Purpose – The purpose of this paper is the further development of an Excel-based integrated management system for the tool and cutlery industry regarding sustainability. The tool’s actual status allows integrating and implementing requirements considering work safety, environmental and quality management and a self-assessment for checking the level of requirements’ fulfilment. However, the topic of sustainability and requirements and risks going along with it are of great importance for the mostly small and medium companies of this industry. Therefore, the Excel-tool is being enhanced by integrating the requirements of risk, energy and sustainability management. The paper presents the advanced Excel-tool. Design/methodology/approach – The base for advancing the Excel-tool has been analysing the status quo of sustainability management in the companies. Moreover, a matrix for comparing the requirements has been enlarged regarding the standards for sustainability, risk and energy management and builds the base for further developing of the Excel-tool. Findings – This analysis has shown the need for action, regarding the topic of sustainability. Hence, the Excel-tool has been enlarged regarding the assessment of fulfilling the requirements of different management systems. It allows small- and medium-sized enterprises a detection of need for action to comply with the requirements of different management systems with minimal afford. By this, an easily evaluation and improvement of the companies’ management systems is enabled. Originality/value – The tool enables companies to easily evaluate the state of their integrated management system by themselves and assists when implementing additional management systems.

Purpose Quality management systems (QMSs) are well established in multinationals and small-and-medium enterprises (SMEs). For establishing and improving these systems, a variety of guidelines have been established. Furthermore, there are software tools allowing a self-assessment of the current state of the implemented systems. However, these approaches are not appropriate for microenterprises and start-ups as their processes are rather informal or not yet specified. Moreover, these companies are often in a phase of strong growth and have only one person in charge; hence, they face the difficulty to decide if and how a QMS should be implemented. The purpose of this study is to report a first guideline for implementation of a QMS for microenterprises and start-ups. Design/methodology/approach The first step comprises a definition of microenterprises and start-ups and an analysis of their specific characteristics. An overview of the DIN EN ISO 9001:2015 and its requirements is given below. Next, the relevant requirements that can be implemented in microenterprises and start-ups are analyzed. Accordingly, a guideline for decision-making is developed to examine if an application of the analyzed standard is useful or necessary for these companies. Moreover, the guideline illustrates how the requirements can be implemented. Findings A literature review, an analysis of the DIN EN ISO 9001:2015, and of microenterprises and start-ups have been carried out. Thus, the need to decide whether to implement a QMS and assistance for the implementation process has been revealed to be essential for the companies that were considered. The literature mostly deals with implementing a quality and/or project management system in multinationals and SMEs but not for very small companies. Furthermore, the practical examples have shown that microenterprises face difficulties when choosing and implementing a QMS; thus, a practical implementation guideline for these companies is lacking. Originality/value Although there is a lot of research dealing with quality management (QM) in SMEs, research about QM in microenterprises and start-ups is scarce. This paper offers a first approach for a guideline of implementing an appropriate QMS and possibly an additional or alternative project management system in microenterprises and start-ups. This should facilitate the process of deciding if and how to implement an adequate management system for such companies.

Purpose Quality management systems are well established in multinationals and SMEs. For establishing and improving such systems, there is a variety of guidelines. Furthermore, there are software tools allowing a self-assessment of the current state of the implemented systems. However, these approaches do not fit for micro-enterprises and start-ups. Their processes are rather informal or not yet specified. Moreover, these companies are often in a phase of strong growth and have only one person in charge. Hence, they face the difficulty to decide if and how a (quality) management system should be implemented. This paper aims to show a first guideline for implementation. Design/methodology/approach The first step comprises a definition of microenterprises and start-ups and an analysis of their specific characteristics. Following, an overview of the DIN EN ISO 9001:2015 and its requirements is given. Next, it is analysed which requirements are relevant for or can be implemented in microenterprises and start-ups. Based on this, a guideline for decision-making is developed to examine if an application of the analysed standard is useful or necessary for the regarded companies. Also, the guideline illustrates how the requirements can be implemented. Findings A literature review, an analysis of the DIN EN ISO 9001:2015, the standards for project management, microenterprises and start-ups have been carried out. Thereby, the need to decide whether to implement implement a quality management system and assistance for the implementation process has been revealed as essential for the companies considered. Literature mostly deals with implementing a quality and/or project management system in multinationals and SMEs but not in very small companies. Furthermore, first practical examples have shown that microenterprises face difficulties when choosing and implementing a quality management system. A practical implementation guideline for these companies is lacking. Originality/value Although there is a lot of research dealing with quality management in SME, research about quality management in microenterprises and start-ups is scarce. This paper offers a first approach for a guideline of implementing an appropriate quality and possibly an additional or alternative project management in microenterprises and start-ups. This should facilitate the process of deciding if and how to implement an adequate management system for the regarded companies.

a a Dortmunder Initiative zur rechnerintegrierten Fertigung (RIF) e.V., Joseph-von-Fraunhofer-Str. 20 , Currently, methods for the evaluation of human reliability are mainly applied in safety critical industries (aerospace engineering, nuclear engineering). The Expert System for Task Taxonomy (ESAT) was developed to evaluate the error rate of control and surveillance activities in safety critical areas. In contrast, currently industrial assembly processes are mainly developed concerning an optimal use of the time factor. In this article, the suitability of ESAT for the evaluation of human reliability in manual assembly operations will be examined. By the analysis of an exemplarily considered assembly process it is shown whether and how its work content can be depicted by the ESAT method. In this context, it is also analysed how a modification of the marginal conditions -e.g. the level of specification -affects the calculation results. In the first analysis six manual assembly operations from the automotive industry were analysed and appropriate ESAT-data for its sequences of action were calculated. As a result, the new method allows quantifying potential human error rates before the start of production and comparing planning alternatives under time and cost aspects early. Consequently, the evaluation of human mistakes during the planning process allows developing not only time-optimised but also qualityoptimised manual assembly operations.

Apart from the customer demands themselves, the weightings of the customer demands are one of the main input data of a QFD (Quality Function Deployment) and furthermore of the actual construction process of products. Up to now, most interviews with stakeholders have been carried out with questionnaires and then absolute weightings have been used. Now it has been analysed if the use of other interview and evaluation techniques, e.g. relative weightings and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), can improve the precision of the demands and wishes of the stakeholders. Now the task was to analyse if the use of relative weightings as input of a QFD is possible at all, how they have to be adapted and if an increase in precision compared to the use of absolute weightings is reached. When using AHP during the product development it has become clear that only up to seven demands can be rated at the same time by customers. That means that a kind of hierarchy has to be developed to correctly transfer the demands and their weightings into the QFD.

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The assembly takes up a special position in a company's order processing; as with regard to the company's service provision, it mostly comes at the end of the value chain. For that reason the assembly depicts a melting pot of many technical, organisational and qualitative errors. To mitigate technical failure, in the past versatile solutions were developed, but there are only little satisfactory solutions to consider human failure in the planning process of manual assembly operations. This paper presents a procedure that allows transferring the knowledge about human reliability gained in safety-critical industries to manual assembly operations. In this context, at the research institute of the authors, approaches have been developed to use the knowledge of the Expert System for Task Taxonomy -a method that originally was developed to evaluate error rates of control activities in safety-critical areas -for creating a new method that allows evaluating human reliabilities in manual assembly operations. The aim of this method is to be able to systematically predict human error probabilities for any manual work content of the industrial batch production. Considerable elements of the developed assembly-specific method are an own database containing assembly-specific standard terms and a calculation model which is adapted to low error rates of the manual assembly. First results at a heating manufacturer verified that the developed method enables reliable risk predictions for the field of manual assembly. This is particularly given by the creation of a new database, which is especially tailored to the application field of manual assembly and the development of assembly-specific calculation regulations. In the following steps, the comparison of the calculated error data and the actual error data of the industrial practice is extended, so that the method can be validated across all industries.