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Additive forging is a newly developed method to manufacture heavy forgings by using multilayer hot-compression bonding. However, the relationship between surface cleaning and bonding performance of bonded samples in the additive forging process is unclear. This paper studies the effect of surface cleaning on interface bonding performance for the first time. A new characterization method of surface cleanliness consisting of water contact angles, relative fluorescence units, and optical observation was proposed to characterize the cleaning effect. The micromorphologies and tensile properties were used to evaluate interface bonding performance. Elemental analysis and morphological analysis were used to infer the hindrance mechanism of contaminants. The results show that the new characterization method can effectively characterize the surface cleanliness of substrates. Moreover, the interfacial bonding performance results indicate that surface cleaning had a great influence on the bonding performance for 316H stainless steel joints manufactured by additive forging. Finally, the hindrance mechanisms of particles, chips, and oil contaminants were attributed to the hindrance effect in a radial direction, along the interface direction, and perpendicular to the interface direction respectively. This research builds a relationship between surface cleaning and bonding performance, which helps achieve high-performance manufacturing of heavy forgings.

The fourth industrial revolution requires that personalization processes of mass productions evolve towards flexible, interconnected, cloud production with greater automation in its machines and operations, called Industry 4.0 (I4.0). However, a homogeneous I4.0 concept, infrastructure state, and other issues are still scarce, making difficult to determinate in the specialized literature, the threshold between recent manufacturing and challenges that companies had to reach competitive advantage through I4.0 inclusion. Despite becoming one of the most popular strategies for continuous improvement, many plants are struggling to turn I4.0 into a success. Therefore, this paper analyzes the current trends of Industry 4.0 in High Performance Manufacturing (HPM), aiming to consolidate the existing knowledge on both subjects, providing a starting point for academics and practitioners seeking to implement I4.0 in plants and offering suggestions for future examination. This systematic literature review aims to synthesize, organize, and structure the stock of knowledge relating to I4.0 and HPM. The results show that HPM papers do not evidence a holistic evaluation of I.40 principles and foundations. There exists in HPM literature manufacturing practices that permit evaluate technology inclusion and their performance but not their autonomy, cloud computing and network between machines, supplier, and processes. The HPM papers trends are related with issues such as adaptability, flexibility, reconfigurability, new information technologies, modularity, automation, etc. Regarding study limitations, it is necessary to study current I4.0 adoption level, technological infrastructure, and cultural factors. The practical implications are focused in the identification of manufacturing practices used in specialized literature to measure how technology inclusion increase companies’ performance, proving the technological infrastructure and I4.0 maturity level. The originality of this paper converges on the presentation of some manufacturing practices applied on HPM studies which are associated with I4.0.

A debated issue in the literature regards whether the effect of employee involvement for continuous improvement on organisational outcomes differs in contexts with different degrees of production r...

Quality management has received increasing attention in supply chain management. The concept of supply chain quality integration (SCQI) is used to explain how a focal manufacturer integrates with its upstream suppliers and downstream customers for quality improvement. Although the contingent effects of SCQI on quality-related performance have been studied, SCQI patterns and their relationships with performance remain unknown. Using data collected from 317 manufacturers across 10 countries, this study adopts a configuration approach to identify SCQI patterns and their relationships with quality-related performance. Five SCQI patterns composed of different levels of supplier, internal, and customer quality integration are identified. We describe these SCQI patterns in terms of the strength and balance of manufacturers’ quality integration. The ANOVA results show that quality-related performance varies according to different SCQI patterns. Interestingly, product quality is not distinguishable across SCQI patterns. Delivery performance is improved in patterns with a high level of balance of quality integration. The cost of quality is lower in patterns with a high level of customer quality integration. Flexibility is achieved in patterns with high balance and strength of quality integration. This study contributes to the supply chain management and quality management literature, and provides suggestions for managers to adopt different SCQI configurations to improve different types of quality-related performance.

A rich research stream investigates the drivers and enablers of supplier sustainability practices, usually classified into suppliers’ monitoring and collaboration with suppliers. Differently from p...

The inverse surface integrity problem could be effectively solved if the generation of a desired surface integrity be quantitatively correlated to process parameters or process loads. Possibility of establishing such a correlation is studied by employing a surface modification technique of high-intensity pulsed ion beam with well controlled thermo-mechanical load to manufacture WC-Ni cemented carbide component with enhanced wear resistance. The multiple surface integrity parameters including phase, microstructure and composition in addition to surface microhardness should be taken into account for establishing the correlation between process loads and surface integrity, since the interactions between the surface integrity parameters determine the wear performance of surface modified cemented carbides. The different process parameters can be quantitatively distinguished by material loading, i.e. the temperature and/or stress field evolution in the surface layer of cemented carbide under the different thermo-mechanical loads, while the material loading can be further correlated to the resultant changes in surface integrity. In this way, identification of material loading enables establishing a process-independent correlation between process loads and surface integrity for solving the inverse surface integrity problem.

Lean management (LM) is a managerial approach for improving processes based on a complex system of interrelated socio-technical practices. Recently, debate has centered on the role of organizational culture (OC) in LM. This paper aims to contribute to this debate by examining whether plants that successfully implement LM are characterized by a specific OC profile and extensively adopt soft LM practices. Data were analyzed from the High Performance Manufacturing (HPM) project dataset using a multi-group approach. The results revealed that a specific OC profile characterizes successful lean plants; in particular, when compared to unsuccessful lean plants, they show a higher institutional collectivism, future orientation, a humane orientation, and a lower level of assertiveness. While a high level of institutional collectivism, future orientation, and humane orientation are common features of high performers in general, a low level of assertiveness is typical only of successful lean plants. In addition, successful lean plants use soft LM practices more extensively than unsuccessful lean plants (i.e., lean practices concerning people and relations, such as small group problem solving, employees’ training to perform multiple tasks, supplier partnerships, customer involvement, and continuous improvement), while they do not differ significantly in terms of hard LM practices (i.e., lean technical and analytical tools). For managers, the results indicate that, in order to implement LM successfully, it is fundamental to go beyond LM technicalities by adopting soft practices and nurturing the development of an appropriate OC profile.

Though most scholars recognise that supply chain integration (SCI) can contribute to improving operational performance, previous studies on the SCI-performance link showed mixed results and several questions on this issue remain still open. In line with a configurational perspective, this study investigates whether plants adopting multiple integration practices (i.e. full SCI adopters) perform better than plants implementing only some selected SCI practices (i.e. partial adopters) and plants which do not implement any SCI practice (i.e. non-adopters). In addition, it analyses whether partial adopters show a superior performance compared to non-adopters. Analyses based on a sample of 317 manufacturing plants reveal that full adopters perform better than non-adopters, in terms of quality, delivery, flexibility and efficiency. Among partial adopters, a particular SCI pattern, characterised by a high level of internal integration and supply chain planning, differs from non-adopters in terms of delivery, and s...

PurposeUsing the matching/difference perspective, the purpose of this paper is to examine the interaction fit between a set of managerial practices from manufacturing strategy (MS) and another set from technology management (TM) and the link of this fit to operational performance.Design/methodology/approachThe paper applies multiple statistical methods to a database of an international sample of plants in the auto supplier sector to explore (deviation score analysis/multiple linear regression) and confirm (correlation and variance subgroup analysis) whether a matching model presents organisational disequilibrium, where states of fit are related to effectively higher performance than states of misfit.FindingsResults from regression show that there were no states of misfit between the levels of both manufacturing practice sets/areas. This means that there are no significant differences in performance that may be tested for matching interaction. However, subgroup analysis provides greater detail on why there might not be any misfits (i.e. state of fit), by illustrating that when grouping by plant type (high/world class performer, HP, and standard performer, SP), the slight lack of significant difference in the correlation between MS and TM was in favour of HP. The implementation levels of MS‐TM found were not significantly different, showing for HP slightly higher levels for both practices (+&+) than for SP, with slightly lower values in both cases (− & −). Therefore, it seems that both groups might perform equally well, due not to interaction but to the presence of a state of MS‐TM fit alone. A state of fit such as this, known as selection or congruency, would be the reason for there being no significant matching interaction originally.Originality/valueMost of the interaction fit bibliography is from the accounting perspective. Therefore, the impact of the matching interaction fit between MS and TM (as well as its impact on performance) has not been well documented theoretically, and much less, empirically, in production and operations management.

Just-in-time (JIT) practices are very useful to improve operational performance. These practices, that represent the core of Lean management methodology, were firstly developed in Toyota, where the production is highly repetitive, and for many years researchers have thought that this methodology could be applied in contexts characterised by repetitive manufacturing systems only. Recently some authors have refuted this view, providing empirical evidence that JIT practices can be successfully implemented also in non-repetitive contexts. However, this evidence came from descriptive and anecdotal case studies, whereas in the literature, studies based on large sample lack, which analyse JIT impact on performance at varying degrees of repetitiveness. This paper aims at investigating the impact of JIT on efficiency and responsiveness performance, and the moderating effects on these relationships of some pivotal characteristics of non-repetitive manufacturing contexts, i.e. product customisation and demand variab...

[ES] Introducción. En este estudio se compara el grado de implementación de diferentes métodos de las prácticas de Gestión de la Calidad y Mantenimiento Productivo Total en diversas plantas industriales, clasificadas como de alto rendimiento o rendimiento estándar, con el objetivo de analizar cuáles son los métodos de ambas prácticas más correlacionados con la fabricación de alto rendimiento. Material y métodos. A partir de dos rondas anteriores del proyecto internacional High Performance Manufacturing (HPM), se desarrollaron un conjunto de cuestionarios que sirvieron para realizar el análisis cuantitativo de la situación actual de las plantas industriales de Europa, Asia y Estados Unidos de los sectores de maquinaria, electrónica y automoción en lo que acabó siendo la tercera ronda internacional HPM. La muestra de plantas industriales distinguía dos tipologías: Plantas de Alto Rendimiento (PAR) y Plantas de Rendimiento Estándar (PRE). El estudio utilizó la información proporcionada por 179 plantas del total de 265 plantas participantes debido a que 86 plantas industriales no fueron clasificadas según su tipología en PAR y PRE. Resultados. Las comparativas desarrolladas ofrecen una visión de cuáles son los métodos de Gestión de la Calidad y Mantenimiento Productivo Total en los que existe una mayor diferenciación en el grado de implementación entre plantas industriales de alto rendimiento y de rendimiento estándar. También, se realiza un análisis de los diferentes países del estudio y sectores. Aquellos métodos más implantados en las plantas industriales clasificadas como de alto rendimiento son los que confieren una ventaja competitiva, aunque cabe destacar que el rendimiento no sólo es función de los métodos analizados en el presente estudio, sino que también depende de otras prácticas del modelo de Fabricación de Alto Rendimiento. Discusión. Los métodos de control de procesos, orientación al cliente y asociación con proveedores son las técnicas más correlacionadas con el alto rendimiento, ya que las plantas industriales de alto rendimiento tienen un mayor grado de implementación de los mismos. Aquellas plantas que también poseen mantenimiento de apoyo implantado presentan un mayor rendimiento que las plantas que no lo consideran., [EN] Introduction. This study compares the implementation¿s degree of the different methods of the advanced manufacturing practices: Quality Management and Total Productive Maintenance in high performance industrial plants and standard ones to analyze which methods of both practices are correlated with high performance manufacturing. Material and methods. Based on previous rounds of the international research: ¿High Performance Manufacturing¿, a set of questionnaires was developed to perform quantitative analysis of the current situation of industrial plants in Europe, Asia and America in the sectors of machinery, electronics and automotive which conforms the third round of the international research on HPM. The industrial plants¿ sample distinguished two types: High Performance Manufacturing Plants and Standard Performance Manufacturing Plants. The study used the data provided by 179 plants of the total of 265 participant plants owing to the fact that 86 industrial plants were not classi¿ ed by the previous types. Results. The tests carried out provide an overview of which methods related to Quality Management and Total Productive Maintenance present a higher differentiation in the degree of implementation between high performance and standard performance industrial plants. An analysis of the different countries and sectors of the study was performed. Those methods more implemented in industrial plants classi¿ ed as high performance ones, are those that confer a competitive advantage, although it should be noted that performance is not only a function of the methods analyzed in this study, but also depends on other manufacturing practices of the High Performance Manufacturing model. Discussion. The methods of process control, customer focus and involvement, and supplier partnership are the techniques most correlated with high performance, as the high performance manufacturing industrial plants have a higher degree of its implementation. Those plants that have also implemented maintenance support show a superior performance than plants that do not consider such an implementation., Este estudio ha sido parcialmente financiado por el Proyecto DPI2006-05531 “HPM Project-Spain: Proyecto para la Manufactura de Alto Rendimiento (High Performance Manufacturing)” del Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia. Dirección General de Investigación y por el Proyecto P08- SEJ-03841 “HPM-Manufactura de Alto Rendimiento. Cuarta Ronda Internacional” de la Junta de Andalucía.

[ES] Introducción. En este estudio se compara el grado de implementación de diferentes métodos de las prácticas de Gestión de la Calidad y Mantenimiento Productivo Total en diversas plantas industriales, clasificadas como de alto rendimiento o rendimiento estándar, con el objetivo de analizar cuáles son los métodos de ambas prácticas más correlacionados con la fabricación de alto rendimiento. Material y métodos. A partir de dos rondas anteriores del proyecto internacional High Performance Manufacturing (HPM), se desarrollaron un conjunto de cuestionarios que sirvieron para realizar el análisis cuantitativo de la situación actual de las plantas industriales de Europa, Asia y Estados Unidos de los sectores de maquinaria, electrónica y automoción en lo que acabó siendo la tercera ronda internacional HPM. La muestra de plantas industriales distinguía dos tipologías: Plantas de Alto Rendimiento (PAR) y Plantas de Rendimiento Estándar (PRE). El estudio utilizó la información proporcionada por 179 plantas del total de 265 plantas participantes debido a que 86 plantas industriales no fueron clasificadas según su tipología en PAR y PRE. Resultados. Las comparativas desarrolladas ofrecen una visión de cuáles son los métodos de Gestión de la Calidad y Mantenimiento Productivo Total en los que existe una mayor diferenciación en el grado de implementación entre plantas industriales de alto rendimiento y de rendimiento estándar. También, se realiza un análisis de los diferentes países del estudio y sectores. Aquellos métodos más implantados en las plantas industriales clasificadas como de alto rendimiento son los que confieren una ventaja competitiva, aunque cabe destacar que el rendimiento no sólo es función de los métodos analizados en el presente estudio, sino que también depende de otras prácticas del modelo de Fabricación de Alto Rendimiento. Discusión. Los métodos de control de procesos, orientación al cliente y asociación con proveedores son las técnicas más correlacionadas con el alto rendimiento, ya que las plantas industriales de alto rendimiento tienen un mayor grado de implementación de los mismos. Aquellas plantas que también poseen mantenimiento de apoyo implantado presentan un mayor rendimiento que las plantas que no lo consideran. [EN] Introduction. This study compares the implementation¿s degree of the different methods of the advanced manufacturing practices: Quality Management and Total Productive Maintenance in high performance industrial plants and standard ones to analyze which methods of both practices are correlated with high performance manufacturing. Material and methods. Based on previous rounds of the international research: ¿High Performance Manufacturing¿, a set of questionnaires was developed to perform quantitative analysis of the current situation of industrial plants in Europe, Asia and America in the sectors of machinery, electronics and automotive which conforms the third round of the international research on HPM. The industrial plants¿ sample distinguished two types: High Performance Manufacturing Plants and Standard Performance Manufacturing Plants. The study used the data provided by 179 plants of the total of 265 participant plants owing to the fact that 86 industrial plants were not classi¿ ed by the previous types. Results. The tests carried out provide an overview of which methods related to Quality Management and Total Productive Maintenance present a higher differentiation in the degree of implementation between high performance and standard performance industrial plants. An analysis of the different countries and sectors of the study was performed. Those methods more implemented in industrial plants classi¿ ed as high performance ones, are those that confer a competitive advantage, although it should be noted that performance is not only a function of the methods analyzed in this study, but also depends on other manufacturing practices of the High Performance Manufacturing model. Discussion. The methods of process control, customer focus and involvement, and supplier partnership are the techniques most correlated with high performance, as the high performance manufacturing industrial plants have a higher degree of its implementation. Those plants that have also implemented maintenance support show a superior performance than plants that do not consider such an implementation. Este estudio ha sido parcialmente financiado por el Proyecto DPI2006-05531 “HPM Project-Spain: Proyecto para la Manufactura de Alto Rendimiento (High Performance Manufacturing)” del Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia. Dirección General de Investigación y por el Proyecto P08- SEJ-03841 “HPM-Manufactura de Alto Rendimiento. Cuarta Ronda Internacional” de la Junta de Andalucía.

The paper describes the development of a taxonomy of generic manufacturing strategies based on an empirical study. Data was gathered by means of a survey from 88 American, Japanese and Italian plants. Four different groups of plants have been identified, which differ in three dimensions orientation towards differentiation, orientation towards cost leadership and market scope. It was also observed that there are differences between the groups in the way they manage decisions involving manufacturing strategy and technology. Lastly, the taxonomy obtained has been compared with the main classifications of generic manufacturing strategies existing in literature.

A primary function of the Performance Measurement System is to provide employees with information on their past performance, allowing them to assess the outcomes of their actions, and therefore if they are meeting or not the objectives they are given. This work aims at contributing to the understanding of how the effectiveness of performance feedback information can be improved by defining a set of distinct performance feedback dimensions based on a PMS literature review, and by validating it empirically on an international sample of 164 manufacturing organisations. The proposed dimensions are: relevance as performance feedback orientation to the achievement of objectives; dynamic adjustment of performance feedback; relevance as usefulness of cost performance feedback; relevance as usefulness of non‐cost performance feedback; timeliness of shop‐floor performance feedback; personal performance feedback; and feedback on the overall process performances. The analysis shows that these dimensions are distinct, thus allowing to deal with them separately both in PMS design and audit. As far as the effectiveness of the performance feedback is concerned, it emerges that for several dimensions higher scores are associated to higher operating performances (cost, time and quality), but in one case this only holds for managers and in another one only for supervisors.