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The concept of virtual cellular manufacturing systems (VCMS) is finding acceptance among researchers and practitioners as an extension to group technology. This paper is related to a research work which resulted in designing and developing VCMS, which by virtue of its abilities proves to be attractive to manufacturing organisations fitting into the category of SMEs. VCMS consists of enterprise modeller (EM), cell design manager (CDM), cell operation manager (COM), simulator (SIM), performance evaluator (PE) and report generator (REP). The “cell design manager” is a very important constituent of the VCMS, as this module helps to generate a number of cell configurations using different algorithms. A new algorithm styled as “Better alternative to ROC (BETROC)”, which possesses many distinct features to generate a number of alternative solutions, has been developed and reported in this paper.

Changes are inevitable in risky and uncertain business environments of today’s volatile supply chains. The concept of flexibility originates from this need to mitigate the ill-effects of risks and uncertainty in supply chains. In this paper, an attempt is made to present an exhaustive review on supply chain flexibility (SCF) and its implementation to gain strategic advantages.

A citation analysis method is employed in this paper to discuss, analyse and apprehend the conceptual, empirical, analytical and simulation studies done in this field. In this paper, about 110 papers on flexibility from many reputed journals are examined to study and assimilate various aspects of flexibility.

SCF embraces a unified process-based view including the core processes such as procurement, sourcing, distribution and logistics and mitigates uncertainty or risks involved. The review helps to assimilate the key knowledge about relevant practices in SCF and helps to draw implementing strategies while offering managerial insight on the subject.

Citation and co-citation analysis is done to review the SCF literature. Efforts are made to investigate relevant papers from various journals regarding its ability to mitigate risk or aid in making strategic decision. The study, however, is limited to certain industries in the papers as per chosen approach here. The strategies described in here may further be verified by the researchers and practitioners pertaining to their study or industries focused.

It provides managerial insight for practitioners on how to use flexibility within the firm and across supply chain while considering various trade-offs.

This paper is unique as a review paper, as it encompasses various kinds of studies done on SCF from conceptual models to mathematical models. Further, it briefs with the current practices in industries/SC towards being flexible. It talks of various trade-offs in pursuit of flexibility and concludes while suggesting numerous research gaps and opening new dimensions for SCF research. It offers many managerial and academic implications.

This paper discusses integrated logistics in a two‐level repair‐inventory system of a transport corporation where there is one central depot and twenty subordinate depots which cater to the needs of the population in a metropolitan city in India. An expensive, recoverable spare (engine) is considered with (S — 1, S) inventory policy. It is reported that the present location of the central facility is not optimal. The advantages possible by optimally locating this central facility are highlighted with results. The impact of increasing the maintenance effectiveness on the optimum spare stock level and the total system cost are discussed.

Supply chain systems play very significant roles to improve the quality of customer service and therefore, derive considerable attention from managers of enterprises in pursuit of competitive excellence. Different strategies are used to improve customer service and different measures are also used to quantify this. A detailed diagnostic study was conducted in a large Indian company dealing with fast moving consumer goods. In this study, a new measure called Depot Service India (DSI) was used to measure the quality of customer service and using which various statistical analyses were carried out to study how the DSI values vary over time and among various depots, how these values are auto‐correlated, what factors influence the variations in DSI values and how various decisions at strategic, tactical and operational levels affect the performance of the system. The details of how the results obtained were used to evolve remedial measures to improve the quality of customer service in the supply chain system of this company are also discussed in this paper.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss how decisions regarding organisational flexibility can be improved through targeted resource allocation, by focusing on the supply chain's level of uncertainty exposure. Specifically, the issue of where and in what ways flexibility has been incorporated across the organisation's supply chain is addressed.

A two-phase methodology design based on literature review and case study was used. Using 83 journal articles in the areas of uncertainty and flexibility an analytical process for assessing uncertainty-flexibility mismatches was developed. Furthermore, results from ten interviews with senior/middle managers within the Australian manufacturing sector were used to provide preliminary insights on the usefulness and importance of the analytical process and its relationship with organisational practice.

The paper emphasises the importance of having a systematic and encompassing view of uncertainty-flexibility mismatches across the supply chain, as well as the significance of socio-technical engagement. The paper both conceptually and empirically illustrates how, using a structured analytical process, flexibility requirements across the supply, process, control and demand segments of a supply chain might be assessed. A four-step analytical process was accordingly developed and, its application, usefulness and importance discussed using empirical data.

The analytical process presented in this paper can assist managers to obtain a comprehensive overview of supply chain flexibility when dealing with situations involving uncertainty. This can facilitate and improve their decision-making with respect to prioritising attention on identified flexibility gaps in order to ensure stability of their performance.

The paper presents a supply chain-wide discussion on the difficulties that uncertainty brings to organisations, and how organisational flexibility might serve to moderate those challenges for supply chain management. It discusses how to identify the flexibility gap and proposes an original analytical process for systematic assessment of uncertainty-flexibility mismatches.

Reviews a real‐life investigation carried out on copper coating of CO⊂2 welding wire. The major quality problems were non‐uniformity in coating thickness and other associated problems. The factors identified as responsible are speed of drawing the wire, acid, ferrous and copper sulphate. Describes three stages of the study. The results obtained revealed a number of interesting facts about the process. The extent to which the copper coating is influenced by these factors independently and interactively was vividly brought out by factorial experiments, fractional factorial experiments and standard orthogonal arrays. These results show various intricate dynamics of interest to a process controller.

Manufacturing systems are gearing up to meet the challenges of quality‐based competition. Process capability study and analysis have become critical issues in process control and a number of guidelines are available for process capability assessment. However, certain conditions like normally distributed output, statistical independence of observed values and existence of only random variation due to chance causes are stipulated for this assessment. All these conditions may not be completely satisfied in a practical set‐up and departures from these conditions are quite likely to occur. Tool wear is one such dominant and inseparable component in many of the machining processes, and hence it constitutes a systematic assignable cause. Process capability assessment in such cases becomes tricky as the usual procedure will not give accurate results. A real life case study has been considered for detailed analysis. Various approaches of process capability assessment are used. Analyses the results obtained to bring forth a number of critical issues common to such situations. Presents the salient details of the results obtained and various analyses made.

A kaizen system was designed and installed in a large manufacturing organization as a part of a TQM exercise. Detailed studies were carried out by collecting extensive data over a period of 23 months, and by using statistical methods to understand the dynamics in the kaizen process. The kaizen process was found to be an auto regressive process, which leads to habit formation in making improvements. The process was observed to be influenced by seven controllable variables, which affect the quantity and quality of improvements. Reveals that implementation of kaizen as the first step in the TQM journey can lead to a self‐sustaining, controllable process of setting up a culture of continuous improvement.

Reports on a study carried out on an injection moulding process to produce agitators for washing machines, following complaints from customers. The study revealed that there was a lot of variation in the product dimensions produced. Attempts to demonstrate how robust design methodology is helpful in achieving variation reduction of product dimensions and achieving target values. Various analyses carried out using ANOVA and ANOM helped to understand the dynamics of the process. In the presence of multi‐responses and specially when the responses have conflicting behavior to each other, selection of optimum conditions for the process is explained in detail. Reports on the importance of confirmation experiments and the outcome of this detailed exercise.

This paper relates to make‐to‐order (MTO) manufacturing environment. Initially, the various issues of concern and problems encountered in relation to typical MTO systems are presented to emphasize why agility is required in such systems. The need to have better performance measures is discussed. How some of the problems related to typical MTO systems were dealt with in the past is discussed, by highlighting the salient features of some selected contributions made towards enhancing agility in MTO systems. An outline of the system presently being developed by the author for concurrent and integrated management of MTO manufacturing organisations, which is conceived mainly as an agile management system for MTO environment, is also presented.