Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Innovation is key source of a company’s competitiveness in the knowledge economy, and continuous improvement is a key element of such corporate pursuit. Lean production is a globally competitive standard for product assembly of discreet parts. Successful Lean application is conditioned by an evolutionary problem-solving ability of the rank and file. Such ability is in itself contingent on employee involvement in improvement programs and the implementation of appropriate practices. But the challenge of operating innovative Lean systems lacks statistically valid guidance. This empirical study is based on 294 worker responses from twelve manufacturing sites in four Brazilian industry sectors. It identifies particular practices that impact employee participation in change or improvement activities and their performance outcomes.

Business Environments need to react more efficiently and quickly to demand in today’s global markets. Previous research by the authors entailed reviewing the current understanding of the different types of generic business improvements that are applicable to the production environment through a literature review. It highlighted that widely used methodologies have similarly links and differentiating characteristics, thus producing many types of implementation strategies. The research resulted in studying the interrelationships between these Manufacturing Business Improvement Concepts including Cultural Issues surrounding process improvement initiatives, so they can be unified into an integrated Methodology creating a unique strategy that can be correctly tailored to a chosen environment. This paper outlines a methodology that involves ten stages of change including the planning, creating, data collection, analysis and strategic implementation to apply. The approach flows through the change process systematically highlighting how to achieve the best outcome and feedback into the system is also visible.

The paper presents the problems with integration of the companies within the supply chain. Usually the separate actions are undertaken by the companies to implement lean tools for production systems and external logistics processes. This situation leads to minor results or moving the costs between production and logistics processes instead of reduction. The purpose of the paper is to present the new version of Value Stream Mapping method, focused on synchronised reorganisation of company production system, external logistics processes between the company and its suppliers as well as suppliers’ production processes. This paper shows the techniques currently used to support cooperation between enterprises and will demonstrate their incompleteness and how they can be improved.

Although lean is rapidly growing in popularity, its implementation is far from problem free and companies may experience difficulties sustaining long term success. In this paper, it is suggested that sustainable lean requires attention to both performance improvement and capability development. A framework for describing levels of lean capability is presented, based on a brief review of the literature and experiences from 12 Danish companies currently implementing lean. Although still in its emerging phase, the framework contributes to both theory and practice by describing developmental stages that support lean capability development and consequently, lean sustainability.

Within the context of the EU-Project InCoCo-’s’, one of the key aims is to standardize integrative industrial service processes in order to facilitate transparency on service operation performance and the resulting customer benefit. Therefore the Service Performance Measurement System (SPMS) has been developed in order to quantify both the efficiency and effectiveness of industrial service operation activities and to support the measurement of customers’ benefit through industrial service activities. But performance indicators are only a measurable expression of the underlying system performance, a system which is ordinarily complex in nature. It follows, therefore, that it would be beneficial to understand the interdependences between performance indicators in order to better utilize them in evaluating the options for improvements in system performance and the monitoring of an often complex system. Based on a comprehensive literature review and making best use of the tools and expertise available to the InCoCo-S consortium, a process to develop an understanding of the interdependences between performance indicators was created and executed. The results provide both the service provider and the manufacturing customer with an insight into those performance indicators to be targeted for improvement actions and those better suited to monitoring.

In order to face their global competitors, one solution consists for manufacturing companies around the world to implement the Toyota Production System (TPS). Lean manufacturing evolved from TPS. The purpose of the paper is to demonstrate that lean principles and concepts can be successfully applied in a company from the retail industry, such as Seven-Eleven Japan. Lean retailing is now a reality that has forced manufacturers to build standard products ondemand using build-to-order techniques. The retail markets are characterized by a strong competition, short product life cycles, long product development lead times, and highly volatile demand. Today’s powerful retailers insist on low prices and refuse to carry inventory. The main objectives of the paper were achieved by using an extensive review of the literature and a case study.

The importance of business related services has been growing consequently during the past years. Industrial Services constitute the greatest share of business related service with 30% of their intermediate output. But those kinds of services are facing tremendous challenges in terms of synchronizing their process with the manufacturing processes of their customers. The EU funded project InCoCo-S aims to tackle these challenges by the development of an innovative reference model for the collaboration between Service Providers and Manufacturers. Currently, the development of the structure of the reference model is finished and its validation has already begun. In this scope, SKF, as one of the consortium partners, is currently implementing the results in their new service division — Windmill Condition Monitoring. This paper provides detailed information about conducted surveys within the InCoCo-S project, the Reference Model and its practical application.

For mixed-model production lines, this paper proposes a production control system based on lean and agile strategies for responding to changes in product mix is proposed. Performance of the proposed system under the conditions of unstable changes in product-mix is analyzed by simulation experiments, and it can be claimed that the proposed system can respond to changes in product mix by re-allocating work elements into each work center, and inventories can be decreased without decreasing customer service level.

Culture is a powerful, latent, and often unconscious set of forces that determine both of our individual and collective behavior, ways of perceiving, thought patterns, and values. Organizational culture in particular matters because cultural elements determine strategy, goals, and modes of operating. Many international managerial theories or production methods work well locally, but can not receive expected result once they are practiced cross nationally. Although SDWT can be seen as an example of cultural adaptation of lean manufacturing system, yet little is known about the inefficiency caused by the cultural differences. The academic community has remained primarily dedicated to single culture and comparative research which is no more sufficient. Cultures are patterns of interacting elements. To decipher that pattern, we propose an analytical framework based upon the investigation on how Taiwanese enterprises cope with the cultural resistance to achieve expected goals.