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This study surveys the usage of various justification activities in plants that have adopted advanced manufacturing technology (AMT). Relationships between the usage of these activities and the level of performance of AMT projects are also determined. Our findings suggest that justification approaches and justification criteria preference help to explain the adoption of the more integrated technologies. However, the number of functional departments involved in AMT justification activities is more effective in explaining project performance than the other justification activities. Our results also indicate that the majority of plants are not utilizing discounted cash-flow and probabilistic justification techniques. This study provides some insights into the formation of decision making teams for the justification process. Future research directions in this area are also suggested.

This study uses information obtained from the advanced manufacturing technology (AMT) literature to develop a conceptual framework that seeks to illustrate the impact of the management information systems (MIS) department on the different facets of AMT adoption. A detailed survey instrument was administered to a cross-section of manufacturing firms in the USA to collect the data required to test five hypotheses relating to the efficacy of this framework. The results of this study indicate that the proposed framework is particularly useful in explaining the role of MIS departments in firms that are attempting to integrate advanced process and information technologies. This finding and other results of this study and their Implications are discussed.

This article investigates the relationships between adoption of various advanced manufacturing technologies (AMT), the way that firms plan for and implement them, and their eventual performance. Data obtained from 125 manufacturing firms in the U.S. is used to test several hypotheses which were derived from an extensive review of the AMT implementation literature. The four research questions that drive this study are: (1) What types of planning and installation activities have firms utilized to support their AMT adoptions?, (2) do differences in the level of effort applied to these activities have any impact on the eventual performance of the systems?, (3) are firms that are using integrated technologies, such as FMC/FMS and CIM, applying higher levels of effort on these planning and installation activities than other firms?, and (4) Are these firms achieving higher levels of success than firms that are not using the integrated technologies. The results indicate that firms adopting integrated technologies had exerted significantly higher levels of effort on strategic planning and team-based project management and had also achieved higher levels of performance across a wider range of performance factors than other firms. In addition, firms that had exerted higher levels of effort on developing human factors appeared to be achieving more of the benefits of AMT than their counterparts. The overall results and the research and practical implications of this study are discussed.

Organizations vary greatly in their approaches and success in justifying investment in advanced manufacturing technology (AMT). This study investigates usage of various justification approaches by US manufacturers and examines the impact of such practices on the ultimate performance of AMT projects. Responses from a survey mailed to 584 plants in the US were used to test four propositions concerning AMT justification practices. We first discover that the majority of plants are not utilizing the more sophisticated justification techniques that are being touted by many researchers. Significantly, firms using hybrid justification strategies which include both economic and strategic justification approaches were found to attain higher levels of success from their AMT projects than plants that used only one method. However, once a plant used a hybrid justification method, preference for either strategic or economic criteria had no impact on the level of success of the project. Not surprisingly, plants using the more complex manufacturing technologies were more likely to have multiple functional departments involved in the justification process. Finally, the composition of inter-departmental teams for planning, justification and installation activities have an impact on the success of the AMT project.

In an increasingly technology-based competitive global business environment, the operational and competitive strategic potentials of advanced manufacturing technologies (AMT) and related systems cannot be overlooked. This article presents the results of an investigation of AMT implementation practices at 82 discrete-parts durable goods manufacturing plants in the USA. Several propositions that were derived from the AMT literature are tested. The results of this investigation indicate that plants that are desirous of adopting integrated technologies should be prepared to exert considerable effort on the activities in the pre-planning and justification stages of the implementation process. These and other findings that will be particularly useful to firms in the pre-planning stages of technology adoption are outlined and discussed. Research implications of this study are also presented and discussed.

Additive manufacturing using 2 photon polymerization is of great interest as it can create nanostructures with feature sizes much below the diffraction limit. It can be called as true 3D printing as it can fabricate in 3 dimensions by moving the laser spot in any 3D pattern inside the resist. This unique property is attributed to the non-linearity of two photon absorption which makes the polymerization happen only at the focal spot of the laser beam. This method has a wide range of applications such as optics/photonics, metamaterials, metasurfaces, micromachines, microfluidics, tissue engineering and drug delivery.<br>This work focuses on utilizing 2 photon fabrication for creating a metasurface by printing diabolo antenna arrays on a glass substrate and subsequently metallizing it by coating with gold. A femtosecond laser is used along with a galvo-mirror to scan the geometry inside the photoresist to create the antenna. The structure is simulated using ANSYS HFSS to study its properties and optimize the parameters. The calculations show a reflectance dip and zero reflectance for the resonance condition of 4.04 μm. An array of antennas is fabricated using the optimized properties and coated with gold using e-beam evaporation. This array is studied using a fourier transform infrared spectrometer and polarization dependent reflectance dip to 40% is observed at 6.6 μm. The difference might be due to the small errors in fabrication. This method of 3D printing of antenna arrays and metallization by a single step of e-beam evaporation is hence proved as a viable method for creating optical metasurfaces. Areas of future research for perfecting this method include incorporating an autofocusing system, printing more complicated geometries for antennas, and achieving higher resolution using techniques like stimulated emission depletion.

Cell Therapies are promising clinical instruments with significant therapeutic potential and commercial promise. However, the industry engaged in their commercial and clinical development faces significant financial, technical, regulatory and market challenges. These challenges are compounded by an understanding gap in the cell therapy industry. Commercial failures and financial difficulties have forced the industry to address the need to provide value and estimate and control costs early in the development timeline. The problem is that this issue is not being systematically or thoroughly addressed in the academic community while they pursue potential future treatments. Articles that highlight the need to understand costs and value are appearing with increasing frequency highlighting a growing consensus that work needs to be carried out in this area. However examples of models and tools to predict or estimate or even calculate costs in developing and producing a product do not exist in the literature. This work consists of three parts. Part one entails a new model of the characteristics observed in cell therapy new product development. This model is an evolution of an activity based dependency structure matrix (DSM). Result from the model suggests that some favoured development strategies (such as applying for an orphan indication status) provide less financial benefit than is commonly expected. The ability to scale manufacturing levels between clinical trial phases is also a pressing problem. 3 Part two presents a model to predict the cost of manufacturing and delivering a cell therapy product. This cost of good supplied (COGS) model combines both rules and predictive activity based costing across multiple manufacturing platforms, cell types and supply chain configurations. This model highlights the significant cost burden of validating both single and, more markedly, multiple sites of manufacture. The model also examines the potential for economies of scale when using different production technology in the manufacture of human Mesenchymal Stem Cells. Based in part on the results and knowledge gleaned in parts one and two, part three outlines the development of a novel, scalable expansion system developed to enable lower cost, controlled manufacture of adherent cell populations. While still at an early stage of development the technology has demonstrated the ability to maintain cells in a high rate of growth for a longer period than traditional culture techniques. This allows for the creation of a manufacturing technology with a higher expansion ratio than manufacturing systems on the market today.