Yahaya Yusuf

Agile manufacturing: The drivers, concepts and attributes

Agile manufacturing, a recently popularised concept, has been advocated as the 21st century manufacturing paradigm. It is seen as the winning strategy to be adopted by manufacturers bracing themselves for dramatic performance enhancements to become national and international leaders in an increasingly competitive market of fast changing customer requirements. This paper identifies the drivers of agility and discusses the portfolio of competitive advantages that have emerged over time as a result of the changing requirements of manufacturing. The need to achieve the competitive advantages of manufacturing in synergy and without trade-offs is fundamental to the agile paradigm. To further the understanding of agility, this paper reviews the meaning of agility from different perspectives and suggests a comprehensive definition which can be adopted as a working definition by practitioners. Four underlining concepts of agility has emerged from the working definition and the paper presents a representation of these concepts and their interactions. Finally, the paper highlights some of the key enablers of agility and identifies potential future research directions.

Agile supply chain capabilities: Determinants of competitive objectives

Changing customer and technological requirements force manufacturers to develop agile supply chain capabilities in order to be competitive. Therefore, several companies are stressing flexibility and agility in order to respond, real time, to the unique needs of customers and markets. However, the resource competencies required are often difficult to mobilise and retain by single companies. It is therefore imperative for companies to co-operate and leverage complementary competencies. To this end, legally separate and spatially distributed companies are becoming integrated through Internet-based technologies. The paper reviews emerging patterns in supply chain integration. It also explores the relationship between the emerging patterns and attainment of competitive objectives. The results reported in the paper are based on the data collected from a survey using the standard questionnaire. The survey involved 600 companies in the UK, as part of a larger study of agile manufacturing. The study was driven by a conceptual model, which relates supply chain practices to competitive objectives. The study involves the use of factor analysis to reduce research variables to a few principal components. Subsequently, multiple regression was conducted to study the relationship amongst the selected variables. The results validate the proposed conceptual model and lend credence to current thinking that supply chain integration is a vital tool for competitive advantage.

Implementation of TQM in China and Organisation Performance: An Empirical Investigation

Abstract This research on Total Quality Management (TQM) investigates the essences and processes of TQM implementation and its effects on organisation performance. In particular, it reports the results of a questionnaire survey of TQM practices in Chinese companies. The research identifies a series of concepts under TQM and the significant benefits it can bring to organisations to help them continuously improve, not only in product or service quality but also in integrated company management. The results from the questionnaire indicate that the adoption of TQM in China is extensive, and the majority of the expected benefits in the literature have been delivered to these Chinese companies. In addition, the questionnaire also includes two comparisons of organisation performance: one is between companies with and without TQM; the other is among TQM companies. The findings provide evidence that TQM can positively impact firm performance depending on the degree of implementation.

Application of activity‐based costing: some case experiences

In present day manufacturing organizations, performance measurements play an important role in providing strategic directions and developing corresponding operational policies and methods. One such method is the activity‐based costing (ABC) method which calculates the cost of activities and helps in making decisions on product mix and price for improving the utilization of resources and minimizing the cost of production. Even now some manufacturing organizations employ traditional costing methods depending upon their market forces and characteristics. One of the most important decisions to be made is about the type of costing system that would be suitable for an organization. The role of direct labour in current manufacturing environments has diminished, but at the same time the level of support services has increased. Traditional methods of cost calculation do not take into account this increased complexity and still allocate overhead costs by their diminishing labour base or even do not take into account overhead costs. Hence, there is a need for a more accurate product costing method, viz. ABC. Discusses the application of ABC and some case experiences (for commercial reasons, the original identity of the companies is concealed) with the objective to provide information on whether the system would be applicable and under what circumstances it is better suited for improving the overall operational effectiveness of an organization.

Volume flexibility: the agile manufacturing conundrum

Agile manufacturing is a response to competition in environments characterised by unpredictable change, so having the ability to vary capacity, respond to sporadic changes in demand, mass customise at the cost of mass production, and compete in both mass and custom markets is crucial. Empirical justification of the benefits of implementing agile manufacturing is rare in the literature and an in‐depth empirical study of the benefits of implementing agile manufacturing practices is lacking. This article aims to address this gap by conducting a preliminary analysis of a much wider empirical research. The adoption and impact of a set of tools – enablers of agile manufacturing – were studied through a survey by questionnaire. The results show lower volume flexibility at higher levels of adoption of the five enablers, thus the resource competencies for enhancing it were not in place. Also, volume flexibility ranked very low in hierarchy of future improvement plans. Suggests virtual cells, and its extension into supply chain networks, as a solution to volume flexibility.

Embedded devices for supply chain applications: Towards hardware integration of disparate technologies

The emergence of the RFID technology and its application to supply chain processes has in particular led to the creation of such standards as the EPCglobals model of supply networks as a tool for materializing intra- and inter-enterprise visibility of resources and products, collaboration and integration. Among other critical uses, RFID has been deployed by supply networks to improve asset utilization, effectively combat counterfeiting, and advance targeted product recalls. However, new affordable and deployable technologies and microsensors have recently appeared and keep maturing. This paper discusses the needs and the possibilities that exist for leveraging these technologies and sensors with RFID to guarantee continuous and seamless visibility of all assets (fixed and mobile resources and field personnel) of smart enterprises, thereby expanding and complementing the roles of RFID. It examines the design challenges for the integration of these technologies for advanced logistics operations at the level of product classes or their instances. It then outlines our development of an embedded microsystem that combines RFID, GPRS, GPS and environmental sensors for applications in logistics. The prototyped microsystem demonstrated the feasibility of the multi-sensor integration paradigm that the paper proposes.

Agile manufacturing practices: the role of big data and business analytics with multiple case studies

The purpose of this study was to examine the role of big data and business analytics (BDBA) in agile manufacturing practices. Literature has discussed the benefits and challenges related to the deployment of big data within operations and supply chains, but there has not been a study of the facilitating roles of BDBA in achieving an enhanced level of agile manufacturing practices. As a response to this gap, and drawing upon multiple qualitative case studies undertaken among four UK organisations, we present and validate a framework for the role of BDBA within agile manufacturing. The findings show that market turbulence has negative universal effects and that agile manufacturing enablers are being progressively deployed and aided by BDBA to yield better competitive and business performance objectives. Further, the level of intervention was found to differ across companies depending on the extent of deployment of BDBA, which accounts for variations in outcomes.

Agile manufacturing and constraints management: a strategic perspective

The definition of the agile paradigm has proved elusive and is often viewed as a panacea, in contention with more traditional approaches to operations strategy development and Larkin its own methodology and tools. The Theory of Constraints (TOC) is also poorly understood, as it is commonly solely associated with production planning and control systems and bottleneck management. This paper will demonstrate the synergy between these two approaches together with the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ), and establish how the systematic elimination of trade-offs can support the agile paradigm. Whereas agility is often seen as a trade-off free destination, both TOC and TRIZ may be considered to be route finders, as they comprise methodologies that focus on the identification and elimination of the trade-offs that constrain the purposeful improvement of a system, be it organizational or mechanical. This paper will also show how the TOC thinking process may be combined with the TRIZ knowledge based approach and used in breaking contradictions within agile logistics.

Ethical supply chains: analysis, practices and performance measures

Ethics has been studied in numerous disciplines and its application to various practices has been investigated over the years such as in medicine and law. This has been relatively recently extended into the business arena, and has become a matter of growing interest for many companies. It has led to questions concerning what constitutes ethical behaviour, to what extent ethical practices should be adopted and what benefits a company may derive from its adoption. There are numerous processes involved in the transformation of a product from source to consumer, and these must be managed to produce an optimal balance of business requirements, specifically profitability, and a consideration of the wider impacts they may have or make. The supply chain has become vital to organisational success that companies now compete as supply chains rather than as individual entities. Therefore the ethical conduct of the supply chains has also begun to be scrutinised, both from an internal business performance perspective, and from the increasing concerns held by the numerous stakeholders of the organisation. In light of these developments, this paper explores the notion of ethics as it applies to supply chains. It also examines supply chain ethical practices and demonstrates that there is an empirical relationship between ethical practices and performance. The results show that ethical practices have positive impacts on the performance of the supply chain.

Corporate social responsibility in Nigeria’s oil and gas industry: the perspective of the industry

Nigeria is an exemplar of the challenges of achieving sustainable development in the paradoxical twin realities of resource endowment and acute inequalities originated by difficulties of governance. The paper empirically demonstrates the role of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in facilitating the resolution of this paradox. In its several forms, CSR permeates the industry. The industry deploys CSR as a form of social licence to gain and retain acceptability by its host communities. Previous studies of CSR in the oil and gas industry in Nigeria have focussed solely on multinational operators and their activities, particularly the Nigerian outlet of Royal Dutch Shell, in the Niger Delta region. The present study differs from previous studies by including a significant number of small and medium enterprises trading in the industry, both in and outside of the Niger Delta region and both in the upstream and downstream sectors of the industry.