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Contemporary studies and reports point to the potential of value‐added products as an alternative income stream as well as a means of extending the product line of many agriculturalists. While there is a well documented growth of initiatives and interest in the establishment of commercial kitchen technologies to develop value‐added products in many rural communities, such growth has not been accompanied by research, particularly relating to the producers' perspective on such developments. This study seeks to examine the extent to which small farm operators in one rural Alabama community are interested in becoming involved with value‐adding their product line.

A total of 33 small growers from Chilton County, Alabama, participated in this study by completing a questionnaire.

The findings demonstrate that much of what respondents grow could be further processed into value‐added products. Also, while almost one‐fourth of the participants acknowledge the need for a commercial kitchen, the majority are interested in both selling blemished/unmarketable produce for processing and forming a group to work towards adding value to their produce. The findings also point to the fact that the concept of value‐adding produce and the implications for the same area are little understood amongst many rural farmers.

Both the chosen geographical/physical location of the farms – that is, in one single farming community – and the low number of participating businesses limit the generalisability of the findings. However, the study's overall findings could be of assistance to future research efforts and, in particular, replication studies in other rural areas.

Many farmers could maximise their produce by means of developing value‐added products and could potentially increase their revenues in the process. However, other gains may be of equal or more importance. For instance, extending an area of their business and fully utilising their produce's intrinsic rewards, learning experiences and increased motivation could have important implications for many rural communities and farming industries.

This study seeks to fill the existing gap of knowledge with regard to small farmers' perceptions on maximisation of their produce, an area closely related to value‐added product development. To date, research on the farm operator perspective with regard to these dimensions continues to be limited.

The purpose of this paper is to elaborate value-added service of cold chain logistics between China and Korea. The covering strategy for developing the cold chain value-added service between the two countries is proposed.

The author expounds the driving power for developing cold chain logistics between the two countries basing on the trade data of agricultural exports and imports, the tariff liberalization agreement of China–Korea FTA and the short distance between the two countries. It analyzes the value-added service of cold chain logistics with exemplary cases from four aspects (customized service, integrated service, consultation/solution and strategic alliance service), and its value-added mechanism for the enhancement of core competences of the entire cold chain. Then, by considering the drawbacks of the current cold chain logistics practices, between the two countries, the author proposes certain measures for fostering the cold chain value-added services between them.

There are apparent mutual benefits in developing cold chain value-added service between the two countries, but there exists some shortcomings which impede the sound development of the cold chain logistics, such as low circulation rate and insufficient cold chain facility in China, shortage of integrated and compatible information platform between the two countries, few integrated cold chain service and strategic alliance service and occurrence of some trade frictions.

The enforcement of China–Korea FTA will greatly reduce the tariff and increase the import and export volumes between the two countries; with the proximity between them, development of cold chain logistics between the two countries holds tremendous potential. This paper thoroughly discusses the mechanism of the value-added service of the cold chain logistics, and brings into focus the development of the value-added service in the two countries.

Multifunctional agriculture, including value-added agriculture, has drawn the attention of different stakeholders (government, farmers) interested in maximising the potential of farming operations and strengthening rural communities. This preliminary study aims to investigate value-added agriculture, including the extent to which food growers consider, or are involved in, this aspect of multifunctional agriculture, from the perspective of orchard operators located in different Australian states.

Orchard operators were contacted through regional growers' associations and by mail. A total of 80, the large majority of whom are small orchardists, participated in the study, completing a questionnaire designed to collect both quantitative and qualitative data.

Overall, there is moderate interest among the participating orchard operators in adding value to food production. Respondents also indicate barriers in the form of added expenses, lack of time, knowledge, and markets, to sell value-added products.

This study has only provided preliminary data from a limited number of participants; future research could broaden the scope to gather the insights of more orchard operators or even study other rural food-growing sectors.

With increasing pressures on the farmland, the findings have several implications, in particular, the need to understand the cost-benefits involved in value adding activities and potential cost-savings strategies.

In the case of Australian agriculture, little has been discussed about the extent to which value-added food production is being considered among food growers, for instance, using commercial kitchens to process foods that do not sell as “premium.” The present study examines this unexplored dimension and seeks to provide useful preliminary information.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the process optimization of a precast concrete component production line by using value stream mapping.

This paper is an empirical focused on of lean production theory and value stream mapping. The data in the case study were collected in real time on-site for each process during the production process of a prefabricated exterior wall.

The results of the current value stream map indicate that the main problems of the current production process are related to equipment, technology and organization. The equipment problems include simple demolding and cleaning tools and the lack of professional transfer channels. The technology problems include the lack of a marking mechanism and pipeline exit mechanism. There is a lack of standard operating procedures and incomplete process convergence. A comparison and analysis of the current value stream and the future value flow indicate that optimizations of the process flow, the production line layout, and the standard operating procedures have shortened the delivery cycle, reduced the number of workers, improved the operator’s operating level and balanced the production line.

The results of this study provide practitioners with a clear understanding of the optimization of the precast concrete component production and represent a method and basis for the process optimization of a factory production line; the approach is suitable for process optimization in other areas.

This research represents an innovative application of lean production theory and value stream mapping in a complex production line of precast concrete components and thereby fills the gap between the theory and practice of the optimization of a precast concrete component production line.

The purpose of this paper is to guide companies in conducting benchmarking studies of their manufacturing processes by viewing across industries, locations and products. In particular, the proposed framework can help corporate decision makers in terms of production footprint and site location studies. The level of benchmarking performance can be measured by evaluating defined benchmarking evaluation profiles.

This paper develops a tool to operationalize value-added manufacturing processes for benchmarking evaluations. In this context, an object-oriented database structure has been developed for the business areas such as product development, manufacturing and assembly. This paper focuses on manufacturing processes. Furthermore, a framework for applying high-performance benchmarking has been developed and applied in a case study.

This paper shows that object class-oriented modeling approach can be applied to manufacturing processes. The higher the degree of independence in terms of locations, industry sectors and products, the more powerful thus a higher performance of benchmarking is achieved. The performance level of benchmarking has been defined by proving and demonstrating higher and lower performance levels. The high-performance benchmarking tool has been successfully applied to a production footprint case study.

This paper takes up the superiority of process benchmarking that has been the focus of numerous research papers on benchmarking techniques in the past. The potential of process benchmarking has been enhanced and operationalized as a tool. A classification logic for benchmarking evaluation profiles has been developed and integrated in the overall tool set. The model helps decision makers to configure their benchmarking studies tailored to their strategic entrepreneurial questions and to guide them to achieve a higher benchmarking performance level.

Muscadines grapes, the fruit of a vine native to the South East of the USA have been studied extensively, including their alleged beneficial health properties. To date, however, very little is known about the business side of muscadine growing. For instance, very limited information exists on whether wineries growing muscadines are currently processing their grapes into other value‐added products. The present study seeks to explore these aspects from winery operators' points‐of‐view.

Telephone interviews, coupled with two face‐to‐face on‐site interviews were conducted among 31 winery owners located in different states in the South East of the USA.

Overall, winery operators acknowledge the potential for the diversification and development of muscadine value‐added products, including juice, jellies, fortified wines or those for pharmaceutical purposes. However, the limited supply of muscadine grapes or muscadine juice to satisfy demand for value‐added products is an area of concern that several muscadine growers acknowledged. Also of concern are laws and regulations that are preventing winery operators from capitalizing on some muscadine products with alcohol content.

The low number of participants in comparison with the much larger number of existing muscadine wineries limits the generalisability of the findings.

With potentially greater demand for muscadine‐related products in the future, industry support and the development of new initiatives are needed to facilitate the process of value‐added muscadine product development for the benefit of operators, the industry and consumers.

The study focuses on the business‐side of muscadine production, an area that to a great extent has been neglected in contemporary research.

Accident emergency hospital (AEH) services require cohesive, collective, uninterrupted streamlined medical diagnostic and satisfactory patient care. Medical service efficiency in AEHs is difficult to quantify due to the clinical complexity involved in treatment involving various units, patient conditions, changes in contemporary medical practices and technological developments. This paper aims to show how to measure efficiency by eliminating waste in AEH system, identify service failure points, identify benchmark medical services, identify patient throughput time and measure treatment time when AEH services are nonstandard. The applications shown in this paper are distinct in particular; we the authors use nontraditional and systems engineering approach to collect data as the traditional data collection is difficult in real-time AEHs.

The authors show in this study how to measure overall patient treatment time from admission to discharge. Project evaluation and review technique (PERT) captures the inconsistencies involved in measuring treatment time, including measures of variability. The irregular treatment time and complexity involved in the emergency health-care services are usual. The research methodology illustrates how the time function map and service blueprint can improve value-added time in AEHs and benchmark services between similar AEHs.

The inconsistency in treatment time between AEH in public and private hospital is found to be in ratio of 1:20. The private hospital suggests variety of treatments and long stays for recovery. The PERT computations show that the average time a patient remains in a government AEH is about 10 days. The standard deviation of the AEH treatment time is about 0.043 per cent of the expected patient care time. The inconsistency is not significant as compared to the expected value. In 89.64 per cent of the cases, a patient may be discharged in less than 10 days’ time. The patient on average is discharged in 13 days in a private hospital.

The patient treatment time of an AEH is evaluated with PERT project management approach to account for inconsistencies in treatment time. This research makes new contributions in benchmarking AEH throughput time, identify medical service failure points with service blueprint, measure the efficiency with time function map and collect patient data with nontraditional methods. The inherent inconsistencies in a clinical process are identified by PERT analysis with the variance as a characteristic of the treatment time. Improvement of variability implies cost reduction in AEH system.

Suggests that much of the competitive dilemma experienced by US and European firms in recent years is a result of a persistent failure to manage the firm as a cohesive value‐added system. The complexity of the interactions among the firm′s value‐added abilities underlies this challenge of integrating the firm′s value‐added activities. Presents a paradigm of the firm that provides both a rationale and a starting point for the integration of the firm′s value‐added materials management activities. Suggests a framework, the essence of which is that customer value is added by the functional areas only when consistency exists among decisions made in each of four major decision areas. Addresses information and measurement issues as facilitators which link the decisions areas and bridge the gaps among the functional areas.

The purpose of this paper is to settle the methodological debate on the decomposition of value added in gross exports, proposing a standard, exposing the drawbacks of the alternatives and quantifying the differences.

This paper systematizes the analytical framework and assesses and quantifies the various methodologies and its main differences.

The decomposition method of Borin and Mancini (2023), using a source-based approach and an exporting country perspective, should be considered as the standard for decomposing the value added in gross exports. This study finds that alternative approaches and perspectives are methodologically inferior, and that tailored perspectives do not provide an increase in accuracy that compensates their drawbacks.

This paper’s contribution is fourfold: it rejects the alleged equivalence between approaches and perspectives, defending the superiority of a particular method, approach and perspective; it gives quantitative examples of the differences between them; it proves that the drawbacks of tailored perspectives do not compensate their alleged accuracy (as they do not result in big quantitative differences with the standard perspective); and it argues that no valid standard decomposition can forego the calculation of value added exported, which requires the expression of exports in terms of final demand.

This paper aims to demonstrate the possibility of maintaining triple bottom line (TBL) sustainable performance in the petroleum industry via a case study. In particular, it presents the utilization of a lean-six-sigma (LSS) concept for investigating one of the underperforming support service activities in an engineering contractor (EC) and to indicate how LSS concepts enable the barriers to maintaining sustainable petroleum operations to be reduced for maintaining sustainable petroleum operations.

A case study has been carried out in an EC organization in relation to one of the support services (i.e. valves requisition process [VRP]) to demonstrate how LSS concepts enable the barriers to maintaining sustainable petroleum operations to be reduced for maintaining sustainable petroleum operations. Value stream mapping (VSM) and value stream analysis (VSA) have been utilized to investigate the barriers that inhibit sustainable operations. VSM and VSA have been performed to investigate the underperforming activities in the selected support service (i.e. VRP) using a current state map. After performing VSA, a future state map has been developed, indicating possible improvements in overall TBL sustainable performance.

VSM and VSA enable the barriers to maintaining TBL sustainable operations in the petroleum industry to be investigated, while minimizing waste in the ECs and asset owners’ organizations.

The study has been limited to ECs’ support services, which have been delivered based on asset operators’ requirements.

The suggested LSS approach and related analysis help practicing engineers to perform similar analysis for different engineering support services. Improved performance in support service results minimize health, safety and environmental challenges in asset operations, and the resulting waste reduction increases the return on investments.

Effective delivery of the assessments minimizes potential delays in projects related to petroleum operations, mitigating future accidents. It enhances the TBL sustainable performance of an asset-intensive industrial organization.

This manuscript addresses the inherent TBL sustainable performance challenges in the petroleum industry that have been caused by delayed projects. The responsibilities of projects’ delivery are mainly attributed to ECs. The EC organizations are operating in project mode, and projects delays are inherently caused by the frequently changing nature of: operators’ requirements; suppliers’ and/or manufacturers’ capabilities and restrictions; and lack of standardization in documentation and work processes (i.e. because of different engineering projects’ demands). Hence, this manuscript illustrates a methodology to demonstrate the possibility of TBL sustainable performance improvement in the petroleum industry via a case study (i.e. VRP-related project delivery performance improvement) in an EC organization utilizing the lean concept.