Awaluddin Mohd. Shaharoun

The link between total quality management and organizational performance in Malaysian automotive industry: The mediating role of ISO/TS16949 efforts

The principal aim of this article is to determine the impact of total quality management (TQM) and ISO/TS16949 efforts on organizational performance of Malaysian automotive industry. Based on theoretical considerations, a model is proposed linking the TQM constructs and ISO/TS16949 efforts to the organizational performance. Exploratory factor analyses and reliability analysis empirically verified and validated the underlying items of TQM, ISO/TS16949 and organizational performance. Structural equation modeling was employed to test the model drawing on a sample of 161 Malaysian automotive industries. Data analysis reveals that, TQM implementations have a strong and positive impact on organizational performance through direct relationship and also through a mediating role of ISO/TS16949 efforts.

Generation of look-up tables for dynamic job shop scheduling decision support tool

Majority of existing scheduling techniques are based on static demand and deterministic processing time, while most job shop scheduling problem are concerned with dynamic demand and stochastic processing time. As a consequence, the solutions obtained from the traditional scheduling technique are ineffective wherever changes occur to the system. Therefore, this research intends to develop a decision support tool (DST) based on promising artificial intelligent that is able to accommodate the dynamics that regularly occur in job shop scheduling problem. The DST was designed through three phases, i.e. (i) the look-up table generation, (ii) inverse model development and (iii) integration of DST components. This paper reports the generation of look-up tables for various scenarios as a part in development of the DST. A discrete event simulation model was used to compare the performance among SPT, EDD, FCFS, S/OPN and Slack rules; the best performances measures (mean flow time, mean tardiness and mean lateness) and the job order requirement (inter-arrival time, due dates tightness and setup time ratio) which were compiled into look-up tables. The well-known 6/6/J/Cmax Problem from Muth and Thompson (1963) was used as a case study. In the future, the performance measure of various scheduling scenarios and the job order requirement will be mapped using ANN inverse model.