providing wider variety of products often leads to higher complexity in the manufacturing and business system. finding appropriate methods and techniques to manage these difficulties is going to be an attractive topic for researchers in operations management. by adopting a qualitative approach we have investigated the product variety management in the apparel supply chain. the main contribution...

Recently, there has been much concern over the dumbing down of production and operations management (POM) courses in response to the repudiation of the theory-heavy operations research (OR) approach that became dominant during the 1970s. However, although almost everyone agrees that a new POM framework is needed, there is as yet little agreement on what it should be like. As a result, there is ...

The Biotech industry is still an emerging application area for simulation techniques. This paper describes the hierarchical discrete event simulation efforts at Bayer Corporation’s Berkeley facility that manufactures secondgeneration recombinant DNA technology based drug, Kogenate-FS. The facility consists of multiple manufacturing areas housing state-of-the-art biotech processes. The main simu...

The project was conducted in a high quality steel wire manufacturing company with the production capacity of over 120,000 tones/annum. The wire drawn from the high speed wire drawing (KOCH) machine is fed as the raw material for BEKEART (zinc coating galvanization) furnace. The problem faced by the company is the variability in the amount of input to the furnace, which results from the breakdow...

In recent years, there has been a decrease in accidents due to technical failures through technological developments of redundancy and protection, which have made systems more reliable. However, it is not possible to talk about system reliability without addressing the failure rate of all its components; among these components, "man" – because his rate of error changes the rate of failure of co...

Traditional learning methods in operations management are not ideally suited for externalising knowledge. In this paper, an iterative, gaming-like learning approach for practicing OM issues by using discrete event simulation model is proposed. The approach is utilising an existing learning environment called Delfoi Planner EDU. Its web-based architecture supports distance learning that is an as...

Changeability has become a buzzword for operations management, especially in German literature. Therefore, we analyze the concept in comparison with existing concepts for variability, such as flexibility and agility. Agility is an enterprise-wide concept incorporating product design as well as manufacturing systems design and aiming at lean and often dislocated manufacturing processes. Flexibil...

This volume originates from the Seventh International Conference on “Stochastic Models of Manufacturing and Service Operations”, which took place in Ostuni, Italy, in 7–12 June, 2009. The aim of this conference was to serve as a forum for researchers, academics and industrialists to discuss their most recent research findings and to provide them with opportunities for technology transfer. The c...

The field of Holonic Manufacturing was initiated in the early 1990's to address the upcoming challenges for manufacturing operations in the 21 century. It is intended to support for highly responsive organisations by providing a modular building-block or "plug and play" capability for developing and operating a manufacturing production system in order to support a more responsive organisation. ...