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This paper aims to present an effective approach to integrated circuit (IC) throughput enhancement, called TΔT thermal control. It does not require any micro-architectural change of the IC. The only modification is the attachment of an additional temperature sensor at the heatsink boundary. TΔT control technique enables assessment of changes in the dimension of cooling conditions and quick reaction to the dynamic changes in the surrounding environment. As a result, the chip can operate flexibly while minimizing thermal violation.

Using additional knowledge about the surroundings, the on-chip temperature is regulated. The approach is first investigated theoretically. To validate the utilized thermal model, the measured temperature values of the designed and fabricated testing device are compared with the simulated one. The authors evaluated the impact of the additional sensor location on the reaction time (RT). Using the Spice model, further investigation helps to verify the hypothesis.

The control technique described in this paper showed that the temperature of the chip can be regulated using an additional knowledge of the surrounding environment. It has also been demonstrated that the attachment of an additional temperature sensor close to the cooled surface of the package enables TΔT thermal control technique to react faster (rapid powering up/down of the IC). Therefore, this lowers the risk of shutdown while keeping the temperature close to the thermal limit (the maximal temperature of the chip) for a significant period. The simulation results showed that a higher ambient temperature leads to diminution of the interval in which the on-chip temperature stays almost constant when TΔT technique is used (time shift).

In this study, a new thermal throttling technique that uses the full physical ability of the chip operating under thermal constraint has been evaluated.

The ideas expressed in this work are based on those put into practice at the Okuma Corporation of Japan, one of the world′s leading machine tool manufacturers. In common with many other large organizations, Okuma Corporation has to meet the new challenges posed by globalization, keener domestic and international competition, shorter business cycles and an increasingly volatile environment. Intelligent corporate strategy (ICS), as practised at Okuma, is a unified theory of strategic corporate management based on five levels of win‐win relationships for profit/market share, namely: ,1. Loyalty from customers (value for money) – right focus., 2. Commitment from workers (meeting hierarchy of needs) – right attitude., 3. Co‐operation from suppliers (expanding and reliable business) – right connections., 4. Co‐operation from distributors (expanding and reliable business) – right channels., 5. Respect from competitors (setting standards for business excellence) – right strategies. The aim is to create values for all stakeholders. This holistic people‐oriented approach recognizes that, although the world is increasingly driven by high technology, it continues to be influenced and managed by people (customers, workers, suppliers, distributors, competitors). The philosophical core of ICS is action learning and teamwork based on principle‐centred relationships of sincerity, trust and integrity. In the real world, these are the roots of success in relationships and in the bottom‐line results of business. ICS is, in essence, relationship management for synergy. It is based on the premiss that domestic and international commerce is a positive sum game: in the long run everyone wins. Finally, ICS is a paradigm for manufacturing companies coping with change and uncertainty in their search for profit/market share. Time‐honoured values give definition to corporate character; circumstances change, values remain. Poor business operations generally result from human frailty. ICS is predicated on the belief that the quality of human relationships determines the bottom‐line results. ICS attempts to make manifest and explicit the intangible psychological factors for value‐added partnerships. ICS is a dynamic, living, and heuristic‐learning model. There is intelligence in the corporate strategy because it applies commonsense, wisdom, creative systems thinking and synergy to ensure longevity in its corporate life for sustainable competitive advantage.

The purpose of this research is to examine the effect of internal lean practices on multiple operational performance dimensions, and assess the contingency perspective of these relationships with respect to industry clockspeed.

The study is based on empirical data gathered from 228 manufacturing companies in the Republic of Ireland. The relationships between the constructs are analyzed through regression analysis.

The results indicate that the relationships between internal lean practices and quality, delivery, flexibility and cost were found to be positive and significant. Further, industry clockspeed was found to moderate the relationship between internal lean practices and quality, delivery and flexibility, but not cost.

While internal lean practices can improve operational performance, managers should be aware that internal lean practices are not universally applicable, and the rate of change within an industry should be considered at the time of implementing lean principles.

Much of the lean literature tends to be biased towards its effectiveness. However, empirical evidence shows that not all lean implementation have led to positive results, which has been attributed to the general complexity in the relationship between internal lean practices and performance. We propose to investigate further this relationship by disaggregating operational performance into four of its dimensions, namely quality, delivery, flexibility and cost, and by investigating the possible contingency effect of industry clockspeed.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the moderating impact of industry clockspeed (IC) on the relationship between Lean Manufacturing (LM) practices and operational performance. A model for evaluating the impact of LM is developed and the moderating effect of IC is taken into consideration as a fundamental variable that affects the causal relationship between LM practices and operational performance.

A structural equation model was proposed and investigated across two groups based on IC level (Group 1: low IC and Group 2: high IC). A structured survey questionnaire was used to collect empirical data from 600 companies listed by the Confederation of Zimbabwean Industries. A total of 214 usable questionnaires were obtained giving a response rate of 35.6 percent. The data were analyzed using Smart PLS 3 and SPSS version 25.

The results revealed that LM practices directly and positively affected operational performance and IC had a positive moderation effect on the relationship between LM practices and operational performance. The results indicated that the structural equation model remained invariant across the groups. This showed that IC had a moderating effect on the relationship between LM practices and operational performance for both low IC and high IC industries.

The study analyzed the moderating effect of IC in Zimbabwean industries. The study will provide further evidence to managers on the impact of LM practices on operational performance in developing countries.

To provide an overview of the most commonly used performance and productivity evaluation metrics in the semiconductor industry in order to understand both the impact of the different metrics and the relationship between them, and to identify emerging opportunities for future research.

A range of recently published works (1988‐2003), which aim to provide engineering‐oriented approaches for the analysis of manufacturing operations in the semiconductor industry, is reviewed and critiqued to help researchers and practitioners to well understand the impacts of implementing such performance metrics. After a background on performance management, the metrics are sorted into sections and analysed both individually and in comparison with one another.

Information about each performance index, mainly indicating how it is applied to semiconductor fabrication, as well as the internal and external factors that affect it. A list of relevant scientific works related to these topics is presented.

This paper only focuses on a review of manufacturing performance in the semiconductor industry. Nevertheless, the analysis does not limit the applicability of some concepts to other types of manufacturing industries.

A very successful source of information and analysis that has general applicability as a reference tutorial for practitioners and researchers within the operations and production management community, and especially for those working with the integrated circuit semiconductor industry.

By adding a management dimension, this paper is a useful synthesis of practitioners' insights and of the contents of research papers that have been traditionally engineering‐oriented. This analysis has general applicability as a reference tutorial for practitioners and researchers within the operations and production management community.

Admissions planning decides on the number of patients admitted for a specialty each day, but also on the mix of patients admitted. Within a specialty different categories of patients can be distinguished on behalf of their requirement of resources. The type of resources required for an admission may involve beds, operating theatre capacity, nursing capacity and intensive care beds. The mix of patients is, therefore, an important decision variable for the hospital to manage the workload of the inflow of patients. In this paper we will consider the following planning problem: how can a hospital generate an admission profile for a specialty, given a target patient throughput and utilization of resources, while satisfying given restrictions? For this planning problem, we will develop an integer linear programming model, that has been tested in a pilot setting in a hospital. The paper includes an analysis of the planning problem, a description of the model developed, an application of a specialty orthopaedics, and a discussion of the results obtained.

To present an overview of the research and development carried out by an EC Framework 6 part funded consortium, known as MICROSCAN, for the implementation of an in‐line PCB inspection prototype system that is capable of offering comprehensive defect detection.

Four non‐destructive testing inspection modules based on digital radiography (X‐ray) inspection, thermal inspection, automated‐optical inspection and acoustic inspection have been integrated to form a combined inspection system.

A proof in principle in‐line PCB inspection system, utilising four different inspection techniques, has been developed and demonstrated. The system is based on a generic mechanical, electrical and software communications platform culminating in a flexible system that enables the inspection modules to be used separately, together or interchanged to give the best results in terms of inspection coverage and inspection throughput.

In its current embodiment, the prototype is suited to inspection of high‐return PCBs, particularly those used in medical and aerospace products, rather than high‐throughput PCB production work. The X‐ray inspection module is the slowest inspection technique and combining four different inspection techniques reduces the inspection throughput of the whole system to that of the X‐ray inspection module. Further, trials and investigations need to be carried out to improve inspection throughput.

The novelty of the system is that it is the first time that four inspection techniques have been combined to give the capability of 100 per cent defect coverage.

In new product development (NPD), changes to the initial designs are often proposed for on‐going design projects due to new insights. These engineering changes belong to a wide range from incremental to radical and, in their impact, even to discontinuous change. Consequently, the actual workload of development projects confronted with engineering changes does not match the initial work estimates for the project's work packages. Accordingly, the intended timing of readiness of development projects in an NPD program will drift away. This timing is one of the causes of change propagation to other projects which results in even more engineering changes. For larger changes, the effects on timing may be disastrous. The purpose of this paper is to reveal the cause‐and‐effect relationships triggered by various types of changes and explain the need for a more integrated approach to managing engineering change.

A longitudinal case study was performed at a leading microlithography manufacturing company, in which almost 20,000 engineering changes were included. This study allowed the disclosure of the complexities of engineering change management and provides guidelines for handling the resulting problems arising from managing these various types of change.

In the study, various sources of complexities in managing engineering change were observed, which hinder effective implementation of various types of engineering change. Based on the case observations, a number of improvement possibilities are proposed, such as: alignment of goals and impacts of engineering change on all organizational levels; and planning, monitoring and controlling discontinuous engineering changes as separate projects.

Although further studies are needed to replicate the results, the paper gives a more thorough understanding of factors that could support the implementation of discontinuous innovation in incumbent firms by using the engineering change management process.

Focusing on the important representative of firm intellectual capital (IC), this research explores the effects of chief executive officer’s (CEOs') managerial human capitals on sustaining superior performance in Chinese transition economy to prove the dynamic and strategic value of IC and fulfill the gap of lacking emerging market studies in this research field.

Based on dynamic managerial capability theoretical framework, the authors propose a dynamic management path to analyze the influencing mechanism of CEOs' managerial human capitals to firm performance persistence and the moderating effect of environment uncertainty. Using a panel data of Chinese publicly listed firms from 2008 to 2017, it adopts dynamic first-order autoregressive models to examine these hypotheses. Several tests are conducted to further analyze and ensure that the results are robust and reliable.

These managerial human capitals reveal heterogenous impacts on sustaining superior performance, and environment uncertainty is a valid moderating variable to further distinguish their dynamic values. The supplementary analyses show the integrating effect of an MBA degree and output functional experience is positive and significant, and the results in Chinese state-owned and private firm subsamples are distinct.

It is beneficial for corporate stakeholders to judge and select CEOs and for policymakers to improve the efficiency advantage of IC in Chinese emerging market.

This study first explores the relationship between CEOs' managerial human capitals and superior performance persistence. Through introducing a dynamic perspective, it has extended existing performance persistence research into individual level and provided a new intellectual source of sustainable competitive advantages.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate into the improvement strategies for lead time reduction of military aircraft major overhaul (enhance the overhaul task from present seven to nine-plus aircrafts as agreed to customer) for ABC Company.

This research has been conducted based on the available knowledge and extensive experience gained while working in the overhaul unit of the case organization for a long period of time. The research employs an integrated approach of multi-criteria decision method (in specific analytic hierarchy process (AHP)), theory of constraint (TOC) and simulation for M/M/1/K queuing environment for investigating the improvement strategies for lead time reduction in major overhaul of military aircraft. This has mainly included: Step 1: analysis of existing activity network using actual overhaul data; Step 2: ranking of constraint activities that most affects the lead time using AHP; Step 3: revised flow activity network using time buffers (TBs) concept of TOC; Step 4: mathematical model formulation for effective utilization of TB using single server finite queuing approach (M/M/1/K queuing environment); Step 5: discrete event simulation representing present overhaul conditions and revised overhaul conditions with different scenarios; and Step 6: sensitivity analysis and interpretation of results. The proposed methodology has been tested on an industrial case study dealing with an aircraft overhaul in India (namely ABC Company).

The proposed overhaul lead-time reduction plan points out the augmentation of resources in order to achieve more than 50 per cent reduction in lead time and waiting time under two scenarios – with overtime and without overtime.

An integrated approach proposed has so far been applicable to the specific aircrafts (Jaguar/Mirage/Kiran) of the ABC Company overhaul division. However, the particular methodology can be proved potentially useful and highly practical when applying to other aircraft types.

The results indicate several problems with the current overhaul strategies that need focused process improvements and a need for capacity augmentation for achieving the enhanced overhaul task of nine+ aircrafts per year with reduced overhaul lead time. The proposed approach also provides the maintenance planners with a platform for decision analysis and support often ignored the capacity augmentation.