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Quality function deployment (QFD) has been used to translate customer requirements into engineering characteristics of a product, while benchmarking was developed to search for the best industry practices, which will lead to exceptional performance through the implementation of these best practices. However, no attempt has been made to integrate QFD with benchmarking to identify the best practices of QFD model. This paper aims to classify the QFD models and thereby applying benchmarking process to propose the best practices of QFD model.

The fundamental benchmarking model developed by Camp has been used to benchmark the existing QFD models available in the literature.

Benchmarking the QFD models revealed about 36 QFD steps in the first phase of the house of quality. The tools used in solving for each practice are also reported.

The proposed model is conceptual and it requires validation by implementing the same in an organization to understand its effectiveness.

Utilizing the benchmarking process to develop the best practices of QFD model is an original concept.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the feasibility of adopting a pilot project approach for foreseeing the working and financial viability of a technique, named as agile innovative total quality function deployment (agile ITQFD).

The agile ITQFD technique and its financial accounting system were designed. The implementation study of two pilot projects on agile ITQFD was conducted in an electronics switches manufacturing company. The statements of the financial accounting system were used to foresee the financial viability of agile ITQFD projects.

The research reported in this paper indicates the feasibility of adopting a pilot project approach and its financial accounting system for test implementing new techniques and models in the organisations aspiring to attain global competitiveness.

Like many other modern organisations, the company in which the research work was carried out has been aspiring to compete globally. Hence, even though the implementation study involved only two pilot projects, the implications of this research would represent the global scenario as well.

Currently practitioners struggle to choose the best techniques for applying them in specific cases. The research reported in this paper would help practitioners in this regard to adopt the pilot project approach and its financial accounting system.

The pilot project approach reported in this paper helps a company save time and money while exploring the practical compatibility of the technique. The financial accounting system presented would be useful in foreseeing the viability of projects using monetary values.

The purpose of this paper is to report a case study in which financial feasibility integrated quality function deployment (QFD) approach was implemented.

Customer complaints were systematically gathered. The house of quality (HoQ) matrix was developed. The technical descriptors were prioritized and subjected to the financial feasibility study. The cost calculations were carried out and the actions were derived. A set of value engineering (VE) principles was used during this case study.

The study reported in this paper indicated the need for integrating financial feasibility study with QFD for enhancing the effectiveness of the method. The measures taken to prevent the customer complaints will be of considerable value to the manufacturing organizations.

During the conduct of case study, high-cost factors restricted the selection of materials which would exhibit higher performance. The case study was carried out in a single electronic switches manufacturing organization.

The manufacturing costs incurred have been reduced by incorporating changes in the part material. The outcomes of the study have been considered for further implementation in the case organisation which indicated the practicality of the study.

The concept of apportionment of HoQ cost developed with the idea of integrating the same with QFD is the original contribution of the authors.

Agile manufacturing (AM) has evolved as a revolutionary way of manufacturing the products while managing the uncertainties, product introduction time, responsiveness, innovation, superior quality, etc. along the supply chain to satisfy the ever increasing customer demand and to maximize the profit. The purpose of this paper is to critically analyze the literature related to various dimensions of AM and to report the findings.

This paper presents the reviews of 300 scholarly articles from 1993 to 2016 by various researchers and practitioners on AM collected from different sources, i.e. Google Scholar and ResearchGate. The information related to AM is also captured during industrial visits to different Indian manufacturing plants.

AM definitions are reported along divergent scopes and objectives in the literature. The researchers have given importance on performance measurement and process analysis through empirical and descriptive analysis whereas its implementation issues are neglected. It is also observed that the effort made on AM is significant for manufacturing industries which is overlooked in service industries.

This literature review has identified many research gaps in AM which were not paid attention before. Researchers can address these research gaps for strengthening the AM implementation.

In total, 300 research papers are reviewed and analyzed to capture the various aspects of AM and its related issues but not restricted to research methodologies, author profiles, types of industries, tools/techniques/methodology used, etc.

The concept of “green product development (GPD)” has been emerged as a global phenomenon. The main objective of GPD is to minimize the impact of industrial growth on the environment across the globe. Many researchers have actively contributed articles for developing GPD, but none of them provide direction and guidance for an effective implementation of GPD in organizations. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to identify a comprehensive list of the principles, practices, tools and techniques, and integrate them to develop and propose a new framework for GPD for effective implementation in organizations.

The present study has examined 37 frameworks published from 1991 to 2012 in selected 23 peer reviewed journals. The study has also identified pillars of the framework with the help of comparative analysis performed on the selected GPD frameworks. The study has formed a team to identify critical elements in the field of GPD. The team consisted academicians, practitioner and consultant.

The findings of the present paper bring out extremely incoherent utilization of elements for implementing GPD. The study has identified 80 unique elements and 11 pillars to propose a comprehensive conceptual framework in the field of GPD with the help of comparative analysis. Also, the present study analysis of selected research articles founds that future research in GPD should be directed towards finding a coherent set of elements that may be further employed to formulate and execution of frameworks. To achieve the required task, the study has proposed a conceptual comprehensive framework in the field of GPD with the help of extensive literature survey and comparative analysis.

The study has conducted extensive literature survey using various online portals and sources. It has not only performed critical review on existing sample of the frameworks but also raised the issue of what is really a framework and how to identify the frameworks from the literature. The study also provides guidelines to the future researchers to propose new frameworks in the field of GPD.

The purpose of this paper is to present and identify the challenges toward implementing sustainability strategies both strategic and tactical (STs) and performance measures (PMs) facing industrial organizations in newly industrialized countries.

Conducting a comprehensive survey on the published papers focused on the area of sustainability and/or sustainable development (S/SD) in manufacturing enterprises to identify the most common critical challenges. Setting with industrialists to determine which challenges the industrial organizations facing while implementing the S/SD strategies in terms of strategic, tactic and PMs. Using support logic techniques such as interpretive structural modeling (ISM) and interpretive ranking process (IRP) as modeling approaches to examine the contextual relationship among the STs and PMs individually “first phase,” to clarify and identify the most and least dominant factors, and to rank STs with respect to the PMs “second phase.”

The investigation shows that some challenges are more dominant and influential. Literacy and an awareness of sustainability, globalization and international issues and competitive strategies have emerged as the most dominant and key driving factors for STs in the ISM model, while the whole PMs are driven by remanufacturing and recycling factors in the ISM model. In addition, drivers and barriers to implementing S/SD challenges received the highest rank in the IRP model.

Most of the STs and PMs were identified from academicians. Most of the manufacturing companies participated in the discussion; unfortunately, all are not familiar with the S/SD as a whole. They see to the S/SD from very narrow scope like climate change, environmental and energy issues only based on what they heard from media. Most of them are not fully interested to join with academicians to progress the work.

Most of the manufacturing companies are keen to investigate extremely sustainability challenges. Although this paper has a goal to provide a comprehensive framework to analyze, investigate and model sustainability challenges for industrial/manufacturing companies in different industrial sectors, most of the STs and PMs were identified from academicians. Most of the industrial/manufacturing companies participated in the discussion; unfortunately, all are not familiar with the S/SD as a whole. This study will help manufacturing/industrial companies to analyze and investigate the challenges toward implementing S/SD.

The originality of this paper is to identify the most common ST and PM challenges facing industrial organization toward implementing S/SD, modeling them into logical techniques and comparing between STs with respect to PMs.

The purpose of this paper is to develop an agility evaluation approach to determine the most suitable agile system for implementing mass customization (MC) strategies. Evaluating the alternatives and comparing across them, the best practices of the efficient organization can be identified and transferred to different organizations.

Grey relation approach is a simple mathematical technique useful in situations where the information is not known precisely. Grey relation approach has been applied to measure the agility of various organizations based on agile entities and accordingly the organizations are ranked. The ranking so obtained is compared with the ranking obtained by a popular multi‐attribute decision making (MADM) process known as Fuzzy TOPSIS (technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution) to test the robustness of the proposed method. It is to be noted that grey theory considers the condition of the fuzziness and can deal flexibly with the fuzziness situation.

It is demonstrated that the grey approach is an appropriate method for solving MADM problems in an uncertain situation with less computational efforts. The alternatives can easily be benchmarked and the best agile system can be selected. As the ranking obtained through grey relation approach closely agree with the ranking found from Fuzzy TOPSIS method, the robustness of the proposed approach is validated. Both the methods lead to choosing a suitable agile system related to mass customization.

In this paper, the proposed approach has been compared with Fuzzy TOPSIS method to test the robustness of the method. Other MADM approaches may be used for comparison purpose to gain insight into the methodology of the proposed approach.

An alternative approach for MADM is proposed to obtain good decisions in an uncertain environment and used for agility evaluation in selected organizations. As agile manufacturing is relatively a new concept, certain and complete information on systems are not available. In such situations, the proposed method can deal with the issue conveniently and results in workable solutions.

The purpose of this paper is to benchmark the assessment approaches of agility in a manufacturing organization.

The criteria for agility assessment were identified comprehensively based on literature review. The agility assessment was done using Multi Grade Fuzzy and Fuzzy logic approaches, and the results were benchmarked.

Based on Multi Grade Fuzzy approach, the agility index was found to be 6.6; Fuzzy logic approach reveals the agility index as (5.37, 6.91, 8.45) which indicated the case organization is agile. The gaps were identified from both the approaches and the results were corroborated.

In the present study, Multi Grade Fuzzy and Fuzzy logic approaches were only benchmarked. Also, the benchmarking exercise was done only in one manufacturing organization.

The benchmarking study was conducted in a manufacturing organization. The practitioners’ views were gathered and they were involved in the study to substantiate the practical validity.

The benchmarking study between two approaches for agility assessment was found to be original and adds value to the agility assessment field.

The article applies the citizen science phenomenon – i.e. lay people involvement in research endeavours aimed at pushing forward scientific knowledge – to healthcare. Attention is paid to initiatives intended to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic as an illustrative case to exemplify the contribution of citizen science to system-wide innovation in healthcare.

A mixed methodology consisting of three sequential steps was developed. Firstly, a realist literature review was carried out to contextualize citizen science to healthcare. Then, an account of successfully completed large-scale, online citizen science projects dealing with healthcare and medicine has been conducted in order to obtain preliminary information about distinguishing features of citizen science in healthcare. Thirdly, a broad search of citizen science initiatives targeted to tackling the COVID-19 pandemic has been performed. A comparative case study approach has been undertaken to examine the attributes of such projects and to unravel their peculiarities.

Citizen science enacts the development of a lively healthcare ecosystem, which takes its nourishment from the voluntary contribution of lay people. Citizen scientists play different roles in accomplishing citizen science initiatives, ranging from data collectors to data analysts. Alongside enabling big data management, citizen science contributes to lay people's education and empowerment, soliciting their active involvement in service co-production and value co-creation.

Citizen science is still underexplored in healthcare. Even though further evidence is needed to emphasize the value of lay people's involvement in scientific research applied to healthcare, citizen science is expected to revolutionize the way innovation is pursued and achieved in the healthcare ecosystem. Engaging lay people in a co-creating partnership with expert scientist can help us to address unprecedented health-related challenges and to shape the future of healthcare. Tailored health policy and management interventions are required to empower lay people and to stimulate their active engagement in value co-creation.

Citizen science relies on the wisdom of the crowd to address major issues faced by healthcare organizations. The article comes up with a state of the art investigation of citizen science in healthcare, shedding light on its attributes and envisioning avenues for further development.

The knowledge cloud links people and ideas while also providing worldwide resources for putting them into action. This paper aims to see how the knowledge cloud affects the stimulation of subordinate creativity. The impact of the knowledge cloud on transformational leadership and its impacts on subordinate creativity are examined in this investigation. Also, this study checks out the influence of knowledge cloud on motivational goal orientation and the impact of motivational goal orientation on subordinate creativity. It investigates the influence of knowledge cloud on self-efficacy and feelings of it on subordinate creativity. Moreover, this research examines the impact of the knowledge cloud on employee empowerment and its impact on subordinate creativity.

Knowledge sharing is known as a human rationale for information. It promotes learning, human performance, decision-making and problem-solving at the job; thus, innovation and creativity need novel knowledge. Knowledge cloud is a knowledge source that provides a base for knowledge co-creation. This investigation explores the structural relationships among knowledge cloud, transformational leadership, motivational goal orientation, self-efficacy, employee empowerment and subordinate creativity. Here, a model is improved and experimentally examined based on the knowledge cloud, transformational leadership, motivational goal orientation, self-efficacy and employee empowerment to improve subordinate creativity using partial least squares (PLS) and data from car factories' employees in Beijing.

The study results show that knowledge cloud, transformational leadership, motivational goal orientation, self-efficacy and employee empowerment are strongly related to subordinate creativity. In addition to using the Sobel test, all four variables' mediating role (transformational leadership, motivational goal orientation, self-efficacy and employee empowerment) is confirmed.

A knowledge cloud can improve the stimulating subordinate creativity of employees through transformational leadership, motivational goal orientation, self-efficacy and employee empowerment. First, the human resources department must have some programs to improve the knowledge cloud's incentive. Second, creating an atmosphere of cooperation and trust among employees should enhance the knowledge cloud's effects.

To the authors' knowledge, this is the first study that addresses the knowledge cloud's role in subordinate creativity in firms. This investigation also assists the creativity literature by testing the mediating effect of motivational goal orientation, transformational leadership, feelings of self-efficacy and employee empowerment.