Manufacturing information systems need to integrate and to enhance different information functionalities such as workflow management. Software agents can solve the problem as an additional software layer of an existing manufacturing information system. In this respect, several current research projects focus on workflow management, with the aim of an integration and coordination among plant and...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to understand how effective Turkish small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) use enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems in module aspect and to assess the adherence to lean manufacturing requirements. Obtaining each efficiency result separately is not adequate to make an inference about relationship between ERP and lean practices. Hence, a relational m...

This paper aims to comprehend the intrinsic limitations of the market players in the financial system and how these create a situation of `missing middle` for small and medium industries (SME) financing in Bangladesh. A clear dualism prevails in the manufacturing industry of this country. While the SMEs maintains the biggest share in establishments and employment creation, large enterprises (LE...

Advanced Manufacturing Technology (AMT) plays a major role in quality and flexibility improvements in Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). Advanced manufacturing technologies provide a great potential for improving manufacturing performance to compete in the global markets. Proper decision making in pre-implement and implementation of Robot technology as one of the types of AMT plays an importa...

The product design process operates over user needs to develop functional specifications which are further developed into physical forms. Manufacturing information fed into function-based design provides an effective tool for this function to form transformation. Multidisciplinary teams formed across the supply chain are charged with this process for large-scale product development. For small e...

Virtual prototyping in manufacturing gains more and more importance, since companies competing in industry noticed the increasing cost pressure alongside higher quality requirements. The utilization of virtual prototyping techniques provides a possibility to reduce the total development costs and the time to market, while simultaneously innovations of both products and processes increase the ov...

The Labour Contract Law of People’s Republic of China came into effect in 2008 to supplement the first Labour Law of 1994. The enactment of this law, however, coincided with the outbreak of the world’s financial tsunami at the same time. Many enterprises in China, especially manufacturing factories, faced tremendous difficulties of both the decreasing sales orders from the West and increasing o...

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Since the late 1990s, vendors of integrated management tools called ERPs (enterprise resource planning) have found their primary market, mainly large companies, is saturated. To find new customers, they have begun to market these products to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) (generally with about 100 to 500 employees) (Deep, Guttridge, Dani & Burns, 2007; Muscatello, Small & Chen, 2003). Howe...

Enterprises serve a purpose that is largely the reason as well as the result of its existence in a form that is most amenable for its sustenance. Despite this fact, seldom is the case that enterprises are designed or operated in a way that will bring out the best of its capabilities. The structure, normally designed by an external agency and to satisfy some instant of a future in mind is quite ...