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The software development team reviews the testing phase to assess if the reliability growth of software is as per plan and requirement and gives suggestions for improvement. The objective of this study is to determine the optimal review time such that there is enough time to make judgments about changes required before the scheduled release.

Testing utilizes majority of time and resources, assures reliability and plays a critical role in release and warranty decision-making reviews necessary. A very early review during testing may not give useful information for analyzing or improving project performance, and a very late review may delay product delivery and lead to opportunity loss for developers. Therefore, it is assumed that the optimal time for review is in the later stage of testing when the fault removal rate starts to decline. The expression for this time point is determined using the S-curve 2-D software reliability growth model (SRGM).

The methodology has been illustrated using the real-life fault datasets of Tandem computers and radar systems resulting in optimal review time of 14 weeks and 26 months, respectively, which is neither very early in testing nor very near to the scheduled release. The developer can make changes (more resources or postpone release) to expedite the process.

Most of the literature studies focus on determination of optimal testing or release time to achieve considerable reliability within the budget, but in this study, the authors determine the optimal review time during testing using SRGM to ensure the considerable reliability at release.

The study described here used data from a retailer of soft goods and housewares to evaluate various inventory‐grouping methods and to determine an optimal method considering inventory, transportation and consolidation costs. The specific objectives of this article are:

The vehicle development process (VDP) is iterative in nature with numerous interactions and information flows between design groups and between development phases. The VDP has been changed from a sequential‐functional development to a concurrent‐team based approach. Concurrent execution of design activities may reduce the development lead‐time, but it increases the managerial complexity in the VDP. A system dynamics model was developed to understand the transient behavior of parallel, overlap, and sequential processes in the VDP and to determine the optimal level of overlapping considering the development lead‐time and total number of reworks. The simulation results showed that different execution processes should be used, depending upon the intensity of reworks.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the importance of information management in modular product architecture for customized product development.

The objective of this research is to analyze product architecture in terms of information exchange and show its influence in product customization. A case study is presented with a view to modelling the information tracking necessary for product architecture and customization.

In today's volatile business environment, appropriate ways of information management could be an added value for manufacturing firms. This paper deals with the importance of information flow in product architecture. The role of information exchange influences the basic architecture of the product development process, which also affects the general theme of product customization.

The importance of information flow highlights the design architecture and brings flexibilities to the product development process. This concept is illustrated through a single case example, which may not be translated as a generic output. Multiple case study approaches could be undertaken in future research to rigorously analyze the influence of information exchange on product architecture.

In order to comply with growing customization, firms are looking for flexible design architecture in their product development process. The presented approach will be beneficial for designers and organizational managers in developing flexible customized product or services.

This paper implements a unique approach to modular product architecture through information dependencies among components and sub‐assemblies. The basic principle of modular product architecture and how it affects product customization are also reported.

The purpose of this paper is to present a model linking the role of design engineers to shared team knowledge, enhanced manufacturability, and product development outcomes. New product manufacturability is a quality of the product design that indicates the ease and reliability by which an organization develops products by using its manufacturing and supply chain resources.

The model is tested using a sample of 205 product development projects from firms in the USA and Canada.

The findings of the large‐scale empirical study suggest that by facilitating informing practices among functional specialists, design engineers help translate a functional portrayal of the product in terms of customer attributes, to a form description in terms of engineering characteristics, and then to a fabrication view in terms of manufacturing processes.

New product manufacturability can be a distinctive competency that provides competitive advantage by lowering costs, improving customer value, and speeding products to market.

In contrast to previous research that showed that role changes of design engineers have a narrow impact on development productivity (e.g. improving resource allocation), this paper suggests that these role changes of design engineers have a much broader impact on manufacturability and, through this, improve manufacturing cost, time‐to‐market, and value‐to‐customers.

This paper aims to investigate the overhead costs of construction contractors at the Gaza Strip, Palestine, specifically the level of contractors' awareness of the concept of overhead cost, their perception of main components of overhead cost, percentage of overhead to total project cost, method used to manage and control overhead cost, and reasons for increasing overhead cost.

In the research 40 contractors classified under the Palestinian Contractors Union (PCU) and United Nation Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) list were surveyed.

The findings indicate that the majority of contractors are aware of overhead costs in construction projects. The staff wages are the highest overhead costs component. The currency exchange rates, inflation, increase in financial costs among others lead to increase in overhead costs. The findings illustrate that the overhead costs are on average 11.1 percent of the total project cost. Controlling and managing overhead costs are considered the main tools to improve the companies' financial situation.

The trend in most companies is to adopt techniques to manage and control their cost components. Using activity based costing (ABCs) is one of the main techniques which the companies should take into consideration. The contractors' knowledge and awareness of the research finding will increase their chances of winning bids within an acceptable profit margin. Applied training courses are recommended for contractors to improve their awareness regarding the importance of overhead costs.

This study will extend contractors' awareness and knowledge through guidance on how to gear their financial resources carefully, and how to bid correctly in order to remain competitive in the market place.

The purpose of this paper is twofold, first providing researchers with an overview about the uncertainties occurred in procurement including applicable approaches for analyzing different uncertain scenarios, and second proposing directions to inspire future research by identifying research gaps.

Papers related to supply chain risk management and procurement risk management (PRM) from 1995–2017 in several major databases are extracted by keywords and then further filtered based on the relevance to the topic, number of citations and publication year. A total of over 156 papers are selected. Definitions and current approaches related to procurement risks management are reviewed.

Five main risks in procurement process are identified. Apart from summarizing current strategies, suggestions are provided to facilitate strategy selection to handle procurement risks. Seven major future challenges and implications related PRM and different uncertainties are also indicated in this paper.

Procurement decisions making under uncertainty has attracted considerable attention from researchers and practitioners. Despite the increasing awareness for risk management for supply chain, no detail and holistic review paper studied on procurement uncertainty. Managing procurement risk not only need to mitigate the risk of price and lead time, but also need to have sophisticated analysis techniques in supply and demand uncertainty.

The contribution of this review paper is to discuss the implications of the research findings and provides insight about future research. A novel research framework is introduced as reference guide for researchers to apply innovative approach of operations research to resolve the procurements uncertainty problems.

The purpose of this paper is to provide comprehensive information on preventive maintenance (PM) planning and methods used in the industry in order to achieve an effective maintenance system.

The literature review is organized in a way that provides the general overview of the researches done in the PM. This paper discusses the literatures that had been reviewed on four main topics, which are the holistic view of maintenance policies, PM planning, PM planning concept and PM planning-based in developing optimal planning in executing PM actions.

PM policy is one of the original proactive techniques that has been used since the start of researches on maintenance system. Review of the methods presented in this paper shows that most researches analyse effectiveness using artificial intelligence, simulation, mathematical formulation, matrix formation, critical analysis and multi-criteria method. While in practice, PM activities were either planned based on cost, time or failure. Research trends on planning and methods for PM show that the variation of approaches used over the year from early 1990s until today.

Research about PM is known to be extensively conducted and majority of companies applied the policy in their production line. However, most analysis and method suggested in published literatures were done based on mathematical computation rather than focussing on solution to real problems in the industry. This normally would lead to the problems in understanding by the practitioner. Therefore, this paper presented researches on PM planning and suggested on the methods that are practical, simple and effective for application in the real industry.

The originality of this paper comes from its detail analysis of PM planning in term of its research focus and also direction for application. Extensive reviews on the methods adopted in relation to PM planning based on the planning-based such as cost-based, time-based and failure-based were also provided.

The purpose of this paper is to study joint inventory and pricing strategy for a continuous inventory review system. While dynamic pricing decisions are often studied in the literature along with inventory management, the authors' aim in this study is to obtain a single long‐run optimal price; also to gain insight about how to obtain the optimal price and inventory control variables simultaneously and then the benefits of joint optimization of the inventory and pricing decisions over the sequential optimization policy often followed in practice.

A general (R;Q) policy system with fixed cost of ordering is modelled and then the case where unsatisfied demand is lost is studied. General forms of both the additive and multiplicative demand models are used to obtain structural results.

By showing optimality conditions on the price and inventory decision variables, two algorithms on how to obtain optimal decision variables, one for additive and another for multiplicative demand‐price model are provided. Through extensive numerical analyses, the potential profit increases are reported if the price and inventory problem are solved simultaneously instead of sequentially. In addition, the sensitivities of optimal decision variables to system parameters are revealed.

Although there are several studies in the literature investigating emergency price change models, they use arbitrary exogenous prices menus. However, the value of a price change can be better appreciated if the long‐run price is optimal for the system.

Very few researchers have investigated constant price and inventory optimization, and while there are several past studies demonstrating the benefits of dynamic pricing over a static one, there still are not many findings on the benefit of joint price and inventory optimization.

From 2007, New Zealand firms must report the cost of granting employee stock options (ESOs). Market‐based option pricing models assume that option holders are unconstrained in their portfolio choices and thus are indifferent to the specific risk of any firm. By contrast, ESO holders are frequently required to hold portfolios that are over‐exposed to the firm that employs them and so adopt exercise policies that reflect their individual risk preferences. Applying the model of Ingersoll (2006) to hypothetical ESOs, we show that ESO cost can be extremely sensitive to employee characteristics of risk aversion and under‐diversification. This result casts doubt on the usefulness of any market‐based model for pricing ESOs, since such models, by definition, produce option values that are independent of employee characteristics. By limiting employee discretion over the choice of exercise date, vesting restrictions help reduce the magnitude of this problem.