In today’s highly dynamic and unpredictable project environment, companies need to be able to manage changes quickly and effectively, otherwise, the final product will not be current and will only go to waste. Traditional project management approaches that focus on planning are no longer efficient and companies are forced to adopt new ways of working. As a result, more flexible agile project management (APM) approaches have emerged over the last decades. Originally developed for the software industry, APM is now increasingly recognized and adopted also by other industry sectors. However, due to some discipline-specific differences, the adoption of APM by non-software companies is challenging and requires many adjustments and high financial input. While the larger organizations have sufficient resources to make such a transition, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) generally cannot afford to do so, and therefore need alternative strategies to increase their agility and stay competitive on the global market. In this paper, we present a case study of a Slovenian medium-sized manufacturing company that implemented only certain APM practices separately and not as part of a structured APM methodology, and still managed to achieve significant benefits: improved communication, faster detection of discrepancies, more effective problem-solving and greater flexibility. The results also suggest that APM practices, even when implemented separately, positively impact project success in terms of both efficiency and stakeholder satisfaction, and can thus help in establishing an economically, socially, and environmentally more sustainable workplace.

Agile development became very popular at the beginning of the 21st century when the Manifesto for Agile Software Development was released. Since then, it has been predominant in the software industry and has been increasingly transferred to the development of physical products due to its great success. There are many studies on Agile-Stage-Gate hybrids that combine agile Scrum and the traditional Stage-Gate model, however no research has been found that addresses a direct integration of Scrum into a concurrent product development model in a similar way. In this paper, we therefore examine the possibility of introducing Scrum into the concurrent product development and propose a Scrum framework for an Agile-Concurrent hybrid. We propose that the framework for concurrent development remains unchanged: the stages overlap and the track-and-loop approach is preserved, while Scrum is proposed for the execution of day-to-day work. The main advantage of the proposed hybrid is that after each iteration the customer reviews the results of an entire loop, not just of one stage, which enables a broader understanding of the progress and facilitates a more extensive feedback. A quicker resolution of discrepancies, and a faster and more effective response to change is thus ensured. In the paper, the needed organizational changes and potential implementation issues are also discussed.

An analysis of a product line of small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) shows that products (component parts or assemblies) are quite similar in terms of design and technology, thus clusters of products are formed. For each cluster a production cell can be organized. According to the product line of a company a certain number of individual production cells is organized, while workshop production is retained for the remaining product line.The paper shows how clusters of products are designed on the basis of a product line data and how an ideal layout optimization is determined on the basis of the intensity of material flow. Layout optimization of a production cell is based on a combination of Schmigalla modified triangular method and the Schwerdfeger circular process. The method was applied on a cluster of 20 orders similar in design and technology that are processed at 10 workplaces. At the end of the article a transition from a theoretical O-cell to a real U-cell is suggested.

The basic principles and practices of the Toyota production system (TPS) have been discussed for decades. Sugimori et al.[1] published one of the first scientific papers on this topic.The practice now known as lean production (LP) has been changing and developing from a simple set of practices to the complexity of an entire lean business system [2] and [3]. As a result, knowledge and understanding about the theory behind LP is also evolving in [2] and [4].In this research paper [5] the authors identify four key main factors that are critical for the implementation of lean manufacturing within small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which are: leadership and management, finance, skills and expertise, and the culture of the recipient organisation. These four factors are defined, but least had been improved on the field of management support.Pay [6] stated that there are four major reasons companies fail to achieve benefits through lean implementation. The first is that senior management is not committed to and/or doesn't understand the real impact of 'lean.' The second reason is that senior management is unwilling to accept that cultural change is required for lean to be a success. The third reason is that the company lacks the right people in the right positions, and the last reason is that the company has chosen lean as their process improvement methodology when a different process improvement program -or none at all -would have been the better choice. Based on Pay [6] these four major reasons for failure needs to be avoided or detected soon enough to prevent damage and LP failure.Papers [7] to [9] identified a lack of senior leadership focus and complacency as barriers to lean manufacturing implementation.A methodology for implementing lean manufacturing strategies was proposed which is able to systematically identify manufacturing waste, select appropriate lean tools, identify relevant performance indicators, achieve significant performance improvement, and establish lean culture in the organisation [10]. A management commitment transformation plan and the formation of a lean team should be enough to initiate a lean culture. But initiation of a lean culture is not sufficient, management needs to consistently stay supportive and not only at the start of LP implementation. A lean team cannot implement LP if management support is not absolute. Detection of unsupportive management should be done soon enough.The creation of a lean culture is one of the greatest challenges awaiting the prospective lean implementers, since a considerable degree of organisational learning skills are needed [11]. This is why the LP implementation progress should be measured, and all employees have to be educated regarding LP. Methodology to Facilitate Successful Lean Implementation

No abstract

No abstract

Companies encounter various challenges when entering the global market, one of the most significant being the calculation of the optimal batch quantity of a product. This paper explains how to calculate the optimal batch quantity using first the basic model, and then the extended model that takes into account the tied-up capital in a production, in addition to the costs of changing the batch and storage costs. There is a case study of calculating the optimal batch quantity using the basic and extended models, together with conclusions regarding when either of the two models should be used. For optimal batch quantities we also calculated lead times, corresponding costs of tied-up capital per piece, and the difference between costs per piece when using the basic and extended models.

A novel hybrid two-stage method of facility layout planning, based on self-organized clustering, is presented. In the first stage, a self-organizing map (SOM) is applied in order to organize the production process into production cells which encapsulate products with similar properties and similar machining requirements. In the second stage, the internal layout of each cell is optimized by an expert operator, taking into account various local restrictions, technological specifications, and methods of transportation. The method combines the advantages of both algorithmic and manual expert-based approaches to layout planning. The proposed method was applied in a real production company environment with promising results indicating a 42% reduction in intensity-length efficiency measure with respect to the current layout.