A sample of Italian manufacturing companies was selected in order to verify the abilities and effects (relationships) of the management factors human resources, leadership and strategic planning on company performance. The Partial Least Squares (PLS) estimation method was used for analyzing the data collected, where the relationships between the management factors and performance were formalized by a Structural Equation Model (SEM). The analysis of the survey data showed unexpected result regarding the non significant direct relationship between Leadership and Performance. The effect of Leadership is obtained by an indirect relationship through Human Resources. The combination of Leadership and Human Resources has hence been identified as the management factors which have the highest impact on the performance of Italian industrial companies. Another interesting and unexpected result was that there was no significant impact of Strategic Planning on Performance. It seems that the leaders of Italian industrial companies have not understood that good strategic planning is a necessary condition for achieving excellence. So another improvement area is in fact Strategic Planning. This area should have the highest priority of any top management team and the focus should include how to establish a strong relationship between strategic planning and performance. No correlation between strategic planning and performance is a strong indication that something is wrong. It is not enough that Leadership is doing Strategic Planning-Leadership is also about studying and follow up on results in order to assure impacts on performance. This link seems to be missing in Italian industrial companies.

Nowadays, the competitiveness of any organisations rests dominantly on how they can manage their performance, A host of performance variables such as quality, reliability, and efficiency are recognised as competitive priorities. This paper reviews the criteria and dimensions of performance measures, and discusses six core performance indicators in agribusiness operations with particular reference to the poultry/broiler farms. Besides, a holistic "Quality, Reliability and Efficiency" view of performance is proposed when developing measures for poultry agribusiness operations.

Many practitioners strive to increase the efficiency of their product development. In addition, smaller companies must satisfy customers' expectations of their product development. These expectations can be e.g. use of specific methodologies such as Lean Product Development (LPD) and/or Design for Six Sigma (DFSS). This study attempts to identify differences and similarities between these methodologies and the connection between them. This comparison is of interest to practitioners that must choose a strategy for their product development as well as to researchers. The aim of both methodologies is to reduce waste and time of development and to raise the quality of a product at the very roots of the product: its development. LPD and DFSS help development managers to structure projects and focus as much as possible on customer expectations and satisfaction.

This paper describes the development of a scale for measuring top management commitment towards continual quality performance improvement in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). A set of self-assessment questions of the ISO 9004: 2000 Standard was used to assess the adoption status of quality management practices. This paper investigates the inter-item reliability and the content validity of the Quality Management Principles Scale (QMPS) in an integrated improvement process in SMEs. An empirical study was conducted to acquire senior management views on the use of the QMPS in manufacturing sectors in Trinidad and Tobago. Based on 328 responses from 110 SMEs, statistical software packages were used to analyse the empirical data and determine the reliability and validity of the QMPS. The paper contributes to develop a self-assessment scale that can be used to measure top management commitment. It is anticipated that the findings would provide practical insights for evaluating the levels of maturity on performance improvement in SMEs.

Customer Support Knowledge of Customer Support Organization is one of the important assets of enterprises and "Customer Support Knowledge Management" is also the critical aspect of Business Knowledge Management; however, the attributes of Customer Support Knowledge are complicated, diverse, renewed rapidly and difficult to be managed. Thus, in order to design a successful Customer Support Knowledge Management System, apart from the consideration of "human" and "information technology" aspects, the concerns of attributes and Customer Support Knowledge and industry characteristics should be involved for meeting the requirements of Customer Support Organization and allowing the organization to acquire the competitive advantage of "Differentiation Service". This research used the "Customer Support Knowledge Management System" in a high-tech industry as an example and treated the end users of medical instruments in different types of hospitals in Taiwan which have received the support service of our company in recent six months as the population. The end users were mostly the nursing executives or ultrasonic wave technical personnel in intensive care unit and they had similar educational background and incomes and adopted the medical instruments such as physical supervision system, ultrasonic wave system, heart start or ECG machine produced by our company; the research method was to randomly treat the investigation results of the telephone customers' satisfaction from respective 30 end users in the population three months before and after this system execution as the samples and use hypotheses to validate if the end users' customer satisfaction significantly improved in terms of "Remote Support," "On-site Support," "Service Turn Around time," "Technical Competence" and "Manner" in order to understand the influence and managerial significance of execution of "Customer Support Knowledge Management System" on Customer Support Organization.

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.

In the competitive global market, firms have to keep profit from innovation activities. A firm makes profits by offering products or services at a lower cost than its competitors or by offering differentiated products at premium prices that more than compensate for the extra cost of differentiation. The IC Package and Testing technology industries were the first high technological industry to build in Taiwan. The Package and Testing industries in Taiwan adopted competitive innovation activities to become stronger. In our study, we want to know how innovation activities influence a firm operating in the IC Package and Testing industries. Our study used a questionnaire and Likert five-point scale to survey the innovation activities, customer and feedback in innovation performance in the IC Package and Testing industry. The wafer level chip size packing technology in our study indicates the innovation activities. Because we need to compare the difference between the wafer level chip size packing technology and wire bonding technology to recognize innovation and how the innovator and customer were influenced. Our conclusions are described below: (1) When the innovator adopts innovation activities that can be maintained using experiments and knowledge, using machine and decision variables more quickly will produce success; (2) Innovators should adopt innovation activities that focus on customers that use knowledge and experimentation, training time and cost. If an innovation forces customers to spend much time and cost to learn new technology or applications, the innovation will not be adopted; (3) Innovators that create innovation performance higher than his customers must also consider the impact upon their customers. We have to remind innovator to focus on why their customers have a different level of evolution in the same innovation activities.

This research treated the secondary school teachers as the research scale and the research targets included the following: secondary school (employ unit), center of teacher education, and qualified teachers. In terms of these three groups of people, the topics of exploration focused on the perception of suitable teachers, perception of evaluation standard during the process of teacher examination and the relationship among teacher examination systems. The research was managed by two phases: the first phase referred to literature reorganization, expert interview, the qualities and conditions of suitable teachers, important evaluation standard during the process of teacher examination and teacher examination system used; the second phase included questionnaire survey, employ school acquisition, the perception of centers of teacher education and qualified teachers toward the suitability condition and examination evaluation standard in the first phase and teacher examination system used. This research found out that as to the perception of suitable teachers, through data collection, there were six factors reorganized. The levels of their importance were as follows: education devotion, teaching capacity, class management, capacity to guide special students, capacity to communicate with the parents and the will to undertake administrative works. Noticeably, employee unit and centers of teacher education apparently valued class management more, compared with trained teachers; as to evaluation standard of examination, the analytical result found out that the perception of three groups were different in terms of the views toward educational works, written examination data, candidate's age, club experience at school and capacity to use multimedia support teaching materials. This research further proposed six suggestions for centers of teacher education and trained teachers: (l) employ schools considerably valued educational devotion; (2) trained teachers tended to neglect the importance of class management; (3) employee unit considerably cared about the new teachers' competence to use multimedia support teaching materials; however, trained teachers did not have the same view; (4) employee unit considerably cared about new teachers' views toward educational works as well as the candidates' ages; (5) generally speaking, trained teachers neglected the importance of club experience at school; (6) the data revealed that written examination data was not relatively important in terms of teacher examination.

The high-tech industry is the economic lifeline for Taiwan. Its characteristics are short product life cycle, rapid changes in the market, and a high obsolescence rate for new products. Under globalization, the high-tech industry has adopted Information Technology (IT) to shorten the manufacturing process, reduce costs and conduct product research and development (R&D) to increase the core competence of enterprises and achieve the goal of sustainable operations. Enterprises should actively strengthen their integration with internal and external resources and lead in R&D management to increase industrial operating performance. Effectively managing operations and R&D management evaluation in Taiwan's High-tech Industry has become a critical subject. This study adopted 4 major Balanced Scorecard (BSC) perspectives to establish the Total Performance Evaluation Indicators for the R&D management department in Taiwan's High-tech Industry. The Analytic Network Process (ANP) was applied to evaluate the overall performance of the R&D management department. The research framework is divided into 2 phases. The first phase is combined with the 4 major perspectives, Financial, Customer, Internal Business Process and Learning and Growth, as the related indicators for each measurement perspective. The Key Performance Indicators (KPI) were selected using Factor Analysis to identify the key factor from the complicated indicators. The relationship between the characteristics of each BSC's evaluation perspective is dependence and feedback. This study applied ANP to conduct the calculation and adjustment of correlation between each KPI, and determine on their relative weights for the objective KPI. The "Financial Perspective" for R&D management department in Taiwan's High-tech Industry focused on the budget achievement rate of R&D management. The weight indicator value is (0.05863). The "Customer Perspective" focused on problem-solving satisfaction. The weight value of this indicator is (0.17549). The "Internal Business Process Perspective" focused on the quantity and quality of R&D. The weight value of this indicator is (0.13506). The "Learning and Growth Perspective" focused on improving competence in the research personnel's professional techniques. The weight value of this indicator is (0.02789). From the total weighting indicators, the order of the Performance Indicators for the R&D management department in Taiwan's High-tech Industry is: (1) Customer Perspective; (2) Internal Business Process Perspective; (3) Financial Perspective; and (4) Learning and Growth Perspective.

Many 6-sigma innovation companies are obtaining ISO9000 series or ISO/TS16949 certifications. However, not many of them have considered the integrated management of ISO/TS16949 at the time of 6-sigma introduction. ISO/TS16949 focuses on the process of an overall company. In particular, APQP (Advanced Product Quality Planning) requires that from the beginning all the planning should have a clear quality planning business process. Each company can decide the best course of action to suit its individual needs. Lean DFSS in 6-sigma offers the concrete development steps of the product development process. And if analyses of Input, Output, Target, Process, KSF, KPI, and FMEA is done in each process and clearly defined in APQP, mutual organic and effective systems can be initially achieved.

In this work, an efficient and easy statistical method to find an equivalent discrete distribution for a continuous random variable (r.v.) is proposed. The proposed method is illustrated by applying it to the treatment of the anthropometrical noise factors in the context of Robust Ergonomic Design.