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The purpose of this paper is to present empirical results of an analysis of the strategic alignment between order winners selection and external supply chain integration strategies.

The research instrument is an international survey from IMSS II. It was applied in 23 countries. ANOVA was used for statistical analyses.

The findings show that firms choosing to use price as an order winner do not show any significant difference in the extent of external supply chain integration. On the other hand, firms that use delivery, customer service, quality and/or flexibility as order winners present differences in the extent to which they integrate their external supply chains.

The results should be treated with caution as any empirical study due to generalizability concerns. The data do not necessarily imply causal relationships, which could be an interesting topic to explore in further research.

The study highlights the importance of supply chain integration as a competitive competence, meriting management consideration and resources.

The paper shows empirical evidence with a large sample size that some associations exist between external supply chain integration and order winning strategies.

The purpose of this paper is to define new criteria for measuring workload smoothness of two-sided assembly lines and propose an algorithm to solve a two-sided assembly line balancing problem focusing on distributing the idle time and the workload as evenly as possible among the workstations.

This paper points out that the mean absolute deviation (MAD) and the smoothness index (SI) used to measure the workload smoothing in one-sided assembly lines are both inappropriate to evaluate the workload balance among workstations in two-sided assembly lines, as the idle time occur at the beginning and in the middle of a cycle within workstations. Then, the finish-time-based SI and MAD (FSI and FMAD) are defined, and a heuristic procedure based on the core mechanism of Moodie and Young method is proposed to smooth the assembly workload in two-sided assembly lines.

The computational results indicate that the proposed heuristic algorithm combined with the FMAD is effective in distributing the idle time and the workload among workstations as evenly as possible in two-sided assembly lines.

The two-sided assembly line balancing problem with the objective of the line efficiency can be effectively solved by the proposed approach.

The FMAD is proposed to effectively improve the workload smoothing in two-sided assembly lines.