Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate factors influencing manufacturing flexibility adoption and simultaneously explores some of the key issues prevailing in manufacturing flexibility adoption in Indian context. The study also stratifies critical factors for successful manufacturing flexibility adoption. Design/methodology/approach – Using exploratory sequential design, a series of focus group interviews were conducted with Indian manufacturing professionals and these interviews were supplemented by 127 follow-up structured questionnaires. Findings – Two major themes emerged from the first phase of the study – role played by some of the unexplored antecedents of manufacturing flexibility and key issues in manufacturing flexibility adoption. In the second phase, a list of factors was categorized based on their degree of importance in manufacturing flexibility adoption. Research limitations/implications – Being qualitative in nature, the study suffers from inherent risk of subjectivity associated with manufacturing practitioners. A large-scale survey and rigorous quantitative analysis would be helpful to further validate the list of factors and underlying relationships among proposed factors. Practical implications – The identified list of factors and some of the key issues in manufacturing flexibility adoption can be of great help to practitioners. The stratified list of factors can be further used by academicians to develop an instrument for manufacturing flexibility adoption. Originality/value – The paper identifies a set of factors that affects manufacturing flexibility adoption. It offers a basis for instrument development for manufacturing flexibility adoption and provides direction for future quantitative research in manufacturing flexibility area.

No abstract

Recent challenges induced by the global pandemic COVID-19 have highlighted the critical importance of coping with a sudden surge in demand for front line healthcare services. Motivated by the success of lean implementation in manufacturing systems, this study attempts to apply the lean principles in healthcare delivery environments. The lean approach begins with the identification of seven types of wastes in any production or service system. This study attempts to identify and prioritize the present in hospitals. The study contributes to the existing body of knowledge in two ways. First, we identify the various sources contributing to the seven basic wastes in healthcare delivery. Second, we prioritize the seven types of wastes and the dimensions contributing to these wastes using a Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM). This paper used the fuzzy analytical hierarchy process approach, which is a well-accepted tool in MCDM. The study was conducted at select hospitals located in and around Pune city in India. We find that waiting, transportation, motion, and defects are dominant in adopting lean practices among the seven wastes. The findings of this study may guide hospital management in strategic planning in adopting a lean healthcare process. To our knowledge, this is one of the first studies to extract, and prioritise lean wastes within the context of the healthcare sector.

No abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to propose a novel integrated approach using analytical hierarchy process (AHP) and technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) methods for evaluation and prioritization of appropriate manufacturing flexibility type required in the face of multiple environmental uncertainties. Design/methodology/approach Using a case study of an Indian fashion apparel firm, the study demonstrates the application of the proposed integrated framework for evaluation and prioritization of manufacturing flexibility. The study uses AHP method to determine importance weight of environmental uncertainty criteria and subcriteria and then employs TOPSIS method to determine the final ranking of manufacturing flexibility types required to cope up with these uncertainties. Findings The findings of the case suggest that the proposed integrated approach is feasible and practically implementable for manufacturing flexibility assessment. Research limitations/implications AHP has been extensively studied and used, but the major limitation of this proposed approach is the involvement of large number of pairwise comparisons leading to difficulty in maintaining consistency in pairwise comparisons. Practical implications The proposed approach can work as a benchmarking tool to practitioners in evaluating and prioritizing manufacturing flexibility alternatives and to suggest strategic allocation of resource by prioritizing different manufacturing flexibilities types. Originality/value Unlike conventional approaches, the study provides meaningful knowledge to decision makers by demonstrating a simple, flexible, and efficient method to evaluate and rank the appropriate manufacturing flexibility types.