Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to understand the configuration of a job production system with reference to manufacturing decision areas. The aim is to identify the process specific decisions for job shop and the non-process specific decisions that are influenced by other contextual factors. Design/methodology/approach -A case study research approach is used in the present paper to investigate the decisions of five manufacturing companies that satisfy the characteristics of job production system. Data are collected from case company's products, order winners and choices made in manufacturing decision areas. The paper uses within case and cross-case analysis to identify various patterns in the data, with a view to meeting the required research objectives. Findings -The present paper identifies a number of decisions specific to job shop. Further, many non-process specific decisions are seen to be influenced by competitive priorities (order winner), strategic orientation of manufacturing (stages in H-W model), top management and size of the company. After the study of the case companies, it is also observed that the companies employing a job production system may have high product complexity. Practical implications -The findings derived from this research would facilitate practitioners in understanding both process specific and non-process specific decisions for the job production system. The observation that the job shops can also use progressive practices, the same as other shops, to gain competitive advantage in the market could be very useful for practicing managers. Originality/value -This exploratory research contributes to the existing theory in manufacturing decision areas for job production systems.
Purpose
This study aims to assist the project manager in minimising the material logistics cost of road project by planning the optimal movement of aggregate across three stages of supply chain: sourcing, processing and distribution.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper conceptualises the raw material consumption in a road project as a logistics network distribution problem. A linear programming (LP) formulation is constructed with appropriate decision variables by integrating the three stages of material movement. The series of LP scenarios are solved using an LP solver to decide the optimal movement of the aggregate to be consumed in different layers of road segments.
Findings
The results obtained from the model show that planning material logistics of an entire road project using optimisation provides substantial saving in logistics costs than using common sense. Further, the magnitude of cost saving improves as the complexity of the model increases in term of enormous feasible options.
Practical implications
The model shown in this paper may serve as a basis for planning the logistics of raw materials consumed in the road projects. The small improvement in material flows by optimising supply chain shows sensible cost benefit to the project manager and hence control and monitor the overall cost and activities of the project. The output of the model is also expected to help the project team as an input in the decision-making processes such as appropriate material sourcing contract, capacity assessment of material processing facility and transportation planning.
Originality/value
While the optimisation models are widely used and popular among the many industrial applications, this research shows distinct application of such a model in managing the logistics of the road construction project.
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