Search

Purpose: Firms are accountable for upholding worker rights and well-being in their supply base. The authors unpack the evolution in lead firm thinking and practice about how to assure labor conditions at suppliers. Design/methodology/approach: The authors conducted interviews with the social sustainability leaders at 22 global corporations ("lead firms") and their sustainability consultants to understand how they think about, and enact efforts, to support labor in their supply base. The authors complement this with an analysis of stated practice in proprietary supplier codes of conduct for the manufacturing and extractive-related firms in the S&P 500 and FTSE 350. Findings: The authors' interviews suggest firms follow two distinct and cumulative approaches: a transactional-based approach leveraging collective buyer power to enforce supplier compliance and a relational-based approach focused on mutual capacity building between lead (buyer) firms and their suppliers. The authors also see the emergence, in a small subset of firms, of a bottom-up approach that recognizes supplier workers as rights-holders and empowers them to understand and claim their rights. Originality/value: The authors identify systematic convergence in supplier codes of conduct. While the transactional and relational approaches are well documented in the supply chain social sustainability literature, the rights-holder approach is not. Its emergence presents an important complement to the other approaches and enables a broader recognition of human rights, and the duty of Western firms to assure those rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Too often, companies uncritically accept the long-received wisdom that in matters of scale, it always pays to move up. In doing so, they may be missing out on the benefits [...]

Outsourcing initiatives are key to firm efforts to focus on core competencies, alter engrained practices and attain significant cost reductions in non-core processes. Extensive thought goes into the selection of outsourcing service providers, with the aim of enlisting vendors that have the competence and reputation to lower cost and enhance service levels. However, in addition to traditional fee-for-service outsourcing, another option is to develop a new enterprise that is wholly or partially owned by the outsourcing entity to take on the activities that are externalized-a so-called "enterprise partnership." This article examines one of the first examples of such a partnership: BAE Systems' efforts to outsource its HR services in collaboration with Xchanging. It tracks the evolution of the resulting enterprise partnership from the perspective of both the new vendor and the outsourcing firm. The article also discusses the need for explicit contractual recognition of key phases of the outsourcing life cycle as a means to reduce inevitable in-process conflict. Understanding the divergence of interests that naturally emerge is critical to realizing the long-term promise that enterprise partnerships offer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Toyota and Volvo have traditionally been viewed as anchoring two extremes of production models that companies in the automotive and other manufacturing sectors draw upon. The "Toyota (Lean) Production System" drove superior organizational learning, innovation, and control with positive implications for customer-oriented outcomes. Volvo's "reflective production" model aimed to leverage and develop workers' unique abilities, leading to adaptability, motivation, satisfaction, and innovation at the individual and group levels, with positive benefits for employees. Through a longitudinal case study, we show that environmental pressures, in the form of increased international product market competition and labour market constraints, drove convergence across the two production systems as enacted at Volvo and Toyota, in organizational structure, work design, and to a lesser extent, technology. The result is an integration of the adaptability, motivation, and development of workers at the individual and group levels, with enhanced organizational capacity for responsiveness, variability reduction, and innovation at the organizational level. Understanding how production models evolve provides insight into their operation, their limitations, and the challenges that are associated with their study, imitation, implementation, and use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Build-to-order manufacturing has been hailed as a boon to both companies and customers. But to be effective, companies and their suppliers must first understand what customers want. All companies wish [...]

Empirical work on order fulfillment strategies suggests that building products to customer order is an important driver of organizational value. Similarly, the experimental literature indicates that customers derive value from customization. The modeling literature provides a more equivocal perspective, suggesting that a combination of build‐to‐forecast and build‐to‐order (BTO) fulfillment modalities may lead to the best system‐wide outcomes. Using an industry studies approach, we build on these theoretical perspectives to examine order fulfillment at a global automotive producer. Interviews with key decision makers and a statistical analysis of 48,534 individual vehicle sales enable the development of four propositions on the organizational and profitability implications of the firm's evolution in order fulfillment strategy. Our analyses indicate that building products to customer order is a source of higher unit profit margin. The BTO process also exposes fault lines and generates opportunities for operational improvement, both in the order‐to‐delivery system and in the broader organization. Build‐to‐order evolves to provide the firm with insight on customers’ willingness to trade delivery lead times against their product attribute preferences. This information allows BTO to incorporate a demand management role, for example, by shifting custom orders to later time periods to accommodate excess demand. These changes lay the groundwork for a multi‐modal order fulfillment strategy that no longer distinguishes between the order source or production modality. This strategy enhances customer responsiveness, while addressing manufacturing capacity management imperatives. Our findings open new avenues for theory building, as well as experimental, empirical and modeling research in order fulfillment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the relationship between manufacturing practices and environmental performance as measured in terms of air emissions and resource use. The goal of this paper is to link manufacturing process with environmental management and performance by examining whether manufacturing practices and policies associated with superior overall manufacturing performance in the automobile industry contribute to improvements in environmental performance. An advantage specific to studying the automobile industry is that there is a clearly defined set of advanced manufacturing practices known collectively as lean production or "just-in-time" manufacturing, which enables one to specify and explore the link between manufacturing practice and environmental performance. Two unique factory-level data sets are used along with in-depth interviews to examine the link between advanced manufacturing practices and environmental performance in the automobile industry. The relationship between different characteristics of lean production and measures of environmental performance related to air emissions and resource efficiency are examined.