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Although some recent articles have extended the traditional economic order quantity models to JIT purchasing, their value is limited by the simplistic nature of the underlying assumptions. Implementation of JIT procurement is a lengthy and complex process and it is important to recognize the interrelationships between the investments in the different subsystems of the procurement system to suit JIT and the resultant cost and lead time structures. It is also important o consider the variability in demand and lead time. Presents an inventory‐theoretical model that takes these considerations into account and illustrates its application with a numerical example. This model facilitates the choice of an optimal combination of the investment and the shipment lot size to minimize the total annual cost in each period as a firm progressively adopts JIT procurement.

The value of winning the Baldrige Quality Award to the shareholders of the firm has been the subject of a debate motivated by bipolar perceptions and an opposing set of viewpoints held by both industry leaders and academic professionals. One of the key concerns that must be addressed to place the impact of the Baldrige Award in a proper perspective (and thus contribute to the resolution of this debate on the issue of the value to the shareholders of the winning firms) is the short‐term negative effect imputed by the views and the actions of the critics, especially the short sellers who see the announcement of the award as an opportunity to make profits by short selling the stock. In this study, we focus on this concern and examine the short‐term impact of the Baldrige Award announcement on the shareholder wealth by applying a rigorous statistical methodology to analyze the stock price movements around the day of the announcement of the award for statistically significant abnormal behavior. Our analysis falsifies the critics’ claim that the financial and other resources spent by the companies toward winning the Baldrige Award are wasteful and reduce shareholder wealth.

It has been widely recognized that agility enables manufacturing systems to respond to dynamic and unpredictable changes in today’s competitive environment. Develops a quantitative analysis framework and a simulation methodology to explore the value of agility in financial terms. Addresses the issues pertaining to the assessment of how an agile system performs in an environment of unanticipated changes, the comparison between two or more systems with different designs and hence different agility levels and the justification of investments in agility. Proposes an exploratory framework for a structured analysis of the various segments of the manufacturing system in which agility at different levels is built‐in through different pathways and links it to a set of aggregate performance measures. Then develops a simulation model that captures dynamic and unanticipated changes in the operating environment and facilitates performance appraisal and investment justification decisions using a quantitative financial metric.