John Geraghty

COVID-19, Brexit, war, and some other similar cases will leave/have left us with a lesson that has had an impact on the supply chains of almost all product types. Countries have now recognized that some products cannot be sustained in a situation of uncertainty. This research covers the gap in understanding and identifying the successful factors affecting the criticality level of supply required of intermediate and final products (IFP) at the national level. It investigates the relationship between two factors: the casual factor supply risk (independent factor); and the impacted (dependent factors) political, economic, sociocultural, and technological (PEST) factors in terms of identifying critical products using the principle of Resource Dependency Theory (RDT). A literature review was conducted, followed by a mixed-method approach. Semi-structured interviews with 23 Saudi experts were carried out initially; then, a questionnaire was shared with 152 Saudi experts in different sectors. The qualitative study identified 30 key measurement variables for both factors, in which 19 variables were confirmed using the factor analysis (FA) technique.

Purpose: This paper examines the behaviour of shared and dedicated Kanban allocation policies of Hybrid Kanban-CONWIP and Basestock-Kanban-CONWIP control strategies in multi-product systems; with considerations to robustness of optimal solutions to environmental and system variabilities. Design/methodology/approach: Discrete event simulation and evolutionary multi-objective optimisation approach were utilised to develop Pareto-frontier or sets of non-dominated optimal solutions and for selection of an appropriate decision set for the control parameters in the shared Kanban allocation policy (S-KAP) and dedicated Kanban allocation policy (D-KAP). Simulation experiments were carried out via ExtendSim simulation application software. The outcomes of PCS+KAP performances were compared via all pairwise comparison and Nelson’s screening and selection procedure for superior PCS+KAP under negligible environmental and system stability. To determine superior PCS+KAP under systems’ and environmental variability, the optimal solutions were tested for robustness using Latin hypercube sampling technique and stochastic dominance test. Findings: The outcome of this study shows that under uncontrollable environmental variability, dedicated Kanban allocation policy outperformed shared Kanban allocation policy in serial manufacturing system with negligible and in complex assembly line with setup times. Moreover, the BK-CONWIP is shown as superior strategy to HK-CONWIP. Research limitations/implications: Future research should be conducted to verify the level of flexibility of BK-CONWIP with respect to product mix and product demand volume variations in a complex multi-product system Practical implications: The outcomes of this work are applicable to multi-product manufacturing industries with significant setup times and systems with negligible setup times. The multi-objective optimisation provides decision support for selection of control-parameters such that operations personnel could easily change parameter settings to achieve a new service level without additional optimisations of the system parameters. Originality/value: The examination of the behaviour of the two Kanban allocation policies in HK-CONWIP and BK-CONWIP in a complex multi-product assembly line with setup-times and environmental variabilities, under erratic demand profiles.

Is Lean Supply an Option for SMEs in the Automotive Industry: An Irish Case Study: 10.4018/978-1-4666-5039-8.ch012: It is widely claimed that the lean supply concept has enabled both buyers and suppliers to engage in collaborative relationships based on mutual dependencies