Purpose – Supply chains directly influence the differentiation and cost of a firm's products and services and its exposure to risk. The purpose of this paper is to use secondary financial data to explore the relationship between supply chain and firm performance by developing a unified proxy...

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between business‐level strategy and organisational performance and to test the applicability of Porter's generic strategies in explaining differences in the performance of organisations. Design/methodology/approach – The...

Purpose – This article aims to explore that despite the prominence of lean since 1990, there still exist ambiguous perceptions about the prominent obstacles preventing organisations either adopting lean or thwarting its wider implementation. Design/methodology/approach – A total of 68 UK...

Purpose The issue of manufacturing flexibility has been widely discussed in the literature. One major area of focus has been the development of taxonomies for flexibility. This paper aims to review the contributions in this area and to propose a new classification and a framework for analysing...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to understand how the full potential of the global phenomenon “Six Sigma” can be realised in low volume, high complex manufacturing. Design/methodology/approach – The research reported on in this paper is based on a case study company – ComplexCo...

Purpose – Empirical evidence suggests corporate culture and change contribute to every Lean failure. Whilst the prevailing research implies that successful Lean implementations lead to a profitable organisation, it also points towards the low numbers of organisations fully adopting the Lean...

Purpose – The primary intention of this research paper is to systemically identify and discuss the longitudinal embedding of the nature of the changing role of first‐tier managers (FTMs) – drawing particular attention to the trends, typical characteristics and complexities associated with...

Purpose – There is a view that firms should decide between a lean or agile approach to supply management primarily on the basis of whether their product offering is “functional” (predictable demand, low variety and a long life cycle) or “innovative” (unpredictable demand, high variety...

Purpose – The objective of the research is to identify and analyse the main barriers to new product development within small manufacturing companies. Design/methodology/approach – The study has employed a longitudinal case‐study methodology, which has focused on data gathering from three...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the factor structure of the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ) in a UK context. For a number of years studies have failed to reproduce the original MLQ factor structure. A paper published in Leadership & Organization Development...