Bibliography: leaves 350-402. This thesis is concerned with the process of change and adaptation in four Australian manufacturing companies in the period 1989 to 1996. The thesis seeks to explain the reaction of these companies to the pressures for change, and particularly for the adoption of 'best practice' management prescriptions in the organization of work and human resource management. The operating hypothesis adopted is that the pattern of changes undertaken by manufacturing organizations are shaped by a variety of factors both external to and within the company, but that management beliefs and orientations are a key element in understanding the pace and extent of change. The research is pursued through detailed case studies designed to explore at length pressures for change and continuity in corporate decision-making.

Bibliography: leaves 350-402. / x, 412 leaves ; 31 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / This thesis is concerned with the process of change and adaptation in four Australian manufacturing companies in the period 1989 to 1996. The thesis seeks to explain the reaction of these companies to the pressures for change, and particularly for the adoption of 'best practice' management prescriptions in the organization of work and human resource management. The operating hypothesis adopted is that the pattern of changes undertaken by manufacturing organizations are shaped by a variety of factors both external to and within the company, but that management beliefs and orientations are a key element in understanding the pace and extent of change. The research is pursued through detailed case studies designed to explore at length pressures for change and continuity in corporate decision-making. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of Economics, 2001

The optimal allocation of buffers in serial production systems is one of the oldest and most researched problems in Industrial Engineering. In general, there are three main approaches to the buffer allocation problem when the objective is to maximize throughput. The first is basically a systematic trial and error procedure supported either by discrete event simulation or analytical models. A second approach is to allocate buffers based on general design rules that have been established in the research literature through experimentation. And the third approach is to apply a buffer allocation optimization algorithm to a specific production line. All these approaches have limitations and could be time and resource consuming. Additionally, most of the existing research on buffer allocation only considers production systems modeled with an infinite supply of raw materials before the first workstation and an unlimited capacity for finished goods after the last workstation. In reality many production systems are designed as closed systems where an interaction between the last and the first workstations in the line is present. In a closed production system, there is a finite buffer after the last workstation and the number of "carriers" holding jobs that move through the line is fixed. The objective of this thesis was to develop efficient heuristic algorithms for the buffer allocation problem in closed production systems. Two heuristics for buffer allocation were implemented. Heuristic H 1 uses the idea that highly utilized workstation stages require any available buffer more than sub-utilized stages. Heuristic H2 uses information stored in the longest path of a network representation of job flow to determine where additional buffers are most beneficial. An experiment was designed to determine if there are any statistically significant differences between throughput values with buffer allocations obtained with a genetic algorithm, also developed in this research, and through puts with buffer allocations generated by Hi and H2. Several types of closed production systems were examined in eight different test cases. No significant differences in performance were observed. The efficiency of the heuristics was also analyzed. A significant difference between the speeds of Hi and H2 is found. The analysis performed in this research indicates that heuristic H2 is sufficiently effective and accurate for determining near optimal buffer allocations in closed production systems. / Graduation date: 2005

This study aims to investigate the outsourced design management implementations along the alliances that are established between firms and design consultancies in Turkey, which have been analysed in a limited sense in the past. Within this context / information on, &lsquo / why and how design is outsourced&rsquo / and &lsquo / how the design process is managed&rsquo / are derived through semi-structured interviews in conjunction with structured questionnaire conducted with managers from a sample selection of design and manufacturing firms with the aim of comparing the expectations and offerings of the parties that engaged the alliances in Turkey. The findings of the field study indicate that design management implementations in their current form of application exhibit several issues to discuss. Context of outsourced design service, corporate level strategic utilization of the design expertise, evaluation of final outputs, business initiation practices and design process management practices are important factors to consider in management of design alliances.

University of Macau / Faculty of Science and Technology / Department of Electromechanical Engineering

In manufacturing environments, machines are usually subject to down periods due to various reasons such as preventive maintenance activities, pre-accepted jobs and pre-known material shortages. Among these reasons, preventive maintenance, which is defined as the pre-planned maintenance activities to keep the machine in its operating state, has gained much more importance in recent years. In this thesis, we consider the single machine total flow time problem where the jobs are non-resumable and the machine is subject to preventive maintenance activities of known starting times and durations. We propose a number of optimality properties together with the upper and lower bounding procedures. Using these mechanisms, we build a branch and bound algorithm to find the optimal solution of the problem. Our extensive computational study on randomly generated test instances shows that our algorithm can solve large-sized problem instances with up to 80 jobs in reasonable times. We also study a two-alternative maintenance planning problem with minor and major maintenances. We give an optimizing algorithm to find the timing of the maintenances, when the job sequence is fixed.

In this study, the effect of inspection error on the product mix and quality projects selection in a manufacturing environment where rework and inspection errors exist is examined. It is assumed that the products (items) for which rework is necessary are reprocessed at a separate work center and 100% inspection is performed for the products both after rework and processing operations. Markov chain approach is used to compute yield and rework rates. In addition, nominal-the-best type of a quality loss function is used in computing quality loss due to products shipped to the customers. A linear programming (LP) model is developed to support the product mix and quality improvement project selection decisions. The use of LP model is demonstrated on an example problem. The results obtained under different experimental conditions are compared with solutions of a naive QI project selection method, improving the least capable process. The analysis shows that developed LP model is relatively better than process capability approach. Besides, according to the results obtained under different experimental conditions, the factors that have significant effect on throughput and QI project selection are being determined.

In this study, non-permutation flowshops with missing operations are considered. The primary performance criterion is the total cycle time (i.e. makespan) and the secondary criterion is the total flowtime. In order to obtain the schedule with minimum makespan and minimum total flowtime, non-permutation schedules are being generated instead of permutation ones by permitting multiple jobs bypassing stages where misisng operations occur. A heuristic algorithm has been developed in order to generate non-permutations sequences through those stages. The heuristic algorithm has been compared with the existing heuristic methods in the literature, the ones generating permutation vs. the ones generating non-permutation schedules. Computational analysis is conducted to investigate the effects of certain parameter values such as the number of machines, the number of jobs and the percentage of missing operations. The results demonstrate slight improvement in the makespan as well as a significant improvement in total flowtime of schedules generated by the new heuristic procedure compared to leading non-permutation and permutation schedule generating heuristics, where the percentage of improvement gets higher with larger percentage of missing operations.

Manufacturing companies are searching for new techniques day by day to launch qualified products with a competitive price to the market. Companies believe in the importance of teams which have members coming from different disciplines who use their knowledge, experiences, and creativity for achieving the goals of their teams. The purpose of this study is to explore the effectiveness of teamwork for successful product development process by focusing on the relationship between the team members &ndash / especially engineers&rsquo / and industrial designers&rsquo / relation. After a broad literature survey, a descriptive-survey study that aims demonstrating the relationship between engineers and industrial designers in manufacturing companies in Turkey is held in order to investigate the effectiveness of teamwork in product development process. A twelve item questionnaire which has four open-ended questions and eight Likert-scaled statements has been prepared. As the result of this study, a positive relationship is found between the performance of product development team and the effects of cooperation, social and professional communication, having clear and common goals, sharing knowledge and experiences, leadership, coordination and cooperative problem solving and decision making processes to the relationship between engineers and industrial designers.

In some production environments the defect rates are considerably low such that measurement of fraction of nonconforming items reaches parts per million level. In such environments, monitoring the number of conforming items between consecutive nonconforming items, namely the time between events (TBE) is often suggested. However, in the design of control charts for TBE monitoring a common practice is the assumptions of known process parameters. Nevertheless, in many applications the true values of the process parameters are not known. Their estimates should be determined from a sample obtained from the process at a time when it is expected to operate in a state of statistical control. Additional variability introduced through sampling may significantly effect the performance of a control chart. In this study, the effect of parameter estimation on the performance of Time Between Events Exponentially Weighted Moving Average (TBE EWMA) schemes is examined. Conditional performance is evaluated to show the effect of estimation. Marginal performance is analyzed in order to make recommendations on sample size requirements. Markov chain approach is used for evaluating the results.