To develop a sustainable competitive advantage, companies need to offer products and/or services that keep attracting customers. Focusing on operational excellence is one of the strategies companies can adopt in order to do so.
The Production Dice Game is a powerful learning exercise that demonstrates the impact of variability and dependency on throughput and work-in-process inventory. The insights obtained by playing the game can also be extended to a service or supply chain context. This article presents an overview of the dice game and the four extensions the authors have made to the game to reflect real-life characteristics more accurately.
Strategic alliances have become a common feature of supply chains, with managers of companies along the chain integrating their processes to enhance competitiveness. Yet research shows that alliances do not guarantee success – and little is known about why some strengthen the market position of the partners while others do not. Evelyne Vanpoucke and Ann Vereecke set out to understand which aspects of an alliance are more likely to deliver success. This article explores how behavioural features of an alliance – such as trust and commitment, and how partners communicate and manage the relationship – impact performance.
A complex daily surgery schedule must balance the needs of individual patients with available equipment and recovery beds, and will benefit from employing a planning tool using algorithms that can be accessed through user-friendly software. Brecht Cardoen and Erik Demeulemeester set out to examine how a decision support system using optimization algorithms can help medical staff improve their scheduling.
A maintenance company whose staff provide day and night coverage for airlines on a complex flight schedule needs to keep its labour costs down without alienating unions yet remain flexible enough to cover for the unexpected. Time to call in an algorithm. This project, explained in the paper “Improving Workforce Scheduling of Aircraft Line Maintenance at Sabena Technics”, demonstrates the potential for optimization programming taking in diverse demand and supply variables to solve complex scheduling problems.
The financial crisis, triggered by the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, resulted in a spectacular dip in industrial production in 2009 and into 2010. However, over the same period, retail sales remained fairly constant. In this paper, the authors argue that the shockwave throughout the industrial world was caused by the inventory policy adopted by manufacturing companies: due to the de-stocking and re-stocking practices, real demand was distorted along the value chain. The authors urge close monitoring of, and insight into, the real state of consumer demand to ensure the sustainability of the current economic recovery.
The changing European market and increased globalisation may have consequences for current top logistics regions, such as Flanders (Belgium). New regional distribution centres to serve the local East European markets may arise, but they will not replace the economic value-adding distribution centres currently located in Flanders. In addition to helping us understand the differences between the European Distribution Centres and giving us a view on their landscape, the analysis of these centres can also guide a region in developing its logistics policies.
Meant to complement rather than compete with the existing books on the subject, this book deals with the project performance and control phases of the project life cycle. It presents a detailed investigation of the project’s time performance measurement methods and risk analysis techniques in order to evaluate existing and newly developed methods in terms of their abilities to improve the corrective actions decision-making process during project tracking.
The international manufacturing landscape has changed significantly over the past 10 to 15 years. Manufacturing as a percentage of GDP has been reduced in many of the industrialised countries, and we have seen a major shift in the allocation of production capacity around the world. In the period 1995-2005, manufacturing moved from 18.9% to 14.4% of GDP in the USA; from 21.7% to 14.4% in the UK; and from 23.4% to 21% in Japan.
In the summer of 2006, some conflicts arose between the emergency department (ED) and some of the internal nursing departments (INDs) of Ghent University Hospital. The ED staff did not understand why the CEO had communicated a message about the low occupancy rate of the beds in the hospital, because he had been confronted for some years with the phenomenon of access blocking in the ED. Furthermore, the ED staff had evidence of the fact that the access of patients from the ED to the INDs was being blocked even though there were free beds in these nursing departments. As a consequence, the ED regularly became overcrowded, which led to an unacceptable workload for the ED staff.