Yuan-Yuan Jiao

A financial model of flexible manufacturing systems planning under uncertainty: identification, valuation and applications of real options

Flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) have been considered to be essential for manufacturers to succeed in the uncertain market place. Flexibility typically comes at a price and is only valuable as a hedge against environmental uncertainty. It is important to determine an appropriate level of flexibility in the production system while considering the tradeoffs between its costs and benefits. This paper proposes to apply a real option theoretic approach to the modeling and analysis of various types of uncertainty involved in an FMSs operational environment. In comparison with financial options, real options in the context of an FMS, namely, production options, are identified and accordingly a pricing model for production options is proposed based on the option theory. Based on the valuation of production options, a general framework of flexibility planning is formulated. The real option approach surmounts traditional discounted cash flow analysis based valuation methods that tend to ignore the upside potentials to an investment from management flexibility. The proposed model is tested in a refrigerator company that deals with high product variety and uncertain demand.

Integrated BOM and routing generator for variety synchronization in assembly‐to‐order production

Purpose – Traditional production management systems are often designed to support manufacturing based on a limited number of product variants. With the emerging trend of producing customized products to meet diverse customer needs, the number of product variants increases exponentially in mass customization. In a situation of assembly‐to‐order production, production planning and control involve not only product variety, but also process variety. It is imperative to synchronize product and process variety in a coherent manner.Design/methodology/approach – This paper discusses integrated product and production data management for assembly‐to‐order production. An integrated BOM and routing generator is proposed for the purpose of unifying BOM and assembly‐planning data in order to accommodate a wide range of product variability and production variations.Findings – An integrated BOM and routing generator excels in variety synchronization for assembly‐to‐order production planning.Research limitations/implicati...

Customer Knowledge Management of Mass Customization Enterprises Based Value Chain

Mass customization has become the main mode of production and management in the 21st century. Customer knowledge becomes important strategic resources of enterprises, it is an urgent problem for academia and business community that deeply studying of customer knowledge of mass customization enterprises and effective manage. Revealing the characteristics of customer knowledge of MC enterprise through analyzing customer knowledge of MC enterprise, studying the management process and forms of customer knowledge in main links of mass customization value chain, and establishing customer knowledge management process model of MC enterprise based on value chain.

A Customized Training Model Evaluation System of Higher Vocational Education

Customized training model of higher education must be vigorously promoted. A customized training model evaluation system of higher vocational education should be built to help us improve the training model. Therefore, this paper first analyzes the strategic continuum of the customized training model of higher vocational education, and then builds the evaluation index, finally, adopts ANP approach to establish a multi-dimensional evaluation system.

A case study of hospital patient discharge process re-engineering using RFID

Radio frequency identification (RFID) tools have assumed an important role in supporting logistics and supply chain management processes. Unlike barcode systems, it is necessary to implement Business Process Reengineering (BPR) with an innovative spirit on the fundamental processes before implementing RFID to achieve greater synergy. BPR requires that there exist a fundamental framework and a proven, reliable methodology, which are generally applicable and repeatable. Towards this end, this paper presents a framework of business process reengineering based on RFID. A case study of hospital patient discharge is presented to illustrated the BPR framework.

A Practice of Total Cost Management for Integrated Product and Production Data Management

One of the challenges of integrated product and production data management lies in the synchronization of product cost data across the product lifecycle. Towards this end, this paper discusses total cost management. A feature-based product costing approach is proposed by associating cost-related design features to standard time estimation. To integrate legacy product and production data management systems, various perspectives on costing data are unified, encompassing target costing, product costing, cost control, and cost accounting. A case study of refrigerator manufacturing is reported to illustrate the feasibility and potential of the proposed approach

A JDF-based framework of computer integrated printing manufacturing

Regardless of rapid adoption of digitalization in printing production processes, production management in most printing companies is still low efficient and operated in an old fashion. This paper applies the CIM philosophy to the print-manufacturing environment. A computer integrated printing manufacturing (CIPM) framework is proposed with integration of an application architecture, a system integration framework and a job definition format (JDF) based print process control framework. The CIPM framework takes advantage of existing standards such as CIP4/JDF, XML, PDF and other advanced information technologies. These technologies make a CIPM system flexible, scalable and extensible