https://epublications.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1270&context=mgmt_fac

Qualitative case studies in operations management: Trends, research outcomes, and future research implications

Manufacturing industry profoundly impact economic and societal progress. As being a commonly accepted term for research centers and universities, the Industry 4.0 initiative has received a splendid attention of the business and research community. Although the idea is not new and was on the agenda of academic research in many years with different perceptions, the term “Industry 4.0” is just launched and well accepted to some extend not only in academic life but also in the industrial society as well. While academic research focuses on understanding and defining the concept and trying to develop related systems, business models and respective methodologies, industry, on the other hand, focuses its attention on the change of industrial machine suits and intelligent products as well as potential customers on this progress. It is therefore important for the companies to primarily understand the features and content of the Industry 4.0 for potential transformation from machine dominant manufacturing to digital manufacturing. In order to achieve a successful transformation, they should clearly review their positions and respective potentials against basic requirements set forward for Industry 4.0 standard. This will allow them to generate a well-defined road map. There has been several approaches and discussions going on along this line, a several road maps are already proposed. Some of those are reviewed in this paper. However, the literature clearly indicates the lack of respective assessment methodologies. Since the implementation and applications of related theorems and definitions outlined for the 4th industrial revolution is not mature enough for most of the reel life implementations, a systematic approach for making respective assessments and evaluations seems to be urgently required for those who are intending to speed this transformation up. It is now main responsibility of the research community to developed technological infrastructure with physical systems, management models, business models as well as some well-defined Industry 4.0 scenarios in order to make the life for the practitioners easy. It is estimated by the experts that the Industry 4.0 and related progress along this line will have an enormous effect on social life. As outlined in the introduction, some social transformation is also expected. It is assumed that the robots will be more dominant in manufacturing, implanted technologies, cooperating and coordinating machines, self-decision-making systems, autonom problem solvers, learning machines, 3D printing etc. will dominate the production process. Wearable internet, big data analysis, sensor based life, smart city implementations or similar applications will be the main concern of the community. This social transformation will naturally trigger the manufacturing society to improve their manufacturing suits to cope with the customer requirements and sustain competitive advantage. A summary of the potential progress along this line is reviewed in introduction of the paper. It is so obvious that the future manufacturing systems will have a different vision composed of products, intelligence, communications and information network. This will bring about new business models to be dominant in industrial life. Another important issue to take into account is that the time span of this so-called revolution will be so short triggering a continues transformation process to yield some new industrial areas to emerge. This clearly puts a big pressure on manufacturers to learn, understand, design and implement the transformation process. Since the main motivation for finding the best way to follow this transformation, a comprehensive literature review will generate a remarkable support. This paper presents such a review for highlighting the progress and aims to help improve the awareness on the best experiences. It is intended to provide a clear idea for those wishing to generate a road map for digitizing the respective manufacturing suits. By presenting this review it is also intended to provide a hands-on library of Industry 4.0 to both academics as well as industrial practitioners. The top 100 headings, abstracts and key words (i.e. a total of 619 publications of any kind) for each search term were independently analyzed in order to ensure the reliability of the review process. Note that, this exhaustive literature review provides a concrete definition of Industry 4.0 and defines its six design principles such as interoperability, virtualization, local, real-time talent, service orientation and modularity. It seems that these principles have taken the attention of the scientists to carry out more variety of research on the subject and to develop implementable and appropriate scenarios. A comprehensive taxonomy of Industry 4.0 can also be developed through analyzing the results of this review.

Literature review of Industry 4.0 and related technologies

Big data analytics in logistics and supply chain management: Certain investigations for research and applications

A literature review and a case study of sustainable supply chains with a focus on metrics

Purpose – Inconsistent research output makes critical literature reviews crucial tools for assessing and developing the knowledge base within a research field. Literature reviews in the field of supply chain management (SCM) are often considerably less stringently presented than other empirical research. Replicability of the research and traceability of the arguments and conclusions call for more transparent and systematic procedures. The purpose of this paper is to elaborate on the importance of literature reviews in SCM.Design/methodology/approach – Literature reviews are defined as primarily qualitative synthesis. Content analysis is introduced and applied for reviewing 22 literature reviews of seven sub‐fields of SCM, published in English‐speaking peer‐reviewed journals between 2000 and 2009. A descriptive evaluation of the literature body is followed by a content analysis on the basis of a specific pattern of analytic categories derived from a typical research process.Findings – Each paper was assess...

Conducting content‐analysis based literature reviews in supply chain management

Performance measures and metrics are essential for effectively managing logistics operations, particularly in a competitive global economy. The global economy is featured with global operations, outsourcing and supply chain and e-commerce. The real challenge for managers of this new enterprise environment is to develop suitable performance measures and metrics to make right decisions that would contribute to an improved organizational competitiveness. Now the question is whether traditional performance measures can be used and out of them which ones should be given priority for measuring the performance in a new enterprise environment. Some of the traditional measures and metrics may not be suitable for the new environment wherein many activities are not easily identifiable. Measuring intangibles and nonfinancial performance measures pose the greater challenge in the so-called knowledge economy. Nevertheless, measuring them is so critical for the successful operations of companies in this environment. Con...

Performance measures and metrics in logistics and supply chain management: a review of recent literature (1995–2004) for research and applications

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) play an important role in modern economies because of their flexibility and ability to innovate. In nearly every country, SMEs play a significant role in providing employment opportunities and supporting large scale manufacturing firms. However, there are not many studies reported in the literature that deal with productivity problems in SMEs. Considering the importance of SMEs, the experiences of a small company engaged in continuous improvement and a related conceptual model are discussed here to highlight how productivity can be improved with limited resources. The case study presented in this paper was conducted at Valeo; a French company located in England that produces wiper systems for the automotive industry in the UK. The wiper systems include containers, pumps, jets and hoses. Valeo produces a wide variety of low volume parts for various customers in a job shop environment. The objective of the project was to improve productivity in two cells of the company, namely the Honda/Rover cell and the headlamp cleaning cell. Next, the aim was to identify potential areas for cost savings resulting from productivity gains. Finally, implementation issues associated with productivity improvement strategies in a small company are discussed.

Improving operations performance in a small company: a case study

Business process design and business process reengineering (BPR) depend crucially on linking production procedures and organizational services to business goals and objectives. There is currently very little formula support for this kind of reasoning as analytical tasks are usually carried out informally and individual design decisions are hard to relate to business objectives. If BPR is carried out without understanding the way it is done, then the most likely outcome would be continuing less-than-satisfactory current practice and automating outdated processes. This kind of practice misses opportunities for innovation and rationalization. The modelling and analysis of business processes along with business strategies and organizational structures are essential to study the implications of BPR. In this paper, an attempt has been made to study the modelling, analysis and tools/techniques used for modelling of BPR with the help of a survey on the recently (1993-2000) employed methods and tools used for BPR ...

Modelling and analysis of business process reengineering

New product development process: An investigation of success and failure in high-technology and non-high-technology firms

The revolution in information technology and the changes in political and social environments during the last two decades have created a very competitive global market. In order to remain competitive, business organizations have focused on innovative techniques for product and process designs. Owing to limited resources, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) need to work harder than large corporations in order to survive in a situation of ever‐increasing competition. Considering the importance of elements of computer‐integrated manufacturing (CIM), a framework for the implementation of CIM in SMEs has been developed with the help of a survey conducted in a randomly selected group of 24 SMEs. Also highlights the issues of human resource in the implementation of CIM in SMEs. Finally, presents future research directions.

Bulent Kobu

Papers

Performance measures and metrics in logistics and supply chain management: a review of recent literature (1995–2004) for research and applications

Improving operations performance in a small company: a case study

Modelling and analysis of business process reengineering

New product development process: An investigation of success and failure in high-technology and non-high-technology firms

Implementation of computer‐integrated manufacturing in small and medium enterprises