International Journal of Operations & Production Management: Volume 15 Issue 3

Customer‐driven manufacturing

William L. Berry, Terry J. Hill, Jay E. Klompmaker

The basic tasks of a business are straight‐forward – gettingand keeping customers and making profits, both set within the context ofthe short and long term. Explicit in these is…

Managers’ perceptions of the importance of supply, overhead and operating costs

Colin Armistead, Cliff Bowman, Julia Newton

Examines the way in which managers perceive the relative importanceof the three costs as applied to professional service firms, financialservices firms and retail distribution and…

The impact of electronic data interchange on purchasing: an empirical investigation

Snehamay Banerjee, Ven Sriram

As the use of inter‐organizational information systems such aselectronic data interchange (EDI) increases, it becomes important todetermine what impact, if any, their adoption has…

The effects of grouping parts of ready‐to‐assemble products on assembly time: an experimental study

Manohar Madan, Tom Bramorski, R.P. Sundarraj

The problems involved in assembly of packaged ready‐to‐assemble(RTA) products such as bicycles, furniture, etc., are well known. Someof the factors that contribute to the…

Makespan distributions in flow shop scheduling

James Caffrey, Graham Hitchings

Concerns scheduling five jobs through a flow shop with fivemachines. The distribution of makespans and the distribution of theoptimal makespans was obtained by complete…

The sensitivity of rule combinations for scheduling in a hybrid job shop

Faizul Huq, Ziaul Huq

Much of the research literature in job shop scheduling deals withpure job shop environments. However, currently most processes involve ahybrid of both the job shop and a flow shop…

Balancing the assignment of customer groups among employees: Zero‐one goal programming and heuristic approaches

Moutaz Khouja, Robert Conrad

Addresses an actual problem of assigning customers to employees ina mail order firm. The management of the firm groups customers based onthe first letter of the last name. To make…