Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide practitioners of management and interested research a sense of how the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament is affecting worker productivity in the workplace. There are several positive and negative issues concerning how some employees are...

The history, successes, failures and future needs that relate to the allocation of functions to humans and/ or machines in manufacturing environments are presented. The various methodologies that have been proposed for performing function allocation are discussed. The basic process involves...

Presents an assignment model formulation for the machine cell formation problem in cellular manufacturing based on an appropriate definition of dissimilarlity between any pair of machines for the grouping problem. This dissimilarity measure considers the production volume or demand for the parts...

Presents the similarity coefficient method for group technology to alleviate the part family formation problem in flexible manufacturing systems (FMS). Part families are formed in FMS in order to take advantage of part similarities in design and manufacture. Parts coding and classification...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide practitioners of management with a sense of how collaborative team integration processes were required in order to be reasonably successful in attaining the required manufacturability goals. It aims to accomplish this by investigating: the role...

There has been much debate on the relevance to firms of the academic research produced by business schools. However, what has not received as much attention is how the relevance of the research to businesses should be measured in a systematic and empirical way. We develop a systematic method to...

This paper proposes an integrated optimization model of aggregate production planning (APP), family disaggregation planning, and family scheduling problems in hierarchical production planning (HPP) systems considering sequence-dependent family setup times. The model obtains the optimal...

As more and more companies embark on the never‐ending journey of continuous improvement and world‐class manufacturing, their success will depend to a great extent on their ability to win the purchasing battle. It is common knowledge that it is purchasing′s charge to oversee the acquisition...

The notion of globalization was an emerging trend during the course of the past century, and the notion of progress has been a basic tenet of the Western paradigm throughout the entire past millennium. Given the desperate situation in which large segments of the world find themselves and the...