Managing a complex, boundary‐spanning function to maximize its contribution to the firm can be a challenging task. This research is concerned with providing management with increased understanding of the effects of different ways of managing a function, especially a significant...

Productivity, based on estimated and actual hours, of most maintenance workers is only 30 to 50 per cent. Given the significance of maintenance to manufacturing competitiveness, it is surprising how little research is being carried out. Scheduling is a crucial component of maintenance management...

The IDEF techniques have been developed in projects sponsored by the US Air Force in order to describe, specify and model manufacturing systems in a structured graphical form. These techniques can be classified in two categories: the “modelling” and the “descriptive” varieties. Compares...

Concerns scheduling five jobs through a flow shop with five machines. The distribution of makespans and the distribution of the optimal makespans was obtained by complete enumeration of all the schedules. The effect of the processing times on these distributions was investigated. Three priority...