This paper presents an Operations Excellence (OE) audit sheet that enables companies to get a quick assessment of their operations performance. The sheet is based on well known assessment schemes within lean manufacturing developed by Godson, Kobayashi, and Schonberger. These three schemes are combined and enhanced in the audit sheet, which defines 15 areas of operations excellence. The audit s...

2 Manufacturing companies have historically had an on-off relation with technology. Most have aggressively adopted traditional technologies such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). However, they have been slow in adopting recent digital technologies such as big data analytics, real-time order confirmation, Web-EDI among others. Moreover, most have adopted technologies to varying extent creat...

Operations strategy has been a subject of empirical research for 25 years. We analyzed the outcomes of 33 empirical studies on competitive priorities, published between 1983 and 2007, and identified trends in operations strategy since the early 1980s. At that time, researchers mainly emphasized the importance of flexibility in operations; however, we found that quality has consistently been the...

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) can improve manufacturing efficiency, productivity, sustainability. However, using AI in also presents several challenges, including issues with data acquisition management, human resources, infrastructure, as well security risks, trust, implementation challenges. For example, getting the needed to train models be difficult for rare events ...

Rules governing scheduling and sequencing have accumulated overtime, driven by the manufacturing firms quest for improved operations against key performance metrics. While lead time dictates the need to preserve a focus on manufacturing efficiency, these needs must be balanced with demand-driven requirements especially at the process level, based on the finite capacity that is true of real syst...