The importance of productivity measures in monitoring the performance of manufacturing firms is well documented though existing methods lack effective, accurate and sensitive means of measuring operation efficiency.

The make‐or‐buy decision has been performed on the assumption that cost data are deterministic and accurate. The data available to decision makers are often highly imprecise because of estimation inaccuracy and/or errors in measurement. The bounded interval estimate is a common allowance...

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...

Investigates the industrial location decision behaviour of firms. The behaviour was determined by an examination of the firms′ attitudes measured on “location variables”. Firms representing various countries that actually located in an international industrial park and those that...

Reviews a critical aspect of job shop scheduling research, namely the decision regarding release timing of orders to the manufacturing shopfloor. Covers articles specifically addressing the order release problem; the information should prove helpful for researchers employing order release...

Introduces a set of JIT house of matrices (collectively called here JIT quality matrices (JQM) and a matrix‐based procedure to analyse the results of strategic planning and implementation. Discusses the application of this matrix‐based approach to quantify and rank a set of chosen JIT...

Goal programming is an extension of linear programming. Suggests that, although linear programming is used widely in decision‐making processes, it has a major limitation which restricts the users of the technique to narrowing their problems to a single objective function. Goal programming was...

Successful implementations of scheduling techniques in practice are scarce. Not only do daily disturbances lead to a gap between theory and practice, but also the extent to which a scheduling technique can adequately model the processes on the shopfloor, and the extent to which the optimization...

The key issue in today’s dynamic and competitive global scenario is how to develop, utilize and sustain continuously the knowledge potentials in an enterprise. This issue is about knowledge management. In this paper, an attempt is made to discuss the various issues of a learning organization...

Performance measures should be linked to an organization’s strategy in order to provide useful information for making effective decisions and shaping desirable employee behaviour. The pitfalls relating to the indiscriminate use of common maintenance performance indicators are discussed in this...