Purpose: The goal of XPRESS is to establish a breakthrough for the factory of the future with a new flexible production concept based on the generic idea of "specialized intelligent process units" ("Manufactrons") integrated in cross-sectoral learning networks for a customized production. XPRESS...

Purpose: Servitization is a rising trend as companies look for new revenue streams. This paper presents a study of customer care business model evolution in the smartphone industry. The paper identifies key changes in the business models during recent years and their implications for companies...

Purpose: Lean approach is widely recognized today as an effective approach to process management and more specifically to performance improvement of processes. However, there is an ambiguity around this approach, which leads to the failure of several companies to achieve their desired...

Purpose: This article presents a maturity model for the evaluation of the information-driven decision-making process (DMP) in small and medium enterprises. This model is called "Simplified Holistic Approach to DMP Evaluation (SHADE)". The SHADE model is based in the "Circumplex Hierarchical...

Purpose: Existing productivity improvements activities such as inventory buffer, overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) and total productive maintenance (TPM) do not analytically associate the throughput shortage with process parameters. The paper aims to develop and test an integrated model to...

This paper discusses the nature of sustainability and sustainable development as they relate to operations management. It proposes a typology for sustainable operations management that is based on the life cycle stages of a product and the three dimensions of corporate social responsibility. The...

A new economic approach to process capability assessment is presented, which differs from the commonly used engineering metrics. The proposed metric consists of two economic capability measures - the expected profit and the variation in profit of the process. This dual economic metric offers a...

A traditional lean transformation process does not validate the future state before implementation, relying instead on a series of iterations to modify the system until performance is satisfactory. An enhanced lean process that includes future state validation before implementation is presented....

Many companies are implementing lean manufacturing concept in order to remain competitive and sustainable, however, not many of them are successful in the process due to various reasons. Communication is an important aspect of lean process in order to successfully implement lean manufacturing....