A special issue on e-technology and manufacturing enterprise competitiveness
A special issue on e-technology and manufacturing enterprise competitiveness
About the Guest Editors
Dr Panayiotis KetikidisVice Principal of CITY Liberal Studies – an affiliated institution of the University of Sheffield and is responsible for the Computer Science department and the Centre for Information Services. His main role within the South East European Research Centre (SEERC) is the overall management of the centre and the development and implementation of SEERC future research agenda. Also to provide strategic leadership in the planning of SEERC research projects and to assist in strengthening existing partnerships and establishing new ones in the South East European (SEE) region as well as with government, non-governmental organisations and with industry and the private sector. Dr Ketikidis’ early work was with leading research institutes in the USA. He is also the President for the International Society of Logistics – Chapter Thessaloniki (1999-2005). He has also been involved in many European Information Technology Projects funded by the European Commission (1992-current) and he is a member of organising and scientific committees in various national/international conferences/workshops and of the editorial board of the International Journal of Operational Research. His research interests are: ICT policy, logistics information systems, medical informatics and research strategy.
Dr S.C. Lenny Koh Director of the Logistics and Supply Chain Management Research Group and an Associate Professor/Senior Lecturer in Operations Management at the University of Sheffield Management School, UK. She holds a doctorate in Operations Management and a first-class honours degree in Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering. Her research interests are in the areas of production planning and control (ERP and ERPII), uncertainty management, modern operations management practices, logistics and supply chain management, e-business, e-organisations, knowledge management, sustainable business and eco-logistics. Dr Koh has 166 publications in journal papers, book, edited book, edited proceedings, edited special issues, book chapters, conference papers, technical papers and reports. She is the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Enterprise Network Management and the Associate Editor of the International Journal of Operational Research. She is on the editorial board of several international journals and has guest edited many high profile journals. She organised and chaired international conferences and on the board of scientific/international/programme committee of many international conferences. She has received grants and awards from several national and international funding bodies, and has been a consultant to SMEs and large enterprises.
Dr Angappa Gunasekaran Director of Business Innovation Research Center and a Professor of Operations Management in the Department of Management at the Charlton College of Business, University of Massachusetts (Dartmouth, USA). He is teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in operations management and management science. Dr Gunasekaran has over 175 articles published in 40 different peer-reviewed journals. He has presented about 50 papers and published about 50 articles in conferences and given a number of invited more talks in about 20 countries. Dr Gunasekaran is on the Editorial Board of over 20 journals. He has organized several international workshops and conferences in the emerging areas of operations management and information systems. Dr Gunasekaran has edited a couple of books. He is the Editor of Benchmarking:An International Journal. He has edited special issues for a number of highly reputed journals. Dr Gunasekaran is currently interested in researching benchmarking, management information systems, e-commerce (B2B), information technology/systems evaluation, performance measures and metrics in new economy, technology management, logistics, and supply chain management. He actively serves on several university committees.
This special issue of Journal of Manufacturing Technology Management (JMTM)on “e-Technology and Manufacturing Enterprise Competitiveness” mainly comprises of selected papers presented at the 3rd International Workshop on Supply Chain Management and Information Systems (SCMIS2005), hosted by the SEERC– a collaborative venture of the University of Sheffield (UK) and Thessaloniki’s CITY Liberal Studies (Greece) – affiliated institution of the University of Sheffield, on 6-8 July 2005, in Thessaloniki, Greece. This workshop was jointly organised by the University of Sheffield (UK), CITY Liberal Studies – affiliated institution of the University of Sheffield (Greece),SEERC (Greece), University of Nottingham (UK), The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (China), University of Massachusetts (USA), Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece), University of Macedonia (FYROM), Athens University of Economics and Business (Greece), and National Chung Hsing University (Taiwan).
Globalisation, modernisation and streamlining paradigms have driven many enterprises to use various e-technologies in order to improve the performance of existing operations, and compete globally and strategically to enhance manufacturing enterprise competitiveness, which in today’s digital economy,is often networked and interconnected via the internet, intranet, and extranet. Examples of the e-technology include e-commerce, e-business, e-procurement and e-logistics. These technologies are in place to support the notion of establishing a value-added e-supply chain and e-demand chain. The support of back-office systems, e.g. supply chain management, manufacturing resource planning, enterprise resource planning are crucial to enable seamless information flow in the supply chain, whilst support from front-office systems,e.g. customer relationships management, is important to coordinate the demand chain. Appropriate alignment of the e-technology with the systems is expected to create further competitive advantages. Hence, e-technology is a core competence in contributing to competitiveness in the digital economy. It is not merely a facilitating enabler, but a critical enabler towards globalisation.
Past research on aspects of e-technology tends to be fragmented. In today’s digital economy, practitioners of production and operations need to address their evolving business landscape in formulating, designing and implementing competitive solutions in order to add value to their business. This special issue aims to investigate the performances, successes, failures, critical issues and roles of e-technology in contributing to manufacturing enterprise competitiveness. The special issue consists of theory building and empirical study papers that have strong relevance to the practical world in manufacturing sectors, as well as case studies and papers with best practices experiences.
This special issue contains ten papers contributed by researchers and practitioners from Hong Kong (China), India, Italy, Greece, Spain, Turkey, UK and USA. The papers cover a diverse range of contributions including research on operational intelligence discovery, risk and uncertainty in supply chains, total quality management (TQM) related performance, supply chain transformation; and application of order fulfilment systems, knowledge mapping and knowledge-based approach, real option approach, fuzzy approach, classification framework,portable maintenance system and e-business capabilities model. The normal JMTMreview guidelines were followed.
Koh and Tan in their paper, “Operational intelligence discovery and knowledge mapping approach in a supply network with uncertainty” propose an approach for discovering operational intelligence and enabling knowledge mapping in a supply network with uncertainty. Knowledge mapping and handbook techniques were used and operationalised with a software tool named TAPS. TAPS was used to model a supply network with uncertainty and to discover operational intelligence in a supply network. This research found that knowledge management itself is inadequate for managing a supply network with uncertainty. It should be supplemented by knowledge mapping with capability of identifying the operational intelligence within the supply network. To this end, iTAPS was developed in order to provide managers with an ability to visualise the operational intelligence for a given objective, and to identify the likely effects on implementing a particular tool or technique in a supply network. The main contribution from this research was the proposed new approach called the “intelligence handbook” used to discover operational intelligence in order to map knowledge in a supply network with uncertainty.
The paper, “Risk management in supply chain: a real option approach”by Cucchiella and Gastaldi, aims to individualise a framework for the management of uncertainty in supply chain aiming to reduce firm risks. They argued that a way for reducing the damages derived from uncertainty sources is through increasing the level of flexibility within the supply chain. The real option theory would enable the addition of flexibility in the supply chain. They applied the real options theory to study risks within the supply chain. A theoretical framework has been individualised, enabling the selection of possible options to protect the firm against the risk originating from sources of uncertainty. Using Matlab for testing, it was found that the ability of outsource option can minimise firm risks.
Pibernik in his paper, “Managing stock-outs effectively with order fulfilment systems” provides a consistent formal approach to modelling order promising mechanisms, introduces new and innovative order promising mechanisms and gives valuable insight into their performance through numerical analysis. In this research, a different order promising mechanism was suggested,and analysed to examine how well this mechanism could contribute to the effective management of stock-out situations. A formal description and analysis of alternative order promising mechanism applicable in make-to-stock systems was provided. This empirical research was conduced based on the data of a pharmaceutical company. The potential of alternative order promising mechanisms to alleviate the negative consequences associated with a temporary stock-out situation were noted. The results obtained from this analysis provide guidelines for manufacturers, retailers, and vendors of supply chain software on how to design and utilise order promising systems.
The paper, “Optimising supply chain management using fuzzy approach”by Gunasekaran, Rathesh, Arunachalam and Koh, put forward a fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making procedure and it was applied to find a set of optimal solution with respect to the performance of each supplier in a supply chain. Responses obtained from customers were simulated using a triangular fuzzy quality function deployment (QFD) algorithm, Monte Carlo simulation and a multi-objective model to optimise the total user preferences. It was identified that this method with the use of Monte Carlo simulation produces overall desirability level less imprecise and more realistic than those of the conventional QFD methods for engineering design evaluation.
Cheung, Chan, Kwok, Lee and Wang in their paper, “A knowledge-based service automation system for service logistics” highlight that effective service logistics can lower the cost and increase service value by improving customer satisfaction and loyalty. It was purported that although the concept of service logistics has been used in different sectors of the industries, the advantages of service logistics have been overlooked by high-tech and high value manufacturing industries. This paper presents a knowledge-based service automation system (KBSAS) to enhance the competitiveness for manufacturing enterprises in service logistics. The KBSAS incorporates various artificial intelligence technologies such as case-based reasoning which is used for achieving four perspectives of knowledge acquisition, service logistics, service automation and performance measurement, respectively. A prototype customer service portal has been built based on the KBSAS and implemented successfully in a semiconductor equipment manufacturing company.
The paper, “The applicability of a multi-attribute classification framework in the healthcare industry” by Danas, Roudsari and Ketikidis,introduces a new approach to address the inefficiencies of hospital pharmacy management. The study examines the applicability of the Ned-MASTA classification method for managing medicines inventory within the hospital pharmacy environment. A virtual pharmacy inventory system was suggested that forms a virtual pharmacy inventory of hospitals within the same geographical region. These facilities were envisaged to provide the infrastructure for the cooperation of hospital pharmacies in order to improve the efficiency of their operations. A survey was conducted among Greek hospitals to identify the inefficiencies of their logistics systems. They argued that it was considered vital and necessary to investigate the solutions adopted by other industries that are facing similar problems. Hence, the case of spare parts inventory for production machines was used to present similarities with the management of medicine stock within the hospital pharmacy. The approach that was adopted by the spare parts case was adapted and included in the system that forms a virtual hospital pharmacy inventory. Then, the MASTA classification approach was modified to fit in the operation of the hospital pharmacy and a system was constructed to form the virtual pharmacy inventory. The applicability of the system was demonstrated through an application scenario using a prototype system.
Leung, Lee and Chung in their paper, “Systems and application development for portable maintenance aid (PMA) – a performance perspective”explores the theory of technology adoption using a system-application approach to facilitate PMA innovation span across multiple organisations in order to enhance overall production network effectiveness. The survey on available technology and forecast future trends led to the development of a workable prototype for testing in real-world airline operation under a three-layer analysis model. Industrial data was used to validate the concept and correlate performance factors in PMA adoption. This research revealed that greater operational efficiency and higher process value maintenance can be achieved through communication paths. The value process-to-shop concept was validated,next to the value network. This research provided maintenance business,especially with high contents of information and knowledge driven tasks for outsourcing service providers, with the concept of the adoption rules for wireless system for assets and maintenance performance management.
The paper, “e-Business capabilities model: validation and comparison between adopter and non-adopter of e-business companies in UK” by Hafeez,Keoy and Hanneman, presents a conceptual framework to evaluate e-business strategic capabilities using structural equation modelling approach. Three e-business capabilities namely business strategy, supply chain strategy and e-business readiness were identified. These capabilities were further categorised under technology, organisation and people tracks/paths/branches to assess their contribution in business effectiveness. Survey data from 143 firms from the UK was collected to test the theoretical model. They found a positive,mediating/reciprocal relationships among multidimensional measures of business strategy, supply chain strategy and e-business adoption. Their empirical analyses demonstrated several key findings:
Success of e-business in UK firms is attributed to the strong positive correlation of supply chain strategy to business strategy and to e-business adoption.
Within the technology-organisation-people dimensions, e-business adoption and business strategy emerge as the strongest factors for the company’s performance for the adopter of e-business group, whereas supply chain capabilities and business strategies are relatively stronger contributory factors towards business success for non-adopter of e-business.
It was envisaged that these findings would provide useful guidelines for companies to assess their strengths and weaknesses towards adopting an effective e-business implementation strategy.
Demirbag, Tatoglu, Tekinkus and Zaim in their paper, “An analysis of the relationship between TQM implementation and organisational performance:evidence from Turkish SMEs” determines the critical factors of TQM and measures their effect on organisational performance drawing on a sample of 141 SMEs operating in the Turkish textile industry. Using exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, seven empirically validated dimensions of TQM were identified. Organisational performance was measured using subjective measures relying on executive’s perception of how the firm performed relative to both financial and non-financial performance criteria. The structural equation modelling technique was employed to investigate the relationship between the implementation of TQM practices and organisational performance. Data analysis revealed that there is a strong positive relationship between TQM practices and non-financial performance of SMEs, while there is only weak influence of TQM practices on financial performance of SMEs. With only a mediating effect of non-financial performance, TQM practice has a strong positive impact on financial performance of SMEs.
The final paper, “Transforming the supply chain” by Fassoula analyses the transformation process of supply chain and provides a modular structured management tool for planning, implementing and measuring the effectiveness of supply chain transformation process, in relation to overall organisational performance and business strategy. It was purported that overall organisational performance is meant to reflect the satisfaction rate of all interested parties (customers, employees, stakeholders, suppliers and social partners) and the reliability of operations. The critical sensitivity factors of a transformation process formed the conceptual platform for the proposed management tool.
We could not have done this by ourselves and we totally appreciate the efforts and support of all who were involved in making this special issue possible, which includes the authors, referees, Editor of JMTM –Professor David Bennett, and the editorial staff of JMTM. The guest editors gratefully acknowledge the assistance provided by the Editor of JMTMand the referees who reviewed the manuscripts for this special issue.
Panayiotis H. KetikidisSouth East European Research Centre, CITY Liberal Studies – Affiliated Institution of the University of Sheffield, Thessaloniki, Greece S.C. Lenny KohUniversity of Sheffield, Management School, Sheffield, UK, and Professor Angappa GunasekaranDepartment of Management, Charlton College of Business, University of Massachusetts, North Dartmouth, Massachusetts, USA
