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Lean and agile are essential supply chain management (SCM) strategies that enhance companies' performance. Previous studies have reported the capabilities of different SCM strategies to enhance performance; however, the emergence of Industry 4.0 technologies has bred focus on the possibility of attaining more levels of operational performance. Despite being demonstrated helpful at enabling supply chain (SC) strategies, the literature linking Industry 4.0 with SCM strategies is still in its infancy. Thus, this work investigates the degree to which “Industry 4.0 technologies” enable the implementation of lean and agile practices and subsequently assesses the potential performance implications of integrating Industry 4.0 technologies with the SC operations.

The work employs an exploratory case study approach using empirical data from selected organisations drawn from an Estonian manufacturing cluster and digital solution providing companies. The data collected via interviews were used to assign numerical scores and subsequently aggregated across the five cases for the research variables of interest. The work is crowned with a model grounded on the cross-case analysis to depict which technologies impact each of the lean and agile practices.

The analysis enabled comprehension of the potential impact and level of importance of the main Industry 4.0 technologies on lean and agile practices and ultimately the potential implication on performance. The findings revealed that the technologies have a high impact on the practices. Although the impacts are of varying degrees, the analysis provides means to identify the technologies with the most significant impact on lean and agile SCM and the sets of practices with the greatest likelihood of being enabled by various digital technologies.

The work presents various lean and agile practices that practitioners can deploy to operations, alongside the technologies that could support the implementation of the practices towards achieving the various performance measures. Also, it provides some guides for the digital solution providing companies towards understanding the SCM practices that can be improved upon by various digital technologies. This enables them to have more saleable proposals for intending companies who might be sceptical about transiting into the digital operation phase.

This is the first attempt to empirically address the connection between Industry 4.0 technologies and the integrated lean and agile strategies despite literature backing of the complementary nature of the two SCM strategies.

The purpose of this study is to determine the relationship between the geographic market size of businesses and the competitiveness of being able to bid at low prices.

The design of this study is based on a natural experiment approach. Firstly, after controlling for the firm size and other factors, the author sees that firms participating in bidding in a large region are more competitive to bid at lower prices than firms doing business in a smaller region. The author then tests for causality in a natural experiment of the exogenous event.

The results show that firms participating in the bidding process in a large area are more competitive to bid at lower prices than firms doing business in a small area. This is tested in a natural experiment, and the result is that they are more competitive because they do business in a larger area.

The practical implication is that, when aiming for competitiveness, it is most important to consider the nature of the business and to see the essence of the business, for example, that networks are important in the construction industry, and that doing business over a wide area is the way to become competitive.

The social implications are that to make firms more competitive, we must look at the characteristics of the industry and come up with policies that fit the reality, such as encouraging them to do business in a wide area.

The originality of this study is that this study viewed competitiveness as being able to bid low prices for public procurement and found that doing business in a wide area is competitive. Furthermore, the causal effect of the study was to test the fact that doing business in a wide area does not mean doing business in a wide area because it is competitive, but that doing business in a wide area creates a competitive advantage.

The purpose of this paper is to understand if effective road safety education is being provided to students by embedding educational programmes within a curriculum framework.

A qualitative methodology was used to gain in-depth understanding of the health-promoting initiatives of Saudi Arabian universities and colleges in preventing risky driving behaviour among students. Interviews were used to collect data from 11 faculty members.

Results suggest that educational programmes for changing the risky driving behaviour of students are still in their infancy. The findings raise questions about road safety and driving. While initiatives are being taken for promoting awareness within educational institutions on road safety, there is still a lack of awareness of traffic regulations and signs.

Since there is a paucity of research on health promotions specifically related to aberrant and risky driving in the Kingdom, this paper adds value to educators and policy-makers.

The purpose of the this study was to explore the development of commitment to change among leaders in the home help services during organizational change and to study this development in relation to workload and stress. During organizational change initiatives, commitment to change among leaders is important to ensure the implementation of the change. However, little is known of development of commitment of change over time.

The study used a qualitative design with semi-structured interviews with ten leaders by the time an organizational change initiative was launched and follow-up one year later. Thematic content analysis was used to analyze the interviews.

Commitment to change is not static, but seems to develop over time and during organizational change. At the first interview, leaders had a varied pattern reflecting different dimensions of commitment to change. One year later, the differences between leaders’ commitment to change was less obvious. Differences in commitment to change had no apparent relationship with workload or stress.

The data were collected from one organization, and the number of participants were small which could affect the results on workload and stress in relation to commitment to change.

It is important to support leaders during organizational change initiatives to maintain their commitment. One way to accomplish this is to use management team meetings to monitor how leaders perceive their situation.

Qualitative, longitudinal and leader studies on commitment to change are all unusual, and taken together, this study shows new aspects of commitment.

The purpose of this study is to solve NP-Hard drone routing problem for the last-mile distribution. This is suitable for the multi-drones parcel delivery for the various items from a warehouse to many locations.

This study conducts as a mission assignment of the single location per flight with the constraint satisfactions such as various payloads in weight, drone speeds, flight times and coverage distances. A genetic algorithm is modified as the concurrent heuristics approach (GCH), which has the knapsack problem dealing initialization, gene elitism (crossover) and gene replacement (mutation). Those proposed operators can reduce the execution time consuming and enhance the routing assignment of multiple drones. The evaluation value of the routing assignment can be calculated from the chromosome/individual representation by applying the proposed concurrent fitness.

This study optimizes the total traveling time to accomplish the distribution. GCH is flexible and can provide a result according to the first-come-first-served, demanded weight or distance priority.

GCH is an alternative option, which differs from conventional vehicle routing researches. Such researches (traveling time optimization) attempt to minimize the total traveling time, distance or the number of vehicles by assuming all vehicles have the same traveling speed; therefore, a specific vehicle assignment to a location is neglected. Moreover, the main drawback is those concepts can lead the repeated selection of best quality vehicles concerning the speed without considering the vehicle fleet size and coverage distance while this study defines the various speeds for the vehicles. Unlike those, the concurrent concept ensures a faster delivery accomplishment by sharing the work load with all participant vehicles concerning to their different capabilities. If the concurrent assignment is applied to the drone delivery effectively, the entire delivery can be accomplished relatively faster than the traveling time optimization.

This paper reports the results of a three-year-long research on business relationships, relying on qualitative data gathered through multiple-case study research of four focal companies operating in Australia. The industry settings are as follows: steel construction, vegetable oils trading, aluminum and steel can manufacture, and imaging solutions. The research analyzes two main aspects of relationships: structure and process. This paper deals with structure describing it by the most desired features of intercompany relationships for each focal company. The primary research data have been coded drawing on extant research into business relationships. The main outcome of this part of the research is a five construct model composed by trust, commitment, bonds, distance, and information sharing that accounts for all informants’ utterances about relationship structure.

The Swedish company Torsteknik has set up ‘shop’ in the UK in a bid to win an increasing share of arc welding business.

Textile reinforced concrete (TRC) has excellent bearing capacity and anti-crack and corrosion resistance capacity, which are suitable for strengthening concrete structure under harsh environments.

In this thesis, flexural properties of RC beams strengthened with TRC under chloride wet–dry cycles were studied and the effects of the concentration of the salt solution, number of wet–dry cycles, bending stress level and TRC form were considered. Four-point bend loading mode was adopted for the step-loading procedure.

As the number of wet–dry cycles was relatively few, the trend of the yield and ultimate load with the increasing concentration of salt solution and wet–dry cycles were not obvious. However, the beams under high sustained bending stress level (0.5) had a decrease in the bearing capacity and an increase in mid-span deflection because of the larger degree of the corrosion of steel bars and the weaker bond capacity between the steel bar and concrete. Besides, there was little difference between the precast TRC plate and the casting TRC on beams in terms of the capacity of anti-crack, bearing and deflection.

In this paper, preliminary work has been carried out, but some of the factors were not comprehensive considered, which are inevitable. As the time of dry–wet cycles was short and TRC layer had good anti-crack and anti-permeability performance, smaller chloride ions’ penetration resulted in the corrosion ratio of steel bars to be lower.

It should be noted that under high corrosion rates of the reinforcement, the whole TRC strengthening layer might be spalled off if only the strengthening form at the beam bottom is used, and thus the U-type strengthening form could be considered, which means that the beam is strengthened at both the bottom and side surfaces.

This research only considers the flexural performance of the beams strengthened with TRC in conventional environment, and there is little research on the TRC-strengthened beam under corrosion environment. On the basis of previous research, this paper carried out the experimental study on beams strengthened with TRC under chloride wet–dry cycle environment, and the effects of the concentration of the salt solution, number of wet–dry cycles, bending stress level and TRC form were considered.

Plant failures are often not fully investigated, owing to the pressures of restoring production so as to avoid delays and consequent losses. Instead, problems are overcome by quick solutions. Such solutions, however, may not eliminate the underlying cause of trouble and additional costly failures may occur.

The 3rd Automated Manufacturing Exhibition and Conference will be held at the National Exhibition Centre, Birmingham, UK from 14–17 May 1985. This stand‐by‐stand report outlines some of the equipment that will be on display.