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The purpose of this paper is to analyze the productive efficiency and the best operational practices in an armaments manufacturer.

A longitudinal case study is performed using data envelopment analysis (DEA). Using DEA, an assessment of six years in the company manufacturing process is conducted. The research aims at developing an internal benchmark on three production lines of the company.

The results show that only one of the three analyzed production lines increased efficiency over time. With this result, the most efficient production line may be used as a reference in relation to the best operational practices of the company. Moreover, it was found that the current indicators to evaluate efficiency are insufficient and may lead to wrong management decisions.

This research could allow a larger understanding of the factors that really contribute to increased operational efficiency. This is due to internal benchmark assist in the identification of the best practices. The identification of best practices can contribute to enhance the efficiency of inefficient operations without the need for external comparisons.

DEA contributes due to its robustness, for the evaluation of productive efficiency. One of the contributions of this study is to identify opportunities for improvement in key components of the operation through targets, internal benchmarking and robust assessment of productive efficiency.

The paper's aim is to assess the impact of product related features on the performances of assembly line manufacturing systems, also providing a specific Design for Manufacturing and Assembly rating index to assess the goodness of a product design solution with respect to assembly line performances.

A computer simulation‐based parametric analysis was carried out to assess the impact of four major product‐related parameters. 216 different assembly line balance problem instances were evaluated. Findings allowed to develop a DFMA rating index specific for assembly line manufacturing as well as design guidelines.

Assembly sequence degrees of freedom and the ratio of the average task duration to the maximum duration are the most influencing parameters. While the former should be maximized, only a moderate task duration variability was found beneficial. The influence of other factors resulted less marked and changing on a case‐specific basis.

Complex interactions between product design features and line performances prevent generalization. The performed numerical experimentation, although extensive, remains somewhat limited respect all possible practical situations. The proposed rating index should be utilized while maintaining an overall perspective about the mutual influence of all parameters. Some suggested guidelines imply a trade off with traditional DFMA guidelines.

Product designers are given useful insights, tools and guidelines to develop better producible products. With the proposed ranking index a designer can easily rate his choices when selecting assembly tasks and sequences, as well as rank alternative product designs solutions.

The paper presents an original discussion about the impact of product design choices on assembly line performances. The developed DFMA rating index and guidelines are new.

The paper investigates personal and environmental factors providing for the efficiency of line managers' activity and contributing to their professional and career advancement. The paper studies the prognostic value of the assessment of personal and environmental factors providing for the efficiency of line managers' activity according to Blumberg and Pringle's methodology in order to select their lines of training and development.

The methodological approach is based on Blumberg and Pringle's organizational‐psychological model. A conceptual framework was developed from psychological test data and expert interviews with 307 line managers (of two large enterprises), 65 top managers and 100 entrepreneurs (heads of SMEs) from the Northwest of Russia.

The research allowed the isolation of those personal qualities of line managers that separate them from top managers. Sets of personal and environmental factors providing for line managers' labor efficiency and contributing to their professional and career advancement were determined.

Employees at Russian state industrial enterprises were the subject of this research. The specifics of respondent sampling restrict the possibility of extrapolating the findings and generalizations made in this paper onto middle and lower managers from organizations with other ownership patterns, areas of activity and ethnic cultures.

The research findings can be used by HRD specialists in industrial enterprises for the creation of development programs for line managers. Am assessment of personal and environmental factors based on Blumberg and Pringle's model can be used as a criterion for selecting areas of development for line managers, as it is aligned towards the realization of personal and professional potential. Based on the assessment results, variants of training can be offered to employees in the professional sphere, or in the sphere of management or personal development.

For the first time, in this work the differences in personality traits of line managers and top managers of Russian industrial enterprises have been determined, sets of personal and professional factors characterizing line managers' attitudes to development prospects have been described (these sets have been conventionally named “specialists” and “careerists”), and the possibility of using Blumberg and Pringle's model to predict line managers' potential areas of training and development has been demonstrated.

Parallel two-sided assembly lines are usually designed to produce large-sized products such as trucks and buses. In parallel two-sided assembly lines, both left and right sides of the line are used for manufacturing one or more products on two or more assembly lines located parallel to each other. The purpose of this paper is to develop a new mathematical model for the parallel two-sided assembly line balancing problem that helps to evaluate and validate the balancing operations of the machines such as removal of tools and fixtures and reallocating the operators.

The proposed approach is explained with the help of an example problem. In all, 22 test problems are formed using the benchmark problems P9, P12, P16 and P24. The results obtained are compared among approaches of the task(s) shared, tool(s) shared and both tool(s) and task(s) shared for effect on efficiency as the performance measure. The solution presented here follows the exact solution procedure that is solved by Lingo 16 solver.

Based on the experiments, line efficiency decreases when only tools are shared and increases when only tasks are shared. Results indicate that by sharing tasks and tools together, better line efficiency is obtained with less cost of tools and fixtures.

According to the industrial aspect, the result of the study can be beneficial for assembly of the products, where tools and tasks are shared between parallel workstations of two or more parallel lines.

According to the author’s best knowledge, this paper is the first to address the tools and tasks sharing between any pair of parallel workstations.

Brings knowledge of assembly line balancing algorithms into the clothing industry. Uses an already published algorithm to solve a particular problem, obtained from a British clothing manufacturer. Identifies optimum solutions to the problem for the situation when each operative is assumed to be equally productive and when differences in operator productivity are allowed for. In the case of equal productivity of operators three optimum solutions to the problem were identified. When varying operator productivity was allowed for, two optimum solutions to the problem were identified. The identification of these multiple optimum solutions allows the line balancer increased flexibility in the choice of particular solutions.

MORE than a decade ago we were assured by the then head of Imperial Chemicals Industries that the man who knows where he is going is the one who is most likely to arrive. We might venture to add as a footnote that such a man's journey will be easier, his destination more certain, if he first clears away the assorted debris that encumbers his route.

This study aims to reduce carbon emissions and costs in an automobile production plant by improving the operational management efficiency of a serial assembly line assisted by a feeding electric tow vehicle (ETV).

A multi-objective function is formulated to minimize the energy consumption of the ETV from which emissions and costs are measured. First, a mixed-integer linear programming model is used to solve the feeding problem for different sizes of the assembly line. Second, a bi-objective optimization (HBOO) model is used to simultaneously minimize the most eco-efficient objectives: the number of completed runs (tours) by the ETV along the assembly line, and the number of visits (stops) made by the ETV to deliver kits of components to workstations.

The most eco-efficient strategy is always the bi-objective optimal solution regardless of the size of the assembly line, whereas, for single objectives, the optimization strategy differs depending on the size of the assembly line.

Instances of the problem are randomly generated to reproduce real conditions of a particular automotive factory according to a previous case study. The optimization procedure allows managers to assess real scenarios improving the assembly line eco-efficiency. These results promote the implementation of automated control of feeding processes in green manufacturing.

The HBOO-model assesses the assembly line performance with a view to reducing the environmental impact effectively and contributes to reducing the existent gap in the literature. The optimization results define key strategies for manufacturing industries eager to integrate battery-operated motors or to address inefficient traffic of automated transport to curb the carbon footprint.

This paper seeks to study maintenance policies on a plant‐wide level. It focuses on the effectiveness of condition‐based maintenance (CBM). It highlights the role of the production context and the importance of using appropriate metrics to assess CBM.

A simulation model was developed to explore the effects of production context using traditional performance indicators (costs and availability of each piece of equipment) and a more comprehensive metric (line efficiency).

The results showed that CBM has the best performance among other PM policies in loosely coupled processes. By contrast, in tightly coupled processes, CBM has a negative effect on the production line efficiency because it increases equipments' blockage and starvation states.

The simulation model was developed to reflect the reality. Nevertheless, some assumptions have been used to develop the conceptual and computerized model, which can be explored further in future research.

The idea of this paper originates from empirical findings of fellow researchers. The findings in this paper provide a better understanding of how CBM affects key performance indicators in different production contexts and therefore help managers to appropriately execute CBM programmes.

This study focuses on CBM from a new angle. The majority of the literatures on condition‐based maintenance either discusses pure technical issues, or focusses on single equipment only. In this research, the effectiveness of CBM for two processes is studied and CBM is compared with block and age‐based replacement policies using a comprehensive performance indicator.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the empirical effect of competition on cost and profit efficiency in the South African non-life insurance market in a three-stage analysis.

Using annual firm level data on 80 non-life insurance companies from 2007 to 2012, the authors first employ the stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) to estimate cost and profit efficiency scores. In the second stage, the authors measure insurance market competition using the Panzar-Rosse (P-R) H-statistics. In the final stage, the authors estimate a fixed-effects panel regression model which controls for heteroskedasticity to examine the effect of competition on the estimated efficiency scores. Firm size, diversification, age, risk, reinsurance and leverage are employed as control variables.

From the SFA, the authors find average cost and profit efficiency of 80.08 and 45.71 per cent, respectively. This suggests that non-life insurers have high levels of efficiency in cost and low efficiency in profit. The annual estimates of the P-R H-statistics also suggest that firms in the market earn revenues under conditions of monopolistic competition. The authors find a positive effect of competition on cost and profit efficiency to validate the “quiet-life” hypothesis which posits that competition improves efficiency.

Regulatory policies should be directed towards enhancing competition to improve on the low profit earning potential of firms in the non-life market.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study presents the first application of a non-structural measure of competition to examine the empirical relationship between competition and efficiency in insurance markets.

The purpose of this paper is to formulate a new problem of the optimal design of a series manufacturing production line system, and to develop an efficient heuristic approach to solve it. The optimal design objective is to maximize the efficiency subject to a total cost constraint.

To estimate series production line efficiency, an analytical decomposition‐type approximation is used. The optimal design problem is formulated as one of combinatorial optimization where the decision variables are buffers and types of machines. This problem is solved by developing and demonstrating a problem‐specific ant system algorithm. Numerical examples illustrate the effectiveness of the algorithm.

It has been found that this algorithm can always find near‐optimal or optimal solutions quickly. The approach developed in this paper for manufacturing lines can be adapted for power systems and telecommunication systems.

The paper presents a new approach for the optimal design of buffered series production lines. This optimization approach aims at selecting both the machines and the levels of buffers. The paper also develops an efficient solution approach based on the ant system meta‐heuristic.