Conventional supply chain management (SCM) considered only three stages: pre-manufacture, manufacture and use, while the present enterprises and specially the small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) need to consider the sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) for competitive and stability in the market. It means this chain have to consider from birth to death of the products or services. S...

Global competition forces enterprises to concentrate on their core competencies while transforming themselves to participate in emerging interenterprise formations following the virtual enterprise (VE) paradigm. VE is a form that offers high flexibility, agility and resilience for enterprises to survive and prosper in the globalized economy. This paper introduces the real world VE that uses age...

Industry 4.0 concepts have brought about a wind of renewal in the organization companies and their production methods. However, this integration is subject to obstacles when it comes Small Medium sized Enterprises—SMEs: costs new technologies be acquired, level maturity company regarding its digitization automation, human aspects such as training employees master technologies, reluctance change...

In an unstable environment, enterprises are gradually realizing that there should be major changes in how they deploy their strategic resources to compete in the knowledge economy. In this paper, the role of competitive intelligence in South African manufacturing enterprises is examined. The difference between the industrial and the knowledge economy and the competitive intelligence function in...

In this competitive era, manufacturing enterprises struggle to adopt cost-effective manufacturing systems. Overview of the recent manufacturing enterprises shows that successful global manufacturing enterprises have distributed their manufacturing capabilities over the globe. The successes of global manufacturing enterprises depend upon the adaptation of appropriate manufacturing technologies l...

Networked manufacturing becomes an important manufacturing method for modern manufacturing enterprises. With the wide adoption of service-oriented architecture and cloud manufacturing, manufacturing enterprises and organisations publish their manufacturing capability, such as resources, processes and knowledge as manufacturing services. A rapidly growing manufacturing service ecosystem can be o...

The goals of this paper are to 1) examine the current practices of diagnostics, prognostics, and maintenance employed by United States (U.S.) manufacturers to achieve productivity and quality targets and 2) to understand the present level of maintenance technologies and strategies that are being incorporated into these practices. A study is performed to contrast the impact of various industry-s...