Giner Alor Hernández

A systematic review/survey for JIT implementation: Mexican maquiladoras as case study

Abstract Mexico has a free trade agreement with the United States of America (USA) and Canada which was signed in 1988. This agreement created the conditions for establishing many foreign companies in several Mexican cities along the border zone between Mexico and USA. This strategy takes advantage of the geographic proximity with one of the biggest markets in the world, qualified manpower, and low production cost. With the arrival of those companies, frequently called Maquiladoras, a lot of production approaches have been introduced, and one of those widely applied is the just-in-time (JIT) production strategy. Despite the benefits of JIT, the interrelationship among several industrial factors and their impact on results derived from the implementation of JIT are unknown in Mexico. This is the underlying reason of this article, which aims at illustrating the results of a survey applied to foreign companies established in the Mexican–USA border. On the one hand, the activities developed by these companies during the implementation process of JIT are investigated and grouped as latent independent variables. These variables include organizational commitment, communication channels in organization, empowerment granted to employees, education provided in different organizational levels, and the capacity to solve problems, among others. On the other hand, the obtained benefits investigated are grouped as latent dependent variables. These dependent variables involve inventory management, quality, and cost, among others. Those aspects in the activities and benefits of the companies were evaluated using the structural equations model (SEM), which is useful to identify and analyze causal relationships. Result obtained from SEM indicates that management commitment and education are the main critical success factors in the JIT implementation, and that success can be measured through inventory, quality, and cost performance indicators.

The Use of Simulation Software for the Improving the Supply Chain: The Case of Automotive Sector

The effective decision making in the supply chain automotive can be complex because the number of suppliers and customers who form part of it. For this reason, is necessary the use of tools to help the stakeholder in the selection of better decisions that allows for improving the performance of the supply chain, one of these tools is the simulation. In this paper a system dynamics approach is used to develop a simulation model to evaluate three different scenarios that improve the performance of supply chain automotive.

The Impact of Advertising in Emergent Economic Context: A System Dynamics Simulation Approach

The continual changes in the current market have increased complexity in business strategies. Under such dynamic conditions, enterprises need new tools, methods and methodologies to deal with uncertainty, ambiguity and a huge number of interactions. This phenomenon presents important differences in emergent economies but also similarities: the success of a product in the market will depend on product design, an efficient supply chain and also upon the right advertising campaigns in order to improve profit. In parallel, enterprises in emerging economies are involved in a global business where it is necessary to consider the challenging conditions for better decision-making. System dynamics simulation is a tool that can helps enterprises to analyze and observe the effect of business strategies over global performance. Marketing and advertising considered as a business strategy is not an exception to this statement. Thus, in this article is described a methodology and a study case where system dynamics simulation helps a motorcycle distributor enterprise to assess the impact of their advertising strategies in the market share, in order to chose the most suitable strategy through a sensitivity analysis.