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Whether or not a company is able to compete in the local and global arena depends significantly on how effectively the company can build up the partnership synergy with their business counterparts. With the emergence of a dispersed manufacturing network, the important issue is the criteria for the selection of the right partners for the right tasks. In this respect, it is essential to develop the necessary techniques to measure the performance of potential business partners prior to making the decision of partner selection. This paper suggests a performance measurement technique incorporated with on‐line analytical processing (OLAP) technology to support enterprise decisions related to selecting appropriate business partners. It also includes examples to illustrate how to apply this technique in real industrial situations.

A typical product design project involves a number of activities, and each activity requires human resources support. These activities and resources must be properly planned and scheduled in order to achieve optimum project time and cost. This paper proposes a process planning and scheduling (PPAS) system which is based on the concept of process planning typically used for the planning of production activities. Object technology (OT) is chosen as the platform for the development of the PPAS model for its specific characteristics such as inheritance, encapsulation, polymorphism etc. Presents the concept of the PPAS system, discusses its relationship with reference to product design, and proposes the use of object technology as a platform for building the PPAS.

Strategic information systems contribute to enhance managerial understanding in terms of organisational development and business success. In particular, they assist in making timely business decisions and formulating feasible strategic plans. In practice, a strategic information system consists of several modules performing different functions such as strategic prerequisites, strategic directions and so forth. The integration of these modules to form a unified system is an essential task for achieving an efficient as well as effective strategic information system. In today’s business environment, where there are a great variety of standards in various computer systems that make the linking of modules to enable bi‐directional electronic data interchange difficult and costly. This paper attempts to introduce a model which embraces a neutral format approach to realise the efficient and reliable information flow among various modules of a strategic information system. Furthermore, the proposed guidelines for implementing such a system using the neutral format generalisation technique are also covered.

This paper attempts to propose a virtual case‐based benchmarking system (VCBS) which incorporates computational intelligence technologies into partners' benchmarking process to support decision‐making.

The proposed system consists of three main modules: data repository module, OLAP module and case‐based reasoning (CBR) module. The VCBS is a web‐based application that enables users to access the system and submit information to the system in anywhere at anytime. The database repository, on the other hand, maintains and acquires the data that are generated in the transactions processes and other workflow processes. It also ensures the entire valuable data which are accessible for the management to make decisions. The OLAP and the CBR modules are considered as the brain of the VCBS. The CBR module is aimed for short‐listing candidate, while the OLAP module is utilized for benchmarking the short‐listed candidate.

The VCBS is particularly useful in situations where multiple supply chain partners are involved to achieve the common objective to produce the products to the best satisfaction of customer demands with the lowest possible cost.

Since data warehouse does not update in real time it only performs update periodically during non‐office hours to avoid network traffic. The solution provided to the company may not be the most updated information.

The proposed system improves the current practice of partner selection by adopting the computational intelligence technologies into the traditional partner selection process with the assimilation of data repository, CBR and OLAP to form the integrated system for evaluation of potential partners prior to the final decision.

In today’s volatile business environment, whether a company is able to compete in the local and global arena depends heavily on how effective the company can build up the partnership synergy with their business counterparts. Indeed, it is important that companies are able to monitor effectively on the manufacturing activities outside its boundary, such as business partners with dissimilar business nature and probably geographically isolated from each other. With the emergence of a dispersed manufacturing network, the important issue is the communication with the partners, collection of data, and making use of data. This paper calls for an effort to suggest practical and agile approaches and models to avoid a poorly managed supply chain in order to improve productivity and cost‐effectiveness to support the business. The agility of the supply chain models would also be concerned to ensure that there is enough adaptability in the system to respond and tackle problems that may occur in the turbulent market.

This paper proposes an infrastructure of a responsive supply chain network, focusing on the deployment of the m‐commerce technology which transforms a traditional supply chain network to be more effective in coping with market changes.

The proposed supply chain infrastructure embraces the concepts of distributed object technology, wireless markup language (WML), and extensible markup language (XML) schema to enable efficient data exchange among various data objects which reside in distributed platforms over geographically‐isolated regions, thereby leveraging the responsiveness of the entire supply chain network. A case study is conducted to evaluate the feasibility of the proposed model.

Recent studies have found that wireless technology, mobile computing and internet programming techniques drive the development of mobile solution in various industries. Apart from location tracking of goods as well as relevant services, m‐commerce is able to play an important role to enhance the performance of a supply chain network, which is concerned with the proper monitoring of suppliers and production circles, encompassing a wide spectrum of value chain activities ranging from product design to after‐sales services.

The significance of this research is the demonstration of the synergy of using a combination of emerging technologies to form an integrated system that helps achieve flexibility and agility in supply chain network.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a hybrid risk management model, focusing on identification and evaluation of potential risk scenarios in industry/enterprise level, which assists in preventing negative impacts from adverse risks.

The proposed hybrid risk management model embraces the concept of hierarchical holographic modelling (HHM), enterprise‐wise risk management (ERM) and risk filtering, ranking, and management (RFRM) that could be applied in real commercial settings. A case study is conducted in order to validate this comprehensive theoretical model.

This study shows the potential risks that may be faced by the textile industry in Hong Kong. Corresponding responses are suggested for the risks in different levels, which provide a systematic approach in managing the risks.

The use of a single case study may limit the generalizability of the findings.

The risks suffered by the textile industry are identified through the case study, which provide an insight for better planning and preparation, so as to gain a better chance of success than that of competitors.

The proposed model does not only provide theoretical merits to the literature but can also be applied to different industries for risk management practices.

Supply chain management (SCM) has gained a tremendous amount of attention from both industries and researchers since the last decade. Until now, there are numerous papers, articles, and reports that address SCM, but there is still a lack of integration between the existing performance measurement methods and practical requirements for the SCM. An innovative performance measurement method is proposed to provide necessary assistance for performance improvement in SCM. The proposed method will address this purpose in these four aspects: a simplified supply chain model; tangible and intangible performance measures in multiple dimensions; a cross‐organizational performance measurement; and fuzzy set theory and weighted average method.

To develop a new benchmarking process for continuous improvement against the market leader, and report a case study in the postal industry by employing the proposed benchmarking process.

A double AHP methodology is developed in this paper to divide benchmarking process into two main parts: performance evaluation and continuous improvement. Both qualitative and quantitative factors have been taken into consideration. The first phase aims at evaluation of the performance of the benchmarked company and its competitors. The second phase aims at finding the best practice from a list of improvement alternatives based on the first phase.

The proposed framework can evaluate the performance of the case company against its competitors. It can also help the company to select the best improvement alternative for implementation in order to enhance its performance on the weakest measures.

The proposed benchmarking process in this paper can help the case company to identify its weaknesses and then select the best improvement alternative in order to improve its performance against the market leader. Although the postal industry is used to demonstrate the proposed framework, it can be applied to other industries with a little modification.

The increasing consciousness of sustainable development and reconciling production with ecosystem conservation have fostered the adoption and implementation of environmental management systems (EMS). This paper investigates the critical processes and factors that may affect EMS planning. Empirical findings of a recent study in Hong Kong are presented, and a five‐stage EMS planning framework starting from strategy formulation to system implementation and evaluation is proposed. The framework integrates various perspectives of environmental management and strategy formulation. The paper provides organisations with a procedural guide for implementing environmental management practices. Flexible adaptation of the framework can help organisations derive potential benefits from the EMS implementation leading to sustainable competitive advantage. The framework can be modified to cater for varied business nature and operations in industry.