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SMI Companies Global Inc., a Louisiana-based contract manufacturer for the oil and gas industry had a conflict with Whitney Bank regarding a line of credit. The line of credit was for a specific contract to supply acid storage tanks to Halliburton. Due to a series of delays on the part of Halliburton, the contract was started much later than originally envisaged. While the bank was aware of the delays, they were unwilling to extend the time for the repayment of the loan. Vaughn S. Lane, the founder and owner of the company, learned that the bank had, unilaterally and quite abruptly, turned the loan over to the bank's attorney for collection. He had to make a decision as to how to respond to the expected call from the attorney.

The research focus in this study is on the subcontract manufacturer's service portfolio in the metal industry. The aim of the study was to identify new classification types to better understand the subcontract manufacturer's service business. A new kind of framework was developed to link the subcontract manufacturer's capabilities to their service offering. The service offering was divided into two main classes: 1) manufacturing services; 2) other services. These two classes were divided further into four subclasses: 1) manufacturing basic operations; 2) other manufacturing-related operations; 3) operative activities; 4) development activities. This classification was finally tested with two subcontract manufacturer companies.

Recent advances enable data from manufacturing systems to be captured and contextualised relative to other phases of the product lifecycle, a necessary step toward understanding system behaviour and satisfying traceability requirements. Significant challenges remain for integrating information across the lifecycle and enabling efficient decision-making. In this paper, we explore opportunities for mapping standard data representations, such as the Standard for the Exchange of Product Data (STEP), MTConnect, and the Quality Information Framework (QIF) to integrate information silos existing across the lifecycle. To demonstrate this vision, we describe a reference implementation with a contract manufacturer in the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Smart Manufacturing Systems Test Bed. Using this implementation, we explore how knowledge generated from manufacturing can support lifecycle decision-making. As a case study, we then present an interactive prototype correlating the test bed’s data based on the context that must be provided for a specific decision-making viewpoint.

In this paper, we apply global value chain (GVC) analysis to study recent trends in the global electronic hardware industry and their implications for upgrading opportunities for firms from developing countries. We identify three key firm level actors - lead firms, contract manufacturers, and platform leaders. Company, cluster, and country case studies are presented to illustrate how supplier capabilities in various places have developed in the context of electronics GVCs. The findings identify some of the persistent limits to upgrading experienced by even the most successful firms in the developing world. Four models used by developing country firms to overcome these limitations are presented: emerging multinationals, contract manufacturer spinoffs, platform brands and emerging factory-less start-ups. Each of these new models has been enabled, to a greater or lesser degree, by the rise of new markets and new kinds of consumers in developing countries.

Throughput Accounting (TA) has been analysed within the previous research works through the product mix problems, and it has been concluded that this method provides nearly optimal decisions (as compared to static optimisation methods), and performs significantly better than the other accounting approaches. However, there exists only scarce research related to the implementation and an actual use of TA in the short-term performance measurement context. In this paper, we present the results from electronics contract manufacturing company, and analyse these through American Productivity Center productivity and price recovery model. The results of the research suggest that productivity improves in the company level within the same phase among price recovery, but in different product groups the situation is diverse (this is caused mostly by product life-cycles and use of software). We also find that the manufacturer is able to benefit from price recovery; direct material prices are changing with sales prices, but the speed of change creates price recovery in nearly all situations, and eventually improves profitability. These findings stress the importance of revenue management; life-cycle phase and used technology of a product group seem to produce different patterns in productivity and price recovery.