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...

Production responsiveness refers to the ability of a production system to achieve its operational goals in the presence of supplier, internal and customer disturbances, where disturbances are those sources of change which occur independently of the system’s intentions. A set of audit tools for...

Five hundred financial executives from North American companies were surveyed by means of a mailed questionnaire to gain a view from outside the operations functions of the basis on which aggregate inventory decisions are taken. The response indicated that more functions than might have been...

A visual based group decision‐making process used for office layout finalisation is described. While quantitative and computer based models can be used for planning alternative layout plans, considerations of qualitative and personal factors should be given during the layout finalisation...

The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), as applied to the plant location problem, involves the structuring of this decision‐making process into different levels. Each level has certain attributes unique to the structure of the problem. Two levels of attributes are considered in the plant...