Purpose: The general objective of this research was to identify the practices of the mass production industries, on the decisions related to the detection of defective products and to identify relevant criteria, actions, effects and variables to be used in a decision-making model....

The use of improvement tools in manufacturing industry has proven to be an important aspect of continuous improvement activities. To determine whether the same is true in the UK construction industry, a survey was conducted to assess the current level of use and perceived importance of such...

Purpose: System reliability optimisation in today’s world is critical to ensuring customer satisfaction, businesses competitiveness, secure and uninterrupted delivery of services and safety of operations. Among many systems configurations, complex systems are the most difficult to model for...

Quality function deployment (QFD) is a system for translating customer requirements (government regulations, operating conditions and buyer expectations) into suitable technical characteristics and ensuring that important ones are prioritized in the design. The method has been successfully...

To date, very few publications have been found that describe how small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are adopting knowledge management (KM). The same is true concerning attempts to develop a framework to help them implement it. To redress this, this paper presents the results of four case...