Purpose – To provide an overview of the history, evolution, and existing research on continuous improvement. Design/methodology/approach – Extensive review of the literature. Findings – This paper provides an overview of continuous improvement, its inception, how it evolved into...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a continuous improvement methodology developed in an aerospace company that is successfully being used by other companies in various industries. Design/methodology/approach – A case study was undertaken at a medium‐sized aerospace company...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to propose a framework of critical success factors, metrics, and tools and techniques for implementing metrics for each stage of the new product development (NPD) process. Design/methodology/approach: To achieve this objective, a literature review was...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to study the effect of selected scheduling dispatching rules on the performance of an actual CIM system using different performance measures and to compare the results with the literature. Design/methodology/approach: To achieve this objective, a computer...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to propose a framework of critical success factors, metrics, and tools and techniques for implementing metrics for each stage of the new product development (NPD) process. Design/methodology/approach: To achieve this objective, a literature review was...

Purpose: The majority of a company's improvement comes when the right workers with the right skills, behaviors and capacities are deployed appropriately throughout a company. This paper considers a workforce scheduling model including human aspects such as skills, training, workers'...

Purpose: The lean methodology and its principles have widely been applied in supply chain management in recent decades. Manufacturers are one of the most important contributors in a supply chain and inventory plays a paramount role for them to become lean. Therefore, there should be appropriate...

Presents the findings of an empirical study conducted on Canadian firms on the latest version of the ISO9000 standard, ISO9001:2000, which takes a process‐based approach to quality management systems. The study focuses on the difficulties faced by firms and attempts to determine the...

Purpose – This paper aims to present the findings of a case study conducted at ABC Structures (pseudonym), which is a small North American manufacturing company that has spent close to one year working on implementing the ISO 9000 standard. The main obstacles faced by ABC during implementation...