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Major constitutional change is rare and thus has unknown implications for supply chain partners. Member firms within local food supply chains in the UK can best protect their interests in the wake of Brexit through close collaboration and by identifying and exploiting key dynamic capabilities. This can increase their individual and collective resilience and potential ability to influence future decisions relating to the constitution.

Structural models' inflation forecasts are often inferior to those of naïve devices. This chapter theoretically and empirically assesses this for UK annual and quarterly inflation, using the theoretical framework in Clements and Hendry (1998, 1999). Forecasts from equilibrium-correction mechanisms, built by automatic model selection, are compared to various robust devices. Forecast-error taxonomies for aggregated and time-disaggregated information reveal that the impacts of structural breaks are identical between these, helping to interpret the empirical findings. Forecast failures in structural models are driven by their deterministic terms, confirming location shifts as a pernicious cause thereof, and explaining the success of robust devices.

In recent work, we have developed a theory of economic forecasting for empirical econometric models when there are structural breaks. This research shows that well-specified models may forecast poorly, whereas it is possible to design forecasting devices more immune to the effects of breaks. In this chapter, we summarise key aspects of that theory, describe the models and data, then provide an empirical illustration of some of these developments when the goal is to generate sequences of inflation forecasts over a long historical period, starting with the model of annual inflation in the UK over 1875–1991 in Hendry (2001a).

The purpose of this paper is to present a successful implementation of a comprehensive workload control (WLC) concept; and to describe the associated implementation process.

Longitudinal action research using a contingency‐based approach to ensure alignment between the case company and the characteristics of the WLC approach; and the resulting expected improvements in performance. A set of 17 issues and responses from the literature is used as a checklist for implementing WLC.

Performance improvements include: reduced lead times; significant improvement in lateness and tardiness; reduced costs; improved internal and external co‐ordination; and higher quality. The relevance of 15 of the 17 implementation issues is confirmed along with the same response as in previous research for ten issues and an improved response for five issues. In addition, three new issues are identified and addressed.

Dependability was a more important competitive priority in this company than speed; and, therefore, the ability of WLC to reduce lead times was not fully assessed.

The importance of a contingency‐based approach to production planning and control is confirmed. Comprehensive WLC approaches are closely aligned with the high‐variety/low‐volume context of make‐to‐order (MTO) companies.

This is the first paper that empirically demonstrates performance improvements resulting from WLC alongside a detailed discussion of the implementation process. Few examples of successful implementations have been published previously, and these tend to treat the implementation process as a “black box”. Where more detail on the implementation process has been given in previous studies, evidence of effectiveness in practice was not provided.