Many firms are trying to optimize their production and distribution functions separately, but possible savings by this approach may be limited. Nowadays, it is more important to analyze these two functions simultaneously by trading off the costs associated with the whole. In this paper, I treat a production and distribution planning problem for single-period inventory products comprised of a single production facility and multiple customers, with the aim of optimally coordinating important and interrelated decisions of production sequencing and vehicle routing. Then, I propose a hybrid genetic algorithm incorporating several local optimization techniques, HGAP, for integrated production-distribution planning. Computational results on test problems show that HGAP is effective and generates substantial cost savings over Hurter and Buer's decoupled planning approach in which vehicle routing is first developed and a production sequence is consequently derived. Especially, HGAP performs better on the problems where customers are dispersed with multi-item demand than on the problems where customers are divided into several zones based on single-item demand.

The managerial environment of automobile industry has been rapidly changing, mainly with the tighter standard of legal and environmental regulations, the pressure of cost reduction from the end-user, the various functional improvements of vehicles, and the globalization management. In order to survive in this complicate circumstances, the automakers have strongly pursued the mutual collaboration with the suppliers, especially tier-1, for the optimal selection of parts/materials and the assembly manufacturing processes of the new model development. They prepare the early involvement program for the suppliers during the conceptual design stage, and implement the win-win strategy of technology development activity, in order to improve the value creation. This study considers the strategic technology management of automotive steel sheets makers on the aspects of strategy, processes, human & physical resources, and organization structure. It also suggests the corporate strategies of steel mills, in order to obtain the technology competence.

In this study, we empirically investigated the internal consistency among priorities in manufacturing strategy, manufacturing activity program performances and managerial performance indices in domestic electronic manufacturing firms. The test results show that there exist several significant internal consistencies with managerial implication related in research model. Especially, priority in quality shows most significant consistency through manufacturing activity program performances and managerial performance indices.

We propose the improved channel assignment and management methods for an efficient use of traffic channel resource for supporting 12.2 Kbps, 64 Kbps, and 384 Kbps traffic with the different quality of service(QoS) in the radio network controller(RNC) in asynchronous IMT-2000 system. We consider two types of traffic channel block assignments for utilizing the traffic channel efficiently; the Completely Shared(CS) channel assignment and the Partially Dedicated and Partially Shared(PDPS) channel assignment. The former is that all traffic channel blocks are completely shared with all traffic types. The latter is that some traffic channel block is independently assigned to each traffic type and the other blocks are completely shared with some traffic type. We also propose the traffic channel management method which consists of the block and task management step, for efficiently assigning, releasing, and managing the channel resource. Finally, we evaluate the performance through various numerical examples when applying our proposed channel block assignment and resource management methods.

Most of existing studies for B2B are concerned with efficient search and/or negotiation. But nevertheless it is important to provide quick and transparent guarantee to the buyer, it is hard to find studies related with it. This article suggests the guarantee process for customer satisfaction after purchasing in B2B e-marketplace under make-to-order manufacturing environment. The process consists of three modules; a request and response, a feedback processing, and a work inquiry. Each of them is adopted according to the source of defect and business relationship of buyer, seller, provider, and repairer. All of the process is implemented in user-friendly fashion and a case is presented for the enterprise portal site.

This paper deals with pre-erection scheduling and erection scheduling in shipbuilding. Among shipbuilding scheduling, the ship erection scheduling in a dock is one of the most important since the dock is the most critical resource in a shipyard. However, it is more reasonable to consider pre-erection scheduling and erection scheduling as unified because they compete with the common constrained resources such as labor, crane, space, and so on. It is very hard to consider two scheduling problems simultaneously, and hence, we approach them sequentially. At first, we propose space resource leveling heuristics in pre-erection scheduling given erection date. And then, considering the manpower resource determined by pre-erection scheduling, we also propose manpower resource leveling heuristics in erection scheduling. Various experimental results with real world data show that the proposed heuristics have good performance in terms of scheduling quality and time.

Critical dimension is one of the most important characteristics of up-to-date integrated circuit devices. Hence, critical dimension control in a semiconductor wafer fabrication process is inevitable in order to achieve optimum device yield as well as electrically specified functions. Currently, in complex semiconductor wafer fabrication processes, statistical methodologies such as Shewhart-type control charts become crucial tools for practitioners. Meanwhile, given a critical dimension sampling plan, the analysis of variance technique can be more effective to investigating critical dimension variation, especially for on-chip and on-wafer variation. In this paper, relating to a typical sampling plan, linear statistical models are presented for the analysis of critical dimension variation. A case study is illustrated regarding a semiconductor wafer fabrication process.

Vehicle manufacturing plant is a typical mixed-model production system. Generally it consists of three main shops including body shop, painting shop and assembly shop in addition to engine shop. Each shop contains diverse manufacturing processes, all of which are integrated in a form of flow line. Due to the high pressure from the market requesting small-volume large variety production, production planning becomes very critical for the competitiveness of automotive industry. In order to save costs and production time, production planning system is requested to meet some designated requirements for each shop: to balance the work load in body and assembly shops, and to minimize the number of color changes in painting shop. In this context, we developed a sequencing module for a vehicle production planning system using the ILOG Solver Library. It is designed to take into account all the manufacturing constraints at a time with meeting hard constraints in body shop, minimizing the number of soft constraints violated in assembly shop, and minimizing the number of color changes in painting shop.

The major objective of this paper is to empirically examine the effect of process maturity on the performance of industrial R&D projects. Process maturity, a fundamental concept of the Capability Maturity Model developed by Software Engineering Institute, represents the essential of Total Quality Management (TQM). Based on literature, our research model constructs process maturity in terms of structured process, goal setting and controlling, metrics, and process learning; and links it to the R&D performance that consists of technical, commercial and managerial successes. The model also includes firm size as a moderator of different effects that process maturity may have across firms. Measures for process maturity are based on the best practices identified in literature. Data are obtained from 77 successful R&D projects carried out by Korean manufacturing firms. Multiple regression and t-test are used to test proposed hypotheses. Findings are as follows. (1) In the R&D process, process maturity partially contributes to the performance of R&D projects. More specifically, goal setting and controlling-related practices drive both technical and commercial successes, while process learning-related practices drive commercial success. In contrast, traditionally emphasized elements such as structured process or metrics are found not to be significant. (2) The degree of process maturity is significantly higher in large firms. (3) Process maturity impacts on commercial success in the case of large firms, whereas it does on technical success in the case of small firms. The results imply that the TQM principles are partially associated with R&D performance, and the nature of benefit from high maturity could vary according to firm size.

To ensure competitiveness in the modern automotive market, process planning should be performed concurrently with new car developments. In automotive general assembly shops, thus, new business workflows and supporting environments are inevitable to reduce the manufacturing preparation time in developing a new car in the manner of concurrent and collaborative engineering. Since complete process planning for a whole general assembly system is a huge and complex job, several process planners should execute their planning jobs and share information. Therefore, each planner should provide others with his/her results with continuous on-line communication and cooperation. In this research, a web-based system for concurrent and collaborative process planning for automotive general assembly is developed. By using this system, savings in time and cost of assembly process planning are possible, and the reliability of the planning result is improved.

Supply chain performance management is the essential part of various business activities in supply chain management area, and integrating it with general business management improves the supply chain performance. Although supply chain performance management is important and expected of market growth, there are few researches on this area and lack of practical applications. To resolve these problems, this paper presents a new performance management methodology for a supply chain integrating SCOR (Supply Chain Operational Reference) model and Balanced Scorecard (BSC). And we develop a framework of the Supply Chain Performance Management System (SCPMS) based on this methodology, and implement a prototype system.