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The purpose of this paper is to introduce the notion of fitness in production as something different from leanness and show that building fitness puts a factory on a course of developing cumulative capabilities and improving its ability to respond to changing market and business conditions.

The paper examines the process of design, launch, and management of a fitness program in 42 factories of the Hydro Aluminum Extrusion Group on five continents between 1986 and 2001. The design was based on the “sandcone model” proposed by Ferdows and DeMeyer but the sequence of capabilities was modified to improve safety, reduce process variability, codify and share tacit production know‐how, improve responsiveness, and improve labor and machine efficiency.

Most factories showed improvements higher than industry average in these capabilities during the 15 years. Moreover, they improved the capabilities listed earlier in the above sequence faster than those listed later, indicating that they were becoming more fit.

Observations were in only one company and industry, which limits general applicability of the model. However, measurements were taken over a relatively long period, factories were spread on five continents, and the authors had access to the actual data during the 15 years, which together provided a unique opportunity to gain deep insights from this case. Future research should test the applicability of the model in other industries and companies.

A fitness regimen provides a roadmap for improving core capabilities in a factory. It is different from building leanness. Fitness helps the factory become leaner, but the opposite is not always true. A factory can become too lean but never too fit.

This paper is the first, to the authors' knowledge, to introduce the notion of fitness in production in the literature. Results observed in this case suggest that a better understanding of how factories become fitter provides insights into some of the deeply ingrained practices of superior manufacturers, especially those that stay competitive over long periods.

The purpose of this research is to test a model that incorporates investments in quality and Lean practices and production fitness constructs, originating in the theory of swift even flow (SEF), to provide insights into successful implementation of manufacturing practices.

This research uses data from the Global Manufacturing Research Group fourth round survey and empirically tests the relationships between investments in Lean practices and improvements in production fitness, using a sample of 844 plants in 17 countries.

The results highlight that the implementation of Lean practices yields better results on production evenness, when the company has higher levels of investments in quality practices. Therefore, the implementation of quality practices is a prerequisite for achieving higher production fitness.

The findings are important to the development and testing of operations management theory, as it integrates two research streams, manufacturing practices and SEF research, to gain insights into the interplay of manufacturing practices and how it influences the production fitness. For practitioners, this research assesses how better-performing plants compete. It provides operations managers with a better understanding of production fitness and how manufacturing practices foster its development.

The sudden COVID-19 epidemic in 2019 has frustrated China's overall economy, and the implementation and development of the National Fitness Program has encountered huge obstacles. At a new historical starting point, in order to realize the dream of becoming a powerful country in sports, it is necessary to transform the successful experience gained since the reform and opening up into regular understanding and systematic theories, so as to make a theoretical response to the new contradictions and challenges faced in development and give full play to the National Fitness has comprehensive values and multiple functions in improving people's health, promoting people's all-round development, promoting economic and social development and demonstrating the country's cultural soft power.

Taking the topic of national fitness as an example, this paper sets out from the three dimensions of knowledge input, knowledge output and knowledge production, using citation analysis, social network analysis, co-word analysis and cluster analysis, to measure the characteristics and knowledge structure of interdisciplinary knowledge exchange.

China's national fitness is still in the primary development stage, and the strong boost of the national top-level policy is the biggest driving force of its development, driven by the policy together with the settlement of many major events, constantly improving and enriching the wings. The main body of knowledge production on the topic of national fitness is mainly colleges and universities, with low participation of government and enterprises, high degree of cooperation among authors, obvious interdisciplinary characteristics and strong application of research themes.

This study provides a strong theoretical basis for the promotion of the Healthy China strategy. Especially under the influence of COVID-19, this paper can contribute to the comprehensive value and multimodal functions of national fitness in improving the health of people, promoting economic and social development and demonstrating the soft power of national culture.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between investments in quality and lean practices, and their impact on factory fitness. Using concepts originating in the theory of swift even flow, this study asserts that manufacturers, in order to improve their production swiftness and evenness, must leverage the potential synergetic effects between quality and lean practices.

This research uses data from the Global Manufacturing Research Group (GMRG) survey project (with data collected from 922 manufacturing plants, across 18 countries). The constructs and measurement model were assessed using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and the hypotheses were tested using ordinary least square (OLS) models.

This study highlights that both investments in quality and lean practices have direct impact factory fitness. The results provide insights into the efficacy of the investments in manufacturing practices and their role in augmenting the operational performance. The investments in quality practices were found to enhance the efficacy of investments in lean practices, which in turn impact the factory fitness.

From a practical perspective, the study informs managers on how to leverage investment in quality practices to enhance the impact of lean practice on performance. The results provide empirical evidence to support management decision-making concerning the development of competences in quality and lean practices, which may create competitive advantage.

This study contributes to the quality and lean literature and provides empirical evidence of the synergetic effects between investments in quality and lean practices. The analysis offers a greater understanding of the mechanisms that can be used to maximise the impact of investments in lean practices, from a global perspective. The findings are important to the advancement of theory in operations management, as it integrates three research streams: quality practices, lean practices and swift even flow research.

By studying marketing strategies of the global Weider Nutrition International Group, this study aims to analyse how the industry surrounding fitness equipment and dietary supplements interacted with fitness culture through marketing, advertising and consumption in 1950s Scandinavia. The emphasis is on how the Weider Group established their position as a world leader in sports nutrition through mail order partnerships and advertising using bodies and body ideals in their campaigns.

The Weider Group’s marketing campaigns are studied through close reading of text and images in Scandinavian weightlifting and bodybuilding magazines in the 1950s, guided by a theoretical understanding of the body as a constant and ongoing project.

This study deepens the historical knowledge of market-driven aspects of sport and exercise. The market for nutrition and fitness products was internationalised in the 1950s. The study shows that cooperation between commercial and civic organisations played a major role in the enterprise of selling fitness and nutrition products.

This paper shows that in marketing the products, the advertisements – which appealed to both men and women – not only struck a tone of intimacy and desire but also cultivated a sense of insecurity and inadequacy, as well as individuals’ responsibility for maintaining their own bodies. The latter was reflected in young men’s letters to magazines in which Weider’s products and training programmes were praised. For women, this opened up a previously male-dominated gym environment.

This article uses a series of data mining techniques to analyze body types and introduce a new sizing chart in order to produce garments for males. A principle component analysis and hierarchical and non-hierarchical clustering approaches are used to form a new sizing chart. All variables are grouped into two main components with a principle component analysis. Agglomerative hierarchical clustering is used to determine the number of clusters, and then a k-means algorithm is applied to segment the heterogonous population to actually form the clusters. The resultant innovations in designing garments have improved both non-price and price factors, the fittings of garments on all bodies have effectively improved and fabric waste has decreased, so the main goals which include improvement in quality with more comfort and a lower price have been met.

The paper aims to contribute to the debate concerning the use of knowledge translation for implementing co-production processes in the healthcare sector. The study investigates a case study, in which design was used to trigger knowledge translation and foster co-production.

The paper employs a case study methodology by analysing the experience of “Oncology in Motion”, a co-production program devoted to the recovery of breast cancer patients carried on by the IRCCS C.R.O. of Aviano, Italy.

Results show how design could help to translate knowledge from various stakeholders with different skills (e.g. scientists, physicians, nurses) and emotional engagement (e.g. patients and patients' associations) during all the phases of a co-production project to support breast cancer patients in a recovery path. Stewardship theory is used to show that oncology represents a specific research context.

The paper highlights the vast practical contribution that design can have in empowering knowledge translation at different levels and in a variety of co-production phases, among different stakeholders, facilitating their engagement and the achievement of the desired outcomes.

The paper contributes to the literature on knowledge translation in co-production projects in the healthcare sector showing how design can be effectively implemented.

Multivariate Exponentially Weighted Moving Average (MEWMA) chart is a control chart under multivariate process based on the idea of EWMA that rapidly detects small dispersion with a trend. the MEWMA chart was first time discussed by Woodall. However, in his study the correlativity among the multivariate was not considered for the selection of the constant of the diagonal matrix (the smooth parameter λ). In this paper, the EWMA chart with a generalized smooth parameter matrix has been discussed which is believed to have a better fitness for practical production processes than Woodall’s approach.

This paper presents an evolutionary algorithm (EA) for Sony legged robots to learn good walking behaviours with little or no interaction with the designers. Once the learning method is put into place, the module can learn through its interaction with the real world.

An EA for developing locomotion gaits of quadruped walking robots is presented in this paper. It is based on a hybrid approach that changes the probability of genetic operators in respect to the performance of the operator's offspring.

The mutating and combination behaviours of the genetic algorithms allow the process to develop a useful behaviour over time. The resulting gait from this training proved to be a better solution than the non‐interference training for movements over all types of surfaces, pointing to a local optima being discovered in the non‐environmental interference situation.

The behaviour of these algorithms is stochastic so that they may potentially present different solutions in different runs of the same algorithm. The mechanism described here has several features that should be noted. It allows rapid parameterisation of operator probabilities across the range of potential genetic algorithms and operator set. It is tailored to a steady state reproduction scheme. It would not be literally applicable to problems with noisy evaluation functions.

Provides novel application of genetic algorithms to a potentially practical application area.