The evidence is clear that a lack of attention to structured tool management has resulted in the poor performance of many manufacturing systems. Plant tooling systems affect product design options, machine loading, job batching, capacity scheduling, and real-time part routing decisions. With...

A flexible manufacturing system (FMS) is an integrated system of computer numerically controlled machine tools connected with automated material handling. A set of production planning problems for FMSs has been defined (Stecke [Stecke, Kathryn E. 1983. Formulation and solution of nonlinear...

A flexible manufacturing system (FMS) is an integrated, computer-controlled complex of automated material handling devices and numerically controlled machine tools that can simultaneously process medium-sized volumes of a variety of part types. FMSs are becoming an attractive substitute for the...

For many high-tech and Internet-related products, utility to consumers depends in part on the size of the user base, a phenomenon called network externality. A firm with a portfolio of these and other products--that are often asymmetric in their degree of network externality or marginal...

Companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars annually on advertising to build and maintain awareness for their brands in competitive markets. However, awareness formation models in the marketing literature ignore the role of competition. Consequently, we lack both the empirical knowledge and...