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...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to develop a typology of co‐located supplier clusters, such as logistics centres or supplier parks, and second, to evaluate the theoretical perspectives at hand to investigate the co‐location phenomenon. Design/methodology/approach –...

Manufacturing systems in many industries face the challenge of manufacturing products that are assembled from multi-variant components. Demand for these component variants is correlated, and often subjected to an overall capacity constraint (e.g. fixed production volumes in the final assembly...

Purpose – While the concept of supply chain responsiveness (SCR) has received considerable attention in the operations management literature, mostly under the auspices of concepts such as build‐to‐order, mass customisation, lean and agility, so far there is a lack of comprehensive...

Lean production not only successfully challenged the accepted mass production practices in the automotive industry, significantly shifting the trade-off between productivity and quality, but it also led to a rethinking of a wide range of manufacturing and service operations beyond the...

This paper explores the relationship between lean principles and success in markets for premium products. Drawing on data from two sectors — automobiles and high-end audio equipment — the paper notes that the development of premium brand products is often driven by strong organizational...

Despite the fact that the benefits of lean production have been documented across many industry settings, firms find it difficult to extend lean principles downstream into their distribution systems. In this paper we review and synthesize previous contributions on lean principles towards...