The wave of the fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0) is breaking on manufacturing companies. In manufacturing, one of the buzzwords of the moment is "Smart production". Smart production involves manufacturing equipment with many sensors that can generate and transmit large amounts of data. Data and information from manufacturing operations are however not used by most manufacturing compa...

The advent of information technology (IT) has made today’s manufacturing systems increasingly distributed. Typically such a system consists of a complex array of computer-based decision units, controllers, and databases. Rather than dealing with each component individually, it is necessary to have a new paradigm for management of manufacturing systems, so that all the components and their opera...

This paper presents a simulation study carried out to solve a problem of manufacturing process reengineering. The specific company in which the study took place is a medium size manufacturer of chest freezers, which required an in-depth analysis of its manufacturing operations in an attempt to increase its throughput and overall productivity. A simulation model of the current manufacturing syst...

E$cient long-term capacity management is vital to any manufacturing "rm. It has implications on competitive performance in terms of cost, delivery speed, dependability and #exibility. In a manufacturing strategy, capacity is a structural decision category, dealing with dynamic capacity expansion and reduction relative to the long-term changes in demand levels. Sales and operations planning (S&O...

This paper studies organizational change following a shift in an industry environment, in the context of how a focused factory adapts to a change in its manufacturing objectives. We use the organizational nature of production operations to suggest that the effectiveness of adaptation will depend on how well the manufacturing requirements of the new objectives match manufacturing capabilities at...

Production decisions in a manufacturing supply chain are no longer driven by manual systems based on instinct and experience. They are regulated interactions between analysts, production managers and their collective manipulation of policies within the production information system. This paper studies the demand behavior in manufacturing supply chains and its relationships to the logic of produ...

Increase in the use of computers and hi-tech gadgetry have boosted the semiconductor manufacturing industry tremendously over the past decade. At the same time, exponential rates of growth and innovation combined with cutthroat competition are putting tremendous pressure on the industry to improve manufacturing practices and reduce costs. With considerable existing work in the modeling, simulat...

Quality management has often been advocated as being universally applicable to organizations. This is in contrast with the manufacturing strategy contingency approach of Operations Management which advocates internal and external consistency between manufacturing strategy choices. This article empirically investigates whether quality management practices are contingent on a plant’s manufacturin...

Metal forming operations such as rolling, extrusion, and drawing offer many opportunities for operations improvement through better process understanding and improved planning practices. This paper addresses short and medium term planning issues in sheet, plate, and tube manufacturing operations. First, v^e identify certain distinctive characteristics-the inherent process flexibility, close int...