Purpose -The global spread of production makes companies relocate their manufacturing units frequently. Not only equipment, systems, and facilities, need to be moved, but the transfer of operational knowledge and experience seem to be a major challenge. However, discussions on knowledge transfer are derived predominantly from a cognitive perspective and normally focus on the organizational level and are rarely linked with outsourcing. Thus, from the perspective of operations management, the purpose of this paper is to explore how to transfer production know-how on the shop-floor level when manufacturing units are relocated and indicate which means can be used to support this intra-firm transfer process. Design/methodology/approach -Four cases are identified from research in three Danish companies. Observations and 77 semi-structured interviews have been made over a time period of two years. Surveys of documents, questionnaires, and the Delphi method have been used to supplement the research. Findings -Four cases are analyzed from four aspects. By doing so, different relocation situations are identified; different types of transferred knowledge are recognized; and different groups of means for knowledge transfer are introduced and classified according to their usage. Practical implications -A framework is summarized to integrate all the elements discussed in this paper, which provides strong support and clear directions to industrial managers when they need to transfer knowledge in the relocation projects. Together with the framework, a process to help managers implement their knowledge transfer is also proposed. Originality/value -Besides the framework and process, this paper also indicates that absorptive capacity of a production unit depends not only on the level of technical competence at its site, but also on whether real manufacturing environment has already existed or not. Two means for establishing virtual manufacturing environment are suggested.

Analysis and allocation of tolerance are the typical problems in tolerance planning for the assembly and its components. This paper presents the developed simulator which is able to assist in solving tolerance planning problems in production processes, both in manufacturing and assembly processes. The paper also shows the benefits of this simulator which leads to quality characterisation and improvement, cost reduction and shorter design and planning phases.

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Production is a multi-step process involving many different articles produced in different jobs by various machining stations. Quality inspection has to be integrated in the production sequence in order to ensure the conformance of the products. The interactions between manufacturing processes and inspections are very complex since three aspects (quality, cost, and time) should all be considered at the same time while determining the suitable inspection strategy. Therefore, a simulation approach was introduced to solve this problem.The simulator called QUINTE [the QUINTE simulator has been developed at the University of Dortmund in the course of two research projects funded by the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Labour (BMWA: Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Arbeit), the Arbeitsgemeinschaft industrieller Forschungsvereinigungen (AiF), Cologne/Germany and the Forschungsgemeinschaft Qualität, Frankfurt a.M./Germany] was developed to simulate the machining as well as the inspection. It can be used to investigate and evaluate the inspection strategies in manufacturing processes. The investigation into the application of QUINTE simulator in industry was carried out at two pilot companies. The results show the validity of this simulator. An attempt to run QUINTE in a user-friendly environment, i.e., the commercial simulation software – Arena® is also described in this paper.NOTATION: QUINTE Qualität in der Teilefertigung  (Quality in  the manufacturing process)

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