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Notes that, in order to remain competitive, manufacturing industries seek to eliminate inefficiency and speed innovation, perhaps by joining together traditionally distinct functions (the internal “micro companies”) in order to build up an enterprise resource planning (ERP) project. This process of integrating, and then possible automating, business processes has resulted in a need for improved business process modelling techniques and tools. This article explains the importance of first establishing clear guidelines for, and parameters of, any improvement exercise in the organisation. This may involve the creation of a model that accurately describes the existing business processes, exposing the opportunities for improvement. Based on a real‐world model, developed at Xerox of Brazil (Resende Plant), demonstrates the difficulties and the gains throughout the modelling process. Concludes that modelling can assist understanding and engagement within the company as part of a change programme.

Communication aspects within organisational changes have received greater attention since the advent of business process re‐engineering. This fact has been attributed mainly to the necessity of eliminating a higher degree of human resistance on the implementation of such a project. Our argument within this paper is that appropriate corporate communication would promote better chances to dissolve the aforementioned resistance. The research focused on large manufacturing enterprises and it brings to light the industrialists’ practices and expectances related to the communication issue and to the investment in IT to assist in the improvement of the information flow within and outside of the organisation. Based on the experience of the practitioners interviewed, a communication model was implemented aiming to guide companies in building their own communication process framework. Despite some important initiatives, the findings suggest that the improvement in the strategies of communication is not sufficient on its own but there are other key relational aspects to be considered in order to achieve the envisaged outcome.

Business process re‐engineering (BPR), a management tool that initially advocated a revolution in the way businesses are driven, now carries the stigma of being a major cause of job elimination. This study reveals the depth of involvement of BPR practitioners in what, advocates claim, are the fundamental ingredients of BPR – business processes. The data alert the reader to the different understandings and practices related to business process analysis held by several UK and Brazilian companies. Possible reasons are given, accounting for why some of the companies investigated seemed to lose a BPR focus in favour of more urgent restructuring matters. The authors conclude that companies often lack a basic awareness of the business process concept, and that misconceptions about these issues can lead to unrealised expectations at various levels in the organization.

Digital asset management as a technology for handling electronic material is used in different contexts for various technical purposes. Explores the effects of this technology on the marketing supply chain, being a new application area of digital asset management solutions. A conceptual framework is provided to describe marketing processes in the world of information technology and marketing communication logistics. Based on a literature review, possible benefits of digital asset management in this setting are presented. Anticipated benefits are evaluated in an indicative case study. The description of marketing supply chains leads to new insights for supply chain management.

The purpose of this study is to propose a framework depicting the dynamic links between a firm’s external environment, competitive strategy, manufacturing strategy, competitive advantage and firm performance. This is followed by articulating expected differences among the the content and process dimensions dimensions of a manufacturing strategy for different competitive strategies.

Today, manufacturing is widely recognized as one of the most important means of creating and sustaining a competitive advantage. This paper studies the emerging broader view of the strategic role of manufacturing by offering a manufacturing strategy model, showing its impact on competitive advantage and, ultimately, firm performance. This is accomplished by identifying and defining major content and process dimensions of manufacturing strategy and relating them to a firm’s strategic type. The paper uses an integrative competitive strategy typology (Segev, 1989) to clarify differences in manufacturing strategy dimensions and different competitive strategies. The concept of “fit as gestalt” among the dimensions of manufacturing strategy is also introduced. This study presents the implications of fit between manufacturing and competitive strategy and the contribution of content and process dimensions of manufacturing strategy to firm performance and concludes by providing implications for executives and future research issues.

Differences in content and process dimensions of manufacturing strategy for different competitive strategies are clarified.

Other researchers may propose different frameworks for linking manufacturing and competitive strategies.

This paper presents an integrative view of competitive and manufacturing strategies. It highlights the numerous choices companies must make to ensure fit among the competitive strategic types and their corresponding manufacturing strategies. This integration adds coherence and parsimony to the literature. It provides a basis for conceptualizing manufacturing strategy, thus reconciling different strategic perspectives and reducing a potential source of conflicting research results.

In this century there is likely to be more self‐examination by manufacturing industries. This is not a case of firms putting themselves in the psychiatrist’s chair; rather, companies will be looking more closely at the mechanics of how their organization works, to see where traditionally distinct functions can be brought together in the interests of efficiency and competitive advantage. There is evidence for this in the growing use throughout the world of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to try to standardize, rationalize, integrate and automate business processes.

The purpose of this paper is to present a methodology which defines best strategic practices for business process redesign (BPR).

A total of 29 best practices are studied and evaluated from the literature. The philosophy of TOPSIS (Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution) method is applied in recognizing the alignment of best practices with the organization strategy. The indicators of cost, time, quality and flexibility are used as the criteria to measure the degree of alignment of best practices with organization strategy. The proposed method is tested in a case study of the registration process at a university.

The recent investment failures in BPR projects show that the relation between best practices and organization strategies should be highly considered. It is indicated that process redesign can meet organization strategies through recognizing and implementing best strategic practices.

Considering the fact that pundits working in the field of BPR are not accessible, the previous published findings and results have been used in this research.

Owing to the limitations on budget and time, organizations are able to consider only those best practices which play a critical vote in helping them to achieve their goals. Best strategic practices list provides managers and business analysts with a precious resource in BPR projects.

This paper presents a new methodology for introducing best strategic practices for BPR. A strategic best practice is a new term in the BPR literature.

This paper aims to develop a user‐satisfaction‐based knowledge management performance measurement model, including identifying the assessment criteria sourced from user‐satisfaction‐based core values, critical success factors and phases of knowledge management process. With the aid of the developed measurement model, organisations could assess the strength and weakness of their own knowledge management system and practice and then identify areas for improvement.

User‐satisfaction‐based core values, critical success factors and five‐phase knowledge management process are identified through literature review and analysis, and expert interviews, with the aid of system‐modelling techniques.

The seven user‐satisfaction‐based core values, eight critical success factors and five‐phase knowledge management process are identified as the basis of the assessment criteria. These assessment criteria provide academics and practitioners with a new insight into the research landscape for knowledge management performance measurement.

The user‐satisfaction‐based approach provides direct measurement of knowledge management performances in organisations. The developed user‐satisfaction‐based knowledge management performance measurement model covers comprehensive assessment criteria, which are crucial to enable organisations to measure their knowledge management practices and identify improvement areas. It also provides a platform to benchmark performances among companies and even industries, and in turn continually improve knowledge management performances.

The attention focused on the complex set of human activities through which a company attempts to create value for its stakeholders is one of the most characteristic features of the total quality management (TQM) concept. This focalisation on the concept of process in the field of competitive quality is today mirrored in the prerequisites of normative quality, as the new ISO 9001: 2000 standard encourages a process approach to quality management. This article aims to investigate the relationship between the crucial aspects of process management and the normative indications of ISO 9001: 2000. To this aim, a conceptual framework is proposed which integrates the core components of process management methodologies described in the literature. The framework is used to analyse the requirements of the new quality system standard and to evaluate the conceptual advancement of ISO 9001: 2000 toward TQM principles and practices. The paper discusses how the harmonisation of normative requirements with TQM could entail several important risks as it increases the problem of ritualistic implementation – i.e. the adoption of external norms exclusively targeted at social legitimation – and concludes with a reflection on the “implementation challenge” that both companies and consultants have to face in order to seek ISO 9001 registration and develop an effective process management system.

This paper seeks to present an optimization‐based approach to design acceptance sampling plans by variables for controlling non‐conforming proportions in lots of items. Simple and double sampling plans with s known and unknown are addressed. Normal approximation distributions proposed by Wallis are employed to handle plans with s unknown. The approach stands on the minimization of the average sampling number (ASN) taking into account the constraints arising from the two point conditions on the operating characteristic (OC) curve. The resulting optimization problems fall under the class of mixed integer non‐linear programming (MINLP), and are solved employing GAMS. The results obtained strongly agree with classical acceptance sampling plans found in the literature, although outperforming them in some cases, and providing a general approach to address other cases.

The approach takes the form of formulation of the design of acceptance sampling plans by variables for non‐conforming proportions as optimization problems minimizing the ASN with the constraints being the acceptance probability at the controlled points of the OC curve, and subsequent solution of the mathematical programming problems arising with mathematical programming algorithms.

The results are in strong agreement with acceptance sampling plans available in the literature. The approach presented here outperforms the classical plans in some cases and its generality allows one to design other plans without the requirement of additional relations between the parameters and intensive enumerative algorithms.

The paper presents an optimization‐based approach to design robust acceptance sampling plans by variables for non‐conforming proportions that allows a general treatment and disregards the need for computational intensive enumerative‐based procedures.