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The purpose of this paper is to study the evolution of a system stationary availability and determine the optimal preventive maintenance period, which maximises it in a context where preventive and corrective maintenance actions are imperfect and have non‐negligible durations.

The quasi‐renewal process approach and a (p, q) rule are respectively used to model corrective and preventive maintenance. Considering the durations of the preventive and corrective maintenance actions as well as their respective efficiency extents, a mathematical model and a numerical algorithm are developed in order to compute the system stationary availability.

It has been proven that for any given situation regarding the system, the repair and preventive maintenance efficiency extents, and the downtime durations for preventive and corrective maintenance, there is necessarily a finite optimal period T* of preventive maintenance which maximises the system stationary availability. A sufficient condition for the uniqueness of the optimal solution has also been derived. Numerical examples illustrated how preventive and corrective maintenance efficiency extents affect simultaneously the system optimal availability.

The study considers a general industrial framework where preventive and corrective maintenance actions are imperfect. In fact, neither the best‐qualified technicians nor the most suitable tools or spare parts are found to carry out maintenance actions. In such a context for a large variety of technical systems, when implementing preventive maintenance policies one should take into account the efficiency extents of maintenance actions as well as their durations in order to evaluate and optimise the system availability. The paper provides maintenance managers with a decision model allowing not only the computation and optimisation of system availability, but also the investigation of how preventive and corrective maintenance efficiency extents affect simultaneously the system optimal availability. The proposed model also allows one to find to what extent corrective actions ineffectiveness should be tolerated without having an important availability loss.

The paper proposes a modified formulation of the quasi‐renewal process taking into account the non‐negligible duration of corrective maintenance actions and periodic preventive maintenance. A new numerical algorithm is also developed in this context to compute the quasi‐renewal function that it is impossible to find in closed form. This allowed the computation and optimisation of system stationary availability.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of ISO 9001 quality improvement requirements in ISO 9001:2008, i.e. the corrective and preventive actions and internal audit, on customer satisfaction.

For the purposes of the study, data were collected via a survey on 200 aerospace and transportation companies that belong to a Canadian multinational company supply chain. The relationships between the corrective and preventive actions and internal auditing, on the one hand, and customer satisfaction, on the other, were examined via the structural equation modeling technique.

The major contribution of this study is that it has identified internal audit as the most influential continual improvement ISO 9001 requirement prior to the ISO 9001 transition phase, along with the corrective actions, while the preventive actions in the present formulation do not significantly influence customer satisfaction.

This study is based on a cross-sectional survey conducted on the supply chain level in the aerospace and transportation sector; hence, a longitudinal study is possible as a future research avenue. The generalizability of this study’s findings is limited to similar supply chains around a multinational company consisted of companies that have at least ISO 9001 standard, but also fulfill other industry-specific requirements. Also, findings are based mainly on quality managers’ attitudes, so future studies are recommended to examine other positions’ views, too.

This research contributes to the literature and bridges the gap between theory and practice. It could be of value to both the certification bodies and the organizations that are interested in improving customer satisfaction by implementing ISO 9001 in the multinational supply chains context such as the aerospace and transportation sector.

While the influence of the ISO 9001 standard on customer satisfaction has been the subject of prior research, this is the first time that the simultaneous effect of the corrective and preventive actions and internal auditing on customer satisfaction has been studied. The validity of the removal of preventive actions from ISO 9001:2015 has also been analyzed.

This paper explores the operationalization of production network coordination – the production transfer (PT) – and the relationships between transfer risk sources, preventive actions, supply chain disruptions, corrective actions and losses to better understand how to mitigate the risk and achieve an effective transfer process.

A longitudinal field study of a PT process from Norway to Spain was studied in depth for 25 months.

The paper presents the implications of three areas of importance for PT success: (1) how the transfer influences the plant roles, (2) the cross-locational management of the transfer project at the sender and receiver and (3) whether adapting the transferred production to the receiver's environment is an enabler or an inhibitor of transfer success.

The findings about how to mitigate the transfer risk and the frameworks of risk sources, supply chain disruptions, losses and preventive and corrective actions, along with the examples from the in-depth study, can aid the practitioners in managing PTs and achieving the relocation goals.

This is one of the first studies of PT, which is from the perspective of both transfer parties, and addresses both preventive and corrective actions and all the transfer phases. Moreover, this study addresses the operational aspects of production network coordination, which received limited attention in earlier research.

The current information system use in quality management and ISO 9000 certification process is typically utilized in administration and documentation. The existing software do not satisfy the technical information needs for ISO 9000. There is a need for tools that can help management to decide on technical aspects such as proper corrective and preventive actions or design verification and validation activities. This paper analyzes the information requirements of ISO 9000 standards and identifies the areas where a decision support system can be used. Further, it proposes a conceptual framework for company‐wide information management, while it explains the modular approach to the system development by introducing and empirically testing the prototype model for a corrective and preventive actions module. The proposed system will provide the conceptual structure for a quality assurance information system within organizations.

This paper aims to describe the extent of supplier access to customer forecast information and the perceived quality of such information and also to explain the impact of forecast information access and forecast information quality (FIQ) on supply chain performance.

FIQ is defined, and a measurement instrument is developed from theory. The analysis is based on a survey of the most important suppliers of 136 Swedish companies.

Findings show that a large proportion of the suppliers receive customer forecasts, but that the FIQ is lower further upstream in the supply chain and, in some variables, lower for make‐to‐order suppliers. The greatest information quality deficiency of the forecast was that it was considered unreliable. The only significant difference in supply chain performance found between make‐to‐stock suppliers with and without access to forecast was related to the use of safety stock in finished goods inventory.

The study contains two types of conclusions: those developed from the conceptual discussion in the theoretical framework and those of the empirical study. In the theoretical framework, measurement instruments for FIQ and supply chain performance (corrective actions, preventive actions and customer service performance) were developed. The study identified several empirical relationships, but it was conducted on a sample with a lot of variation.

The understanding of the performance impact of FIQ. FIQ shows quality deficiencies on all variables, which indicates room for improvement.

Research on supply chain information quality as well as dyadic research approaches are rare.

The purpose of this paper is to establish a procedure to examine an organization's improvement process and its adverse factors.

The objectives were to find a way to represent content of a specific improvement process and analyse reliability of improvement processes conducted at operational, tactical and strategic levels. Inspirations of the text were various heuristic schemes used in a process of problem solving: to stimulate transfer of data by formulation of questions (5W or 5Why); to control the flow of the process (QC Story or 8D etc.); and to document results of operation (Ishikawa, fault‐tree diagram, and others). The outcomes are: a questioning scheme on Improvement Story by 5 Whys, which provides guidance, through a study of an organization's improvement processes related to containment, corrective and preventive type; and diagrams of the Prevention State Transitions and the Improvement Snail, which facilitate navigation through the above processes.

There is a finite sequence of Why‐questions, which can be used to analyse basic characteristics of systems of improvement processes in organizations. This scheme has a direct graphical representation in the Improvement Snail and the Prevention States Transition diagrams.

The scheme has a wide scope of applications: it can be used retrospectively or in parallel to a running process of problem solving. A context of the analysis may be auditing an improvement process or monitoring a particular improvement project.

The scheme combines various aspects of improving the effectiveness of an organization's functions. It can represent, in a systematic way, information concerning risk issues related to: the problems and their mechanisms; the effectiveness of improvement processes that are related to various levels of organization: operational, tactical and strategic and their coordination. The scheme is flexible, as it can be combined with various analytical techniques such as fault tree diagram etc. and it can be adjusted to any specific purpose, by modifying the structure and content of questions set.

This paper aims to develop a procedure for preparing production transfers based on risk management principles. The procedure should help companies reduce the amount of supply chain disruptions during transfers and achieve their outsourcing/offshoring objectives.

The procedure was developed during a three-year Design Science study. First, a literature review and case studies were conducted to frame the research problem. Second, a preliminary procedure was developed based on preventive risk mitigation actions from the production transfer literature. Third, the procedure was implemented during an electronics-offshoring case and refined during workshops with the sender and receiver’s transfer personnel. Fourth, during a seminar, transfer practitioners verified the procedure by applying it to outsourcing/offshoring cases with which they had experience.

Most of the preventive actions were evaluated as relevant for the transfers the procedure was applied to, regardless of industry and relocation type. Moreover, the electronics-offshoring case showed that the success of a production transfer not only depends on the physical, knowledge and supply chain transfers, as presented in earlier research, but also on the administrative transfer and on the organisation, project and quality management actions. This paper also attempts to enhance the production transfer literature by clarifying transfer risk management.

The procedure can be used during the production transfer phase as a preparation procedure. Moreover, it informs the decision-making process during the relocation-decision and supplier-selection phases.

To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first production-transfer-preparation procedure based on risk management principles.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss a practical approach taken by utilizing the non‐conformance/event management and failure investigation (FI) system to formally troubleshoot an actual process failure observed in the sequencing facility.

In this study the authors describe how the cause for the poor quality sequence data, as indicated from the quality score, involving high molecular weight follicular lymphoma DNA samples for a study of tumor‐associated genome rearrangements was successfully identified and confirmed through the application of a well structured FI process.

Through this FI process the underlying causes were effectively identified, immediate corrective actions were executed and a preventative action to avoid or minimize reoccurrences was also implemented and monitored for effectiveness.

This paper establishes that by applying a systematic, documented FI process the underlying causes of a process failure in an organization can be effectively identified and appropriate corrective and preventative actions can be successfully adopted.

Service outsourcing/offshoring represents an increasing phenomenon. Several factors (e.g. cost reduction, flexibility, access to new technologies and skills, access to new markets, focus on core activities) motivate the location of (IT or business) processes abroad and/or out of the companies' boundaries. This choice determines also relevant risks. Knowledge and data protection constitutes one of the most relevant issues in service outsourcing/offshoring because it can strongly affect the success of these projects. The purpose of this paper is to propose an assessment framework that highlights the main risks of offshoring and outsourcing projects.

Building on the model developed by Monczka et al. (2005), this work proposes a FMEA assessment framework that highlights the main risks of offshoring and outsourcing projects, their causes, effects and some possible (preventing/correcting) actions. The proposed framework has been implemented and tested in a multinational company for a long time involved in service offshoring/outsourcing projects.

Adopting a failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA) approach, the study describes the main possible failures, their causes, effects and possible (preventive and corrective) actions, along all of the phases of typical outsourcing/offshoring projects.

The paper develops an assessment framework able to identify the security risk profile of companies engaged in outsourcing/offshoring projects by considering the technical, legal and managerial aspects jointly; and detecting the causes of possible security failures and the related preventive and corrective actions.

This paper seeks to document an approach to reduce scrap losses using the root cause analysis technique in a lean manufacturing environment.

The study uses lean manufacturing root cause problem solving (RCPS) technique. The study starts with the collection phase, followed by the analysis phase and ends with the solution phase. Supporting data are presented using a Pareto chart to prioritise wastage in order to be more focused for improvement. The Toyota Production System's 5‐whys analysis is performed to analyse the cause of wastages, to formulate and implement corrective actions.

The application of the 5‐whys analysis in a manufacturing industry (XYZ Corporation) provides a fact‐based and structured approach to problem identification and correction that not only reduces, but also totally eliminates defects. Corrective action has permanently eliminated the top defect, which is the “last piece material scratch” and this results in zero scrap thereafter. In this study it was also proven that with sound understanding of manufacturing coupled with possible solutions using the 5‐whys analysis the authors were not only able to eliminate waste, but also to do it with zero‐cost.

The approach documented in the paper can be extended to other areas in the manufacturing industry to help improve overall equipment efficiency, breakdown, time loss, customer complaints, etc.