Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present an empirical study of supply chain flexibility, asking: what specific inter-firm practices are used to achieve increased flexibility in buyer-supplier pairs and in the wider supply chain or network, and how do these practices and effects...

The Workload Control (WLC) concept is one of few Production Planning and Control (PPC) solutions appropriate for Make-To-Order (MTO) companies yet its successful implementation is an enduring challenge. Most implementations reported are in large organisations yet it has been argued that WLC is...

The paper focuses on refining a Workload Control (WLC) concept to improve the applicability of the approach to the shop characteristics found in practice. This is a two-stage process leading to significant conceptual refinements to a key WLC methodology. The first stage focuses on the...

Purpose – The customer enquiry management (CEM) process is of strategic importance in engineer-to-order contexts but existing literature does not adequately describe how firms support delivery date setting and order acceptance decisions in practice. This paper seeks to explore how and why the...