (tolerance, talent, and technology). We provide rational arguments as to why a city cannot become a creative centre. It is likely that there are hindrances taking opposite positions of 3T's; we label them 3C's, those are: (1) complacency, (2) commonsense, and (3) culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]