Journal of Manufacturing Technology Management

The purpose of this paper is to report the state‐of‐the‐art of servitization by presenting a clinical review of literature currently available on the topic. The paper aims to define the servitization concept, report on its origin, features and drivers and give examples of its adoption along with future research challenges.

In determining the scope of this study, the focus is on articles that are central and relevant to servitization within a wider manufacturing context. The methodology consists of identifying relevant publication databases, searching these using a wide range of key words and phrases associated with servitization, and then fully reviewing each article in turn. The key findings and their implications for research are all described.

Servitization is the innovation of an organisation's capabilities and processes to shift from selling products to selling integrated products and services that deliver value in use. There are a diverse range of servitization examples in the literature. These tend to emphasize the potential to maintain revenue streams and improve profitability.

Servitization does not represent a panacea for manufactures. However, it is a concept of significant potential value, providing routes for companies to move up the value chain and exploit higher value business activities. There is little work to date that can be used to help practitioners.

This paper provides a useful review of servitization and a platform on which to base more in‐depth research into the broader topic of service‐led competitive strategy by drawing on the work from other related research communities.

The paradigm shift in global competition and the resulting business challenges have led manufacturing enterprises, particularly in the developing world, to take a different look at their operations. Responding to this climate meant reassessing their competitive advantage, and re‐engineering their business models and operations. The purpose of this paper is to discuss many of these new challenges and present potential solutions from the practitioner point of view.

This paper discusses many of these new challenges and presents potential solutions. The results are from interviews with the enterprise managers and owners.

The issues are divided into three categories based on who can manipulate them: regional and international, national, and enterprise factors. The level of enterprises' ability to respond to these issues varies from full control to partial or no control. Nevertheless, issues' impact could be minimized by certain adopted polices and action plans.

The paper creates a guiding compass for developing countries' manufacturing enterprises, by which they can navigate around the arising challenges, in a well‐rounded, comprehensive overview.

The paper lays a foundation for a road map for researchers and practitioners to assist small and medium‐sized enterprises in becoming more competitive and improving their survivability, in a well‐rounded, comprehensive way.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an environmental‐oriented material selection methodology with two distinct features: it uses a computer‐aided material selector coupled with environmental auditing; and it provides a quantitative analysis of environmental impact of selected material.

A two‐phase computer‐aided procedure that considers material properties, manufacturing constraints, and design and economic requirements is introduced with the objective of finding the material with least negative environmental impact. The procedure is illustrated for an industrial component.

The implementation of the proposed procedure resulted in screening of three feasible materials from a database of 2,900 materials, among which cast aluminum exhibits savings in energy consumption and CO₂ emission. This result shows the effectiveness of using a systematic computer‐aided method for a speedy selection of material and generating quantitative data to measure the environmental performances and assess the product life cycle.

Although the use of digital databases and material selectors can increase the searching speed and efficiency, the user's knowledge is still needed to achieve the maximum benefits.

Consideration of eco‐sustainability factors in product development may require handling an overwhelming amount of data and performing a good many calculations. The literature review also indicates the difficulty of incorporating quantitative data into environmental and life cycle assessments of a product. As a first step to overcome such challenges, the paper presents a practicalcomputer‐aided procedure that can assist product mangers or designers in quickly and efficiently incorporating environmental and sustainability considerations into their business decision making.

This paper sets out to study a production‐planning problem for printed circuit board (PCB) assembly. A PCB assembly company may have a number of assembly lines for production of several product types in large volume.

Pure integer linear programming models are formulated for assigning the product types to assembly lines, which is the line assignment problem, with the objective of minimizing the total production cost. In this approach, unrealistic assignment, which was suffered by previous researchers, is avoided by incorporating several constraints into the model. In this paper, a genetic algorithm is developed to solve the line assignment problem.

The procedure of the genetic algorithm to the problem and a numerical example for illustrating the models are provided. It is also proved that the algorithm is effective and efficient in dealing with the problem.

This paper studies the line assignment problem arising in a PCB manufacturing company in which the production volume is high.

To provide a new model to solve the assembly‐planning problem of a textile machine in a shopfloor which can help researchers and practitioners.

The assembly planning of a textile machine (repetitive manufacturing system) involves the allocation of operations to cross‐trained operators. Workflow is defined as the workloads assigned to the operators. Operators with smaller workloads are selected to be assigned new operations from the list of unscheduled operations. Three different scheduling strategies – random, shortest processing time, and longest processing time – are adopted for the selection of operations to be assigned to operators. Different combinations of these strategies are considered for the selection of both preceding and succeeding operations. A computer simulation program has been coded on an IBM/PC‐compatible system in the C++ language to study the performance of real data from the shopfloor.

The relative percentage of imbalance is adopted for evaluating the performance of these heuristics. The RL, SL and LL produced well balanced workload schedules with lesser RPI values for all operators other than heuristics.

Non‐traditional approaches like genetic algorithms can be applied to determine the robustness of the results obtained by this research.

The experiments on simulated and real data clearly indicate that the order of succeeding operations determines the balanced workflows to the assembly of operations among the operators.

The allocation of assembly operations to the operators is modeled into a parallel machine‐scheduling problem with precedence constraints using the objective of minimizing the workflow among the operators.