Approaches to business improvement have evolved and grown since the early 1900s and today the process focused, statistically driven Six Sigma methodology has been widely used by companies such as GE, Motorola, Honeywell, Bombardier, ABB, Sony, DuPont, American Express, Ford and many other...

Bayesian methods are common in reliability and risk assessment, however, such methods often demand a large amount of specification and can be computationally intensive. Because of this, many practitioners are unable to take advantage of many of the benefits found in a Bayesian-based approach....

The ALARP principle is applied in many areas to regulate the tolerable level of risk. Usually the principle is operationalized by assigning a value per fatality. A cost-benefit analysis is used to trade the expected value of lives saved with the costs of technical measures required to reduce...

Effective management of suppliers is one of the ways manufacturing companies can improve their performance. Typically, it has been argued in the literature that close relationships with suppliers should be developed, in contrast to the traditional price-driven transactional relationships....

Supplier partnerships can be the key in enhancing the performance of manufacturing companies. Consequently, partnership has been strongly recommended by academics and practitioners alike. Surprisingly, the concept of partnership is only poorly understood. Many authors have identified the...

Streamlining the supplier base is a common approach in many US and UK manufacturing companies. However, is this approach being adopted in Germany as fast as it has in the UK? This paper describes research that answers this question and investigates how German companies are managing contacts with...

A key issue for manufacturers is supplier management, i.e. organising the optimal flow of high quality, value-for-money materials or components from appropriate innovative suppliers. Many companies now recognise the central role that supplier management plays in achieving long-term competitive...

This paper reports on the use of a Qualitative Decision Support System used within the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK. The system has been used to enable the individual performance review (IPR) process to become more effective. One aim of IPR is to motivate managers. However, the vision...

Using a multiple case study, this paper is concerned with assessing the impact of senior management's approach and attitudes on service quality and its implications for middle and firstline managers. Date from 52 semi-structured interviews representing a variety of managerial levels suggests...

Call and contact centres play an important role in the global economy, employing millions of people in the USA and UK and hundreds of thousands in other parts of Europe, Africa and Asia (Russell, 2008). They are often the main point of contact for customers accessing organisations, so have a key...