Since the popularization of Just-In-Time JIT practices in the 1980's, companies have worked to reduce inventory levels and lower overall production costs. JIT programs have had a positive impact on manufacturing and service processes, and the success has also altered the transportation industry. The transportation of goods to and from...
Space has always been at a premium in most dairy processing plants. With necessary machinery taking up a huge part of a facility's overall footprint, processors need to make the most of the space they do have for warehousing ? all the while attempting to cut down the time products...
Innovation and speedy new product development is crucial for companies to gain competitive advantage in a global market. The main focus of this paper is to demonstrate that the principles of Just-In-Time JIT in manufacturing can be used to improve simultaneous New Product Development NPD process. Comparison and analysis of...
The prestigious redevelopment of Paternoster Square in the City of London near to St Paul's Cathedral includes the construction of three new commercial office buildings; Warwick Court, King Edward Court and St Martin's Court. The 4,500 tones of steelwork used in Warwick Court were erected in only 20 weeks out...
CGI's challenge was to use the SAP Portal module to link the three companies and streamline the supply process. Entries needed to be transmitted from Bell Canada to its cable installation partners, but remain in the Bell system for tracking. The most challenging aspect of this link would be enabling...
Time pressure increases creative output. By forcing idea production, setting goals and incremental deadlines, a greater number of ideas are produced than if a "do your best" approach is taken. Time pressure encourages prolific production and therefore the probability of generating good ideas increases. There is a pervasive belief that...
Toyota is number three on Fortune's 2007 Most-Admired Companies list, largely because of its reputation as a super-efficient manufacturer with an eco-consciousness. But, despite all the talk of Toyota's sophisticated just-in-time JIT inventory system, the company actually relies on a more basic practice to stay lean and green -- kanban...
Outsourcing is not something that is "Going to happen," it has already happened. To what level, and more importantly, how it is done are the key priorities for defining the new HR Outsourcing HRO strategy. HRO can be defined in several ways, but to put it simply - HRO is...
Retail businesses confront daunting new challenges in nowadays marketplace. The trend toward market globalization has opened up new retail market opportunities for businesses of every size and description. To stay ahead of the competition, retailers must effectively manage a multitude of variables, maximize efficiency, and collaborate effectively with trading partners...
Developing products for the agile paradigms is the ultimate, and most challenging, application of concurrent engineering. In agile product development, product development teams must concurrently develop flexible processes that are so agile that companies can quickly develop a broad portfolio of niche market products, build products to order, mass customize...
Among the lessons companies learned from the disastrous hurricane seasons of the past two years along the Gulf Coast: Few businesses are immune to supply-chain shocks. Even organizations remote from natural disasters may find their supply lines, already pulled taut by global sourcing, supplier consolidation and just-in-time initiatives, stretched to...
Linking seemingly disparate business functions like demand planning, sourcing and logistics can often yield very positive results by reducing costs and improving performance in supply chain operations. The widespread adoption of just-in-time JIT inventory principles undoubtedly makes production operations more efficient, cost effective and customer responsive. Companies effectively implementing JIT...
The coordination of just-in-time production and transportation in a network of partially independent facilities to guarantee timely delivery to distributed customers is one of the most challenging aspects of supply chain management. This paper focuses on the ready-made concrete delivery: in addition to the mentioned complexity, strict time-constraints forbid both...
The IDS Integrated Defense Systems Boeing St. Louis plant is at the frontier of fostering workforce flexibility and new investment in skills. Pioneering systems for just-in-time delivery of training combine with high performance work systems, front-line quality inspection, and labor-management cooperation. This experience points the way toward a model of...
In a very competitive world, pressures on retailers and their suppliers to lower costs continue unabated. No longer can they afford to have low-productivity, excess inventory available to handle unexpected demand. With these pressures, the supply chain is increasingly called on to service consumer demand on a just-in-time basis. Unfortunately,...
The pharmaceutical distribution sector is undergoing a change in the very structure of its core business model, shifting from a traditional "buy-and-hold" model to a fee-for-service model that is more akin to just-in-time inventory. Under the current traditional business model, distributors, to varying degrees, make a portion of their margin...
Manufacturers have developed many system processes, such as lean manufacturing and just-in-time processes, to help their organizations produce high-quality products with reproducible results across many generations of a product family. This systematic approach has led to the characterization of individual products having a lifecycle ? survey, design, build, Q/A, sell...
Given the size of the automobile industry, and the high per-unit cost of a car in inventory, it would seem that inventory management is an important issue in the automotive industry. Indeed, there has been tremendous anecdotal coverage in the business press regarding automakers' consistent efforts to reduce inventory. Most...
The Just-in-Time JIT philosophy was adopted by American Companies to control manufacturing. The Balanced Score card concept was developed to help management control overall operations. What we propose here is linking the two techniques to increase the effectiveness of both. Financial accounting measures lag performance because they are historical in...
Studies of sick pay and absenteeism have traditionally treated absence as a worker-related phenomenon. There are good reasons to suppose, though, that firms' incentives to control absenteeism are not uniform. This paper presents what we believe to be the first evidence for relationships between the nature of a firm's production...
