The circular economy (CE) aims to radically improve resource efficiency by eliminating the concept of waste and leading to a shift away from the linear take-make-waste model. In a CE, re-sources are flowing in a circular manner either in a biocycle (biomass) or technocycle (inorganic materials)....

Vehicle supply has traditionally been based on forecast-driven production, and a large fraction of cars has been sold from stock—a practice which incurs considerable cost in terms of stock holding and sales incentives. Derived from successes in other industries, the benefits of responsive...

Environmental mandates, energy security concerns, and societal demands place considerable pressure on automotive manufacturers to develop novel powertrain technologies that reduce energy consumption, and in turn, carbon emissions. The economic case for these novel technologies is far from clear,...

Over the past three decades scholars have developed comprehensive insights into the operational and strategic aspect of designing and managing the supply chain. Reviewing this ample body of knowledge however one cannot help but notice a persistent disunion between the “value chain” view that...

In an effort to improve operational efficiency, healthcare services around the world have adopted process improvement methodologies from the manufacturing sector, such as Lean Production. In this paper we report on four multi-level case studies of the implementation of Lean in the English NHS....

Defining the Ph.D. research topic is a non-trivial task, and will influence a young scholar's career way beyond the actual defence of the thesis. This note makes a case for allowing the research topic to be inspired by real-world problems and phenomena, and to let the world of practice challenge...

Purpose – An underlying principle of supply chain management is to establish control of the end‐to‐end process in order to create a seamless flow of goods. The basic idea is that variability is detrimental to performance as it causes cost in the form of stock‐outs, poor capacity...

British industrial policy for two sectors (automotive and aerospace manufacture) in the period the 1960–1990 is considered and compared with the challenges facing the United Kingdom following the financial crisis of 2008. The history of the period 1960–1990 is informed by interviews with...

The benefits of global sourcing as part of a firm’s purchasing strategy have been widely discussed in the academic literature, yet so there are few models that provide a comprehensive risk and cost assessment to guide managerial decision-making. In particular, few models capture the dynamic...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to challenge the common claim of “infinite variety” being demanded in the marketplace by measuring not just how much variety theoretically could be produced, but how much is actually demanded by the customer. To this effect, the authors propose and...