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 need for an efficient provision of product variety has been widely established as a means of competing in the marketplace, yet previous studies into the management of product variety have commonly analysed products in isolated developed markets. The purpose of this paper is to...

The economic growth and industrial development in China over the last decade has been of considerable interest to industry and policy-makers alike, and also been subject of many academic studies. Considerable research on the macro-economic growth and process of industrialisation, as well as the...

Supply-chain coordination relies on the availability of prompt and accurate information that is visible to all actors in the supply chain. However, new demands on the supply-chain system require changes to information flow and exchange. We undertake a case study of three automotive supply chains...

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to understand how large and apparently successful organizations enter spirals of decline that are very difficult to reverse. The paper examines the case of Rover, once one of the largest car producers in the world, which collapsed in 2005. An analysis of...