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Byline: John R. Grandzol, Christian J. Grandzol, Shan T. Rippey The abundance of opportunities in today's global marketplace presents substantial challenges to manufacturing managers and executives. Strategic decisions require thoughtful consideration of various environmental variables, notably political, economical, and logistical influences that are typically outside their control. Possibilities for strategic initiatives and direction abound and manifest themselves in myriad possibilities evident in the academic literature and consultants' prescriptions. Leaders in manufacturing organisations must identify the most efficient and risk-reducing strategies from amongst them. We propose a framework built upon two external, influential, and emerging factors, each converging to its own well-defined set of parameters: international trade agreements and quality management programmes. Seemingly unrelated, we suggest these two activities in fact create a path that contributes to successful strategic planning: the former acting as the classical market push mechanism; the latter as the progressive customer-focused pull mechanism.

Byline: R. Sivasubramanian, V. Selladurai, A. Gunasekaran The Theory of Constraints (TOC) is an example of a management philosophy built upon a limited number of assumptions and designed to provide a process of continuous ongoing improvement. The assumption forming one foundation of TOC is that a system's outputs are determined by its constraints. The assumptions forming another foundation are new definitions for throughput, inventory and operating expense. These definitions are designed to support the goal of the organisation, which, according to Goldratt, is to make money. TOC, previously referred to as Optimized Production Technology (OPT), is a production control methodology that maximises profits in a plant with a demonstrated bottleneck. The process used by TOC to determine product mix that will maximise profitability is a very simple series of steps. In this article, a case study from an industry is considered to demonstrate how the application of concepts of TOC will maximise profit for an organisation. This paper further explains how TOC plays a vital role in increasing performance through a limited number of assumptions designed to provide a continuous process of improvement, as emphasised in Total Quality Management (TQM). This paper also shows the steps involved in solving a typical TOC problem along with optimisation of resources for increased demand conditions. This work has been carried out on an IBM/PC compatible system.

Byline: Kazushige Okuda This paper surveys the research literature of hierarchical structures in manufacturing systems. The research literature is given by classifying categories for an organisation structure and a production plan. In the category of the organisation structure, this paper presents the new trend in multi-division models and/or decentralised models. The research literature that is classified into organisation structure reflects decomposition principle, bi-level planning, and principal-agent problem. In the category of the production plan, this paper presents the new trend and shows several application models in hierarchical production planning (HPP), aggregation-disaggregation model, and multi-level lot sizing problem.

Byline: Ip-Shing Fan, Nicola J. Ward, Stephen C. Cooper, Kamal Sehdev, Gareth Williams Design for manufacture aims to design products for minimum manufacturing cost and time, without compromising the functionality or the quality of the product. The aim is to move the identification of potential manufacturing problems further up in the design process rather than making costly and time consuming changes in the production stage. In the extended enterprise, this transfer of information is not only between functions but also between organisations. The interorganisational barrier makes the transfer of information between design and manufacturing more difficult as it is rare for two organisations to have a formal means for transferring the information required by the product owner especially early in the supply relationship. It is also rare for the information to be stored in a format that is easily accessible to all the potential end user groups. This research develops a generic definition of supplier capability for machining suppliers in the aerospace industry. Through working with the design, manufacturing and procurement functions of an aerospace manufacturer, information requirements are captured. These requirements are verified with suppliers to match the 'desire to access' to the 'willingness to provide'. This model presents a mechanism for the structured transfer of manufacturing information to design. The implementation of the model is in a database that can be filled with information using internet technology.

Byline: Allan Hansen, Carsten Orts Hansen, Jan Mouritsen Flexibility often stands for competitiveness. Through a multiple case study of four SMEs, this paper analyses how flexibility is drawn into organisational situations and how it is managed through certain management control inscriptions. All four firms claim to be flexible, but they do so in very different ways, and the supporting management control mechanism differs widely among the situations. Flexibility is only 'something' under specific conditions and it may even mean completely opposing things in different firms, e.g. both 'more components' and 'fewer components'. This paper analyses flexibility and the associated management control inscriptions which translate it into competitiveness.

Byline: Marcel Cohen, David Shepherd In this paper, we quantify an important management problem, which is how a company should respond to cyclical shocks of different amplitudes and duration when time delays are present in the factor input adjustment process. Our objective is to show how different shock profiles affect the amplitude and wavelength of the production path. We also consider the extent to which cyclical shocks generate long-run persistence in the time-path of output. Finally, our analysis suggests a scheme, which is not based simply on calendar time, for classifying different shock profiles as short or long.