The adoption of ‘best practice’ by small manufacturing enterprises (SMEs) poses many practical, theoretical, financial and organisational problems. The implementation of business-strategy-driven business process re-engineering (BPR) can be seen as a way forward towards best practice....

An increasing number of manufacturing businesses are moving towards global operations, with a manufacturing presence in most of the world's major regions. The use of information technology and business systems as a strategic weapon can be seen as a basis for achieving this end. The capabilities...

Today, there exists a shift towards the adoption of sophisticated supply chain integration and e-commerce techniques by leading global enterprises. Supply chain performance improvement initiatives strive to match supply and demand thereby driving down costs simultaneously with improving customer...

The successful implementation of international quality standards and models can be viewed as an important key for contemporary SMEs to maintain competitive advantage. One of the most influential factors in ensuring ISO 9000 adoption is the development of a management-driven, implementation...

In today‟s dynamic commercial environments, project management approaches are becoming ever more crucial in supporting industrial organizations to achieve their client and enterprise goals. An often undervalued area of this important practice may be seen as the deployment of effective risk...

This primary purpose of this paper is to develop improved insights into common enterprise systems limitations, with specific regard to industrial supply chain management co-ordination and control. Enterprise or ERP systems are now routinely used within many SMEs and can be seen to offer many...

This paper describes the practical manner in which an intranet was applied to a small manufacturing company to support its BPR programme. The company is involved in the design and manufacture of speciality knitting machines. Its market share and turnover have been improving rapidly over recent...

An increasing number of manufacturing businesses are placing direct emphasis on operations management as a means of achieving competitive success in the contemporary performance measures of quality, speed and price. The use of information technology (IT) and business systems as a strategic...

This paper reports research into the specification and implementation of an Information Technology (IT) Route Map for supply chain systems development and deployment. The purpose of the Map is to enable rapid design and implementation of IT solutions, capable of semi-automating business...

In recent years there has been a broad shift towards the sophisticated adoption of supply chain integration and e-commerce (EC) techniques by leading logistics enterprises. A central element of this move has been the evolution of e-marketplaces or trading hubs and portals, which it is suggested,...