Is your company lean? It can be, with the help of MSU’s Institute of Furniture Manufacturing and Management. Faculty in the Institute have been looking in depth at lean processes and how they can be implemented in Mississippi furniture and supplying companies. A series of studies that relate specifi cally to the development and use of lean manufacturing techniques in furniture and wood componen...

Quality by Design (QbD) refers to a holistic approach towards drug development. QbD has become the answer to assist both industry and FDA to move towards a more scientific, risk based, holistic and proactive approach to pharmaceutical development. The concept promotes industry’s understanding of the product and manufacturing process starting with product development, basically building quality ...

This paper aims at assessing the supply chain and innovation management in the manufacturing industries in Turkey on an empirical basis. The assessments presented are based on parts of the data and information collected through the execution of the Competitive Strategies and Best Practices Benchmarking Questionnaire in 82 companies from four sectors of the manufacturing industries in Turkey. Re...

The annual (year 2001) survey of manufacturers conducted by IndustryWeek magazine, and reviewed by a national engineering society, indicates that the average manufacturing company is "just beginning its journey to adopt lean strategies". The review confirms there is a small but definite increasing trend in the movement towards the adoption of lean manufacturing techniques within U.S. plants. Ho...

Facility layout design is a strategic issue and has a significant and lasting impact on the efficiency of a manufacturing system. An ideal facility layout provides the optimum relationship among output, floor area and manufacturing process. Traditionally, the facility layout problem is solved using many methods like heuristics, Mathematical programming, Knowledge based approaches etc. This pape...

Manufacturing system design and operation is critical to achieve strategic company objectives. This must aim fitting manufacturing systems capabilities to the different demand market environments, having in consideration the different approaches and strategies that should be used. In this paper we develop a framework for characterizing production system conceptual models and linking them to bot...

The implementation of lean manufacturing concepts has had a significant impact on various industries. Many companies around the world have attempted to implement lean manufacturing, but the lack of an obvious understanding of lean measurement and its performance has caused its implementation to fail. This paper presents an innovative approach by using fuzzy TOPSIS to measure the production lean...

Lean Manufacturing has helped several industries to achieve operational and manufacturing excellence by increasing productivity and enhancing quality, while reducing waste and costs. However, the wood industry has been historically slow in adopting this philosophy and its many tools. In times when overseas competition has taken big portions of the traditional market share for U.S based wood ind...