The trend for servitization is increasingly affecting manufacturing enterprises. Products are bundled with associated services to so called “Extended Products” (EP). However, the share of services becomes more and more important. This requires on the one hand an evolution of the EP concept towards greater interoperability of the physical product and on the other hand additional competencies in ...

Manufacturing enterprises are now moving towards open architectures for integrating their activities with those of their suppliers and customers within wide supply chain networks. Traditional knowledge engineering approaches with large scale or very large scale knowledge bases are not suited for such widely distributed systems. Agent-based technology provides a natural way for resolving this pr...

Workers involved in small-scale manufacturing businesses are known to comprise a high-risk population for occupational injury. The present study investigated the prevalence and correlates of occupational injury in this population. A self-administered questionnaire that solicited answers about occupational information including injury, demographic characteristics, health conditions and lifestyle...

Virtual commissioning (VC) of manufacturing systems has been researched for more than 10 years. Its intention is to test manufacturing systems and associated control programs through simulation conducted before the real systems are realised. The expected benefits in reducing debugging and correction efforts expended during real commissioning, however, can only be achieved if sufficiently detail...

Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in the manufacturing sector make a significant contribution to economic growth, yet most of the research into innovation management in the manufacturing sector has focused on large organizations. This article, however, identifies innovation drivers and their performance implications in manufacturing SMEs. Its study gathered survey data from a sample of 600 Aus...

Global competition and changing customer requirements are putting major challenges in the production planning and control systems of manufacturing enterprises. Production planning and control requires robust methods able to cope with demand variability, processing times variability, routing sequences, resource availability, etc., between other sources of variation. Production planning and contr...

The emerging of the new global economy has forced companies to adopt innovative manufacturing practices. In this context the concept of Extended Enterprise has emerged as a model which companies are pursuing in order to remain competitive in global markets. A research project named Extended Enterprise Demonstration Factory program is being carried out in order to create reference models, method...

This paper presents the results of investigation of selected problems concerning Lean Manufacturing Implementation at SMEs in México. The analysis is a result of survey conducted in a sample of 24 manufacturing enterprises and it has been supported by some Mexican governmental information sources as well as additional studies which have been conducted before. The paper presents also a prelimina...

This article studies the extent to which governments produce goods for the market (that is, the extent of public enterprise production). It concludes that the current literature dramatically understates the role of public enterprises in many lowproductivity countries. The current literature focuses on the total value of goods produced by public enterprises. This article focuses on the types of ...