Manufacturing Handbook of Best Practices

Manufacturing Handbook of Best Practices
Author: Jack B. ReVelle
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 472
Release: 2001-12-26
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1420025503

Manufacturing Handbook of Best Practices: An Innovation, Productivity, and Quality Focus gives you a working knowledge of today's cutting edge tools - preparing you for the way you will be doing your job tomorrow. With contributions from seasoned manufacturing experts, the book provides a single-source reference to what's currently happening in mod

Aging and the Macroeconomy

Aging and the Macroeconomy
Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2013-01-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0309261961

The United States is in the midst of a major demographic shift. In the coming decades, people aged 65 and over will make up an increasingly large percentage of the population: The ratio of people aged 65+ to people aged 20-64 will rise by 80%. This shift is happening for two reasons: people are living longer, and many couples are choosing to have fewer children and to have those children somewhat later in life. The resulting demographic shift will present the nation with economic challenges, both to absorb the costs and to leverage the benefits of an aging population. Aging and the Macroeconomy: Long-Term Implications of an Older Population presents the fundamental factors driving the aging of the U.S. population, as well as its societal implications and likely long-term macroeconomic effects in a global context. The report finds that, while population aging does not pose an insurmountable challenge to the nation, it is imperative that sensible policies are implemented soon to allow companies and households to respond. It offers four practical approaches for preparing resources to support the future consumption of households and for adapting to the new economic landscape.

Change Masters

Change Masters
Author: Rosabeth Moss Kanter
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 440
Release: 1984
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0671528009

Abstract: This book presents practical information on the conduct of American business and management. The author concentrates on innovation, entrepreneurship, and the development of participative management skills that encourage the use of new ideas arising from within the corporation itself. The organizational structures, corporate cultures, and specifics strategies of several major AMerican companies are examined.

Productivity, Innovation and Knowledge in Services

Productivity, Innovation and Knowledge in Services
Author: J. Gadrey
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2002-01-01
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1781950202

Written by some of the most distinguished authors in the field, this book elucidates the critical and complex relationships between services, production and innovation. The authors discuss the limitations of current theories to explain service productivity and innovation, and call for a conceptual re-working of the ways in which these are measured. They also highlight the important role of knowledge in the production system and in doing so make an important contribution to a key debate which has emerged in the social sciences in recent years.

Firm Innovation and Productivity in Latin America and the Caribbean

Firm Innovation and Productivity in Latin America and the Caribbean
Author: Inter-American Development Bank
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 366
Release: 2016-07-01
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1349581518

This volume uses the study of firm dynamics to investigate the factors preventing faster productivity growth in Latin America and the Caribbean, pushing past the limits of traditional macroeconomic analyses. Each chapter is dedicated to an examination of a different factor affecting firm productivity - innovation, ICT usage, on-the-job-training, firm age, access to credit, and international linkages - highlighting the differences in firm characteristics, behaviors, and strategies. By showcasing this remarkable heterogeneity, this collection challenges regional policymakers to look beyond one-size-fits-all solutions and create balanced policy mixes tailored to distinct firm needs. This book is open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 IGO license.

Innovative Quality Improvements in Operations

Innovative Quality Improvements in Operations
Author: Tomas Backström
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 180
Release: 2017-07-13
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 3319559850

This book examines current and emerging challenges in manufacturing related to the ideal of developing production processes with variability and agility on one level of the system, combined with structures ensuring stability and robustness on another level; close to what by other scholars has been discussed in terms of continuous innovation. However, this ideal has proven to be difficult to achieve in practice, and there is a need for enhanced and more sophisticated theoretical models dealing with the complexity surrounding organizational conditions to foster incremental as well as radical change in production systems, and, at the same time to ensure stability over time. As a theoretical frame of reference, a perspective on change where conflicting demands and conflicting activities, e.g., exploration and exploitation, are seen as intertwined and interdependent, is used throughout the book. The ideal from this perspective is to make use of such conflicting forces and to develop the change dynamics by keeping them in the same social system, not to structurally separate them in different departments or different initiatives. The main purpose of the book is to address an increased need for quality improvement through innovation and disruptive change in production. Traditional theories and managerial models of production systems are developed with a focus on stability and improvement. There is a need for enhanced models to reach an ability to develop new future production systems. The goal of the book is to provide nuances and new perspectives giving more realistic models of the production system to be able to increase the change potentiality of the organization and thus the long-term competiveness. Learning and organizational perspectives are in focus as enablers to increase the understanding of a production system as such. Long-term competitiveness through adaptability and the potential for radical improvement is of importance throughout the book. The use of dualities and the concept of ambidextrous organizations as a frame of understanding is the innovative strength for this area.