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Presents a customer‐focused approach to effective planning of make‐to‐order production, in which production activities are driven by customer orders and all products are made to customers’ specifications. The approach plans, schedules, and co‐ordinates production activities, based on the needs of individual customer orders. In particular, an integrated bill of material and routeing data structure is used to effectively organise production data in response to product specifications of customer orders. It facilitates the creation of production jobs with varying routeings and material requirements. A job‐oriented finite capacity scheduling system is used to effectively accommodate specific needs of individual customer orders. It allows for realistic setting of delivery dates and negotiation of order changes. Key features of the approach presented show its effectiveness in planning multi‐item customer orders and multi‐level products.

An effective production planning and control system requires combining the bill of material (BOM) and routeing data to reflect the material flow through the production process. Presents an integrated BOM and routeing data model which allows flexibility in handling relationships between materials and operations to suit specific needs. It can also be used as a standard data resource for creating production jobs. Maintaining job data independently of the BOM and routeing data allows the system to accommodate a wide range of production variations in practice. In a make‐to‐order environment, jobs are created for making line items on customer orders. To manage customer orders better, develops an extended job model to allow line items of a customer order to be made by one job. Perceives the concept of the extended job model as having considerable value in a wide range of production applications.

High-involvement work processes (HIWPs) are associated with high levels of employee influence over the work process, such as high levels of control over how to handle individual job tasks or a high level of involvement at team or workplace level in designing work procedures. When implementations of HIWPs are accompanied by companion investments in human capital – for example, in better information and training, higher pay and stronger employee voice – it is appropriate to talk not only of HIWPs but of “high-involvement work systems” (HIWSs). This chapter reviews the theory and practice of HIWPs and HIWSs. Across a range of academic perspectives and societies, it has regularly been argued that steps to enhance employee involvement in decision-making create better opportunities to perform, better utilization of skill and human potential, and better employee motivation, leading, in turn, to various improvements in organizational and employee outcomes.

However, there are also costs to increased employee involvement and the authors review the important economic and sociopolitical contingencies that help to explain the incidence or distribution of HIWPs and HIWSs. The authors also review the research on the outcomes of higher employee involvement for firms and workers, discuss the quality of the research methods used, and consider the tensions with which the model is associated. This chapter concludes with an outline of the research agenda, envisaging an ongoing role for both quantitative and qualitative studies. Without ignoring the difficulties involved, the authors argue, from the societal perspective, that the high-involvement pathway should be considered one of the most important vectors available to improve the quality of work and employee well-being.

Examines the changing nature of the production manager’s job. To assess the current position, a survey was conducted on a sample of 600 production/operations managers in Australia. The results of the study indicate that there have been significant improvements in the production manager’s job. The study found that Australian production managers are well qualified, highly

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the multidimensionality of total quality management (TQM) practices and its relationship with production workers' job satisfaction in the Malaysian electrical and electronics (E&E) industry context.

Data for this study were collected using a self‐administered questionnaire that was distributed to 520 production workers in three major E&E organizations in Malaysia. Of the 520 questionnaires posted, 173 usable questionnaires were returned, yielding a response rate of 33.26 percent. The correlation and multiple regression analyses were applied to test the theoretical model and the relationship between TQM practices and job satisfaction.

The results revealed that not all TQM practices enhanced production workers' job satisfaction. Only organization culture and teamwork showed a positive relationship with the production workers' job satisfaction. It was found that when teamwork was perceived as a dominant TQM practice, improvement in production workers' job satisfaction levels was significant.

The findings prescribed potential implications for top management to review their TQM dimensions, consistent with the training needs of the employees within the organizations. Hence, production workers will be more likely to perform better and to feel a higher level of satisfaction towards the organizations.

The study has contributed in advancing the TQM literature with a better understanding of the multidimensionality of TQM practices and its association with production workers' job satisfaction that would facilitate more quality management research in developing countries.

It is common knowledge that during the last decade markets have become extremely competitive with product variety increasing continuously and product life cycles shortening. Many manufacturing companies, which hitherto satisfied their customers while operating specific production systems, were recently obliged to reconsider because of the potential superiority of other “manufacturing philosophies”. In the literature, we meet a great variety of production systems and manufacturing philosophies, while, on the other side, in industry we usually find different combinations of “primary” productions systems. In this paper, we present the existing “state‐of‐the‐art” theoretical and experiential knowledge about productions systems, as well as describe their basic characteristics in a useful, exact and comprehensive way for practitioners and software houses who want to have a knowledge base for further research and practical implementation in the wider field of production management, planning and scheduling.

In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.

Senior production managers are placed in a network of relationships which both influence and are influenced by the responsibilities of their jobs. The results are reported of a study of the difficulties of the relationship demands imposed by the job requirements of 16 senior production managers. In addition, similarities and differences among their jobs are identified and discussed. Results indicate that work relationships perceived as similar and highly demanding include, among others: bargaining and negotiating with external contacts, supervising the quality of their subordinates' work, and needing to create a good impression on people outside their firm. Differences among their jobs were most evident in the following areas: the level of importance assigned to supervising the quantity of their subordinates' work, the manner in which the respondents earned their authority, and the extent to which the participants depended on their bosses to determine the scope of their job boundaries. Consideration of these demands and how they affect the job context may help to identify the particular skills necessary for a specific senior production management position.

The work sequence indicated by a production schedule generated by existing scheduling techniques may not necessarily meet the need for efficient sequencing of day‐to‐day shop floor operations in a dynamic job shop environment. The purpose of this paper is to present a new practical approach to efficiently sequencing day‐to‐day shop floor operations of a job shop.

A color coding and priority system is introduced to identify production jobs that are to be processed at work centers which have a work sequence preference for performing various jobs. Based on a realistic production schedule, a three‐phase sequencing method is developed to create a truly feasible shop schedule, with the most efficient work sequence possible.

Specific features of the approach are presented and illustrated with a numerical example. It enables production jobs to be run in the best possible way at individual work centers. Various options of implementing the approach in practical applications are discussed.

The approach serves as an enhanced supplement to a job shop operations scheduling system for efficient sequencing of shop floor operations. It is to be implemented at the shop floor level.

The approach can be implemented as a real‐time computer integrated shop dispatching system to ensure an efficient work sequence for shop floor operations of job shops in actual industrial settings.

The paper addresses the need for effectively coordinating production jobs of varying routings on the shop floor, which cannot be met by existing scheduling techniques or shop dispatching practice. It provides manufacturing practitioners with a structured approach for managing shop floor operations.

Co-production is an important process that alters value creation and improves the relationships between service providers and their customers. Such practice allows customers and service employees to access and leverage resources residing in their relationships. Clearly, the marketing-related literature focuses on the bright side of co-production. Nevertheless, the costs and potential negative consequences associated with its dark side must be further investigated. Therefore, this study aims to present a conceptual framework that explores the relationships among co-production, co-production enjoyment, co-production intensity, service effort, and job stress, and their effects on value co-creation, value co-destruction and customer satisfaction.

This study was conducted on the basis of dyadic data; the process incorporates both the customer and the corresponding service employee into a single unit of analysis. The proposed model was tested by using a structural equation model that involves LISREL analyses.

The results of this study indicate that co-production influences co-production enjoyment, co-production intensity, service effort, and job stress. Co-production enjoyment and service effort increase value co-creation, whereas co-production intensity and job stress increase value co-destruction. Value co-creation and value co-destruction have different effects on customer satisfaction.

This study addresses the gap in the extant research and contributes to a better understanding of the double-sided effects of co-production by integrating employees and customers into a single dyadic and comprehensive model.