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Sectors associated with the distribution of products and goods have become more and more important in recent years. Globalisation and changing market demands are increasing competitiveness in these sectors, and as a result many companies have adopted new improvement methods to assure their survival. The adoption of improvement philosophies and a lean culture offer new opportunities to improve the quality and service of distribution networks and activities related with transport and warehousing. The application of these philosophies, widely used in industrial companies, has been little documented in distribution centres. However, these methods are difficult to implement in companies from the distribution sector due to the volatility of customer demand, the high degree of human participation and the demanding mechanical and repetitive activities in retail and storage activities. This paper presents a methodology for change management to adopt lean practices in distribution centres. The presented case study has been used to develop, test and refine the methodology. Results show that the methodology was suitable for establishing a lean culture in the company and it resulted in good outcomes in terms of productivity, employee attitudes and participation.

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In the current global economy, with an increased international presence of all types of organisations, the design and management of global operations networks (GON) plays a vital role in organisational competitiveness. Whilst all types of organisations are facing significant challenges for managing increasingly complex global operations, current literature on GONs is still limited in its scope. The aim of this paper is to discuss the development and evaluation of a construct for assessing the strategic plant role and developing of an improvement roadmap in GONs. This research makes a contribution to current knowledge on global operations by extending the model proposed by Ferdows in ‘Making the Most of Foreign Factories’ (HBR, 1997) and operationalising it to enable its application for the design and optimisation of GONs

Some companies improve their production performance using manufacturing or operations models. In the last decade these models have come to be known as "X" production systems (XPS), or company-specific production systems. XPS systems have been oriented mainly to implement lean manufacturing and continuous improvement principles, but have shown little progress in terms of sustainability principles. The emergence of databases (DBs), big data, and business intelligence (BI) systems have enabled the creation of system panels to measure performance and manage business processes. These panels also allow assessment of the implementation of the principles, methods, and tools of the XPS. The effectiveness of these systems requires sufficient IT infrastructure and an acceptable quality of data, but the key performance indicator (KPI) panels of XPSs often lack consistent and acceptable data. In other cases, the IT infrastructure does not cover the needs of the personnel managing the operations, which limits the progress of XPSs. This paper documents the positive experience of one company in jointly auditing and improving data quality and IT infrastructure, which better aligned its XPS with sustainability objectives. It explores, using an empirical case study where the researchers were actively involved, the possibility of complementing the KPI panel system of XPS assessment systems with the principles of sustainability, data quality, and IT infrastructure. The paper describes the development and testing of an assessment tool based on those principles, and offers a number of results that may benefit similar small-and medium-sized companies (SMEs).In order to increase their competitiveness, these XPSs prioritize and deploy improvement projects and routines linked to a series of principles (e.g., total quality, shortest lead-time). These principles are concepts that companies use to differentiate their work from others. Remarkably, however, most XPS principles seem to be misaligned with the principles of sustainability. In fact, while some companies are currently implementing approaches for aligning their business strategy with sustainability (e.g., References [5,6]), most companies do so only occasionally or not at all [7]. The present paper is motivated by this alignment, or lack thereof, which has been suggested to be "the next phase of business sustainability" [8].Another question tackled in this research concerns the measurement and control of performance. Companies continuously measure the effectiveness of their actions not only with operations, but also with improvement projects that implement the principles, traditionally by means of queries to databases (DBs), pivot tables, etc. The last years have witnessed the development of big data and business intelligence (BI) systems to measure and support decision making, among other purposes. Given their success, many advanced countries are investing in big data and BI systems, taking advantage of the boom of the Industry 4.0 concept [9]. As in other areas, big data and BI sys...

In this paper, we identify the key parameters to consider in a decision model on internationalization of operations. In order to propose these parameters, the GLOBOPE framework was adopted as the basis of this work. This framework contemplates the three commonest challenges of global operations configuration for industrial manufacturing companies in an internationalization process, which are: new facility implementation (NFI); global suppliers' network development (GSND); multisite production network configuration. A set of suitable parameters is herein provided for NFI and GSND in the analysis stage from strategic, tactical and operational decision levels. These parameters could be used in the future as a basis for the development of quantitative tools for decision making on the internationalization of operations.