The software industry has matured into a global business with software products and applications growing in number, complexity, and market importance. Global sourcing and software production and operations sharing are becoming the industry standard. At the same time, the marketplace has become less tolerant of poor‐quality products and hidden maintenance costs. Reviews various existing standards and frameworks and discusses the massive consolidation and coordination efforts currently ongoing for the purpose of developing international quality standards. Also proposes an eight‐step framework that puts all 29 clauses required by ISO 9001 for certification implementation in the software industry into clusters for more efficient management. Warns, however, that becoming ISO 9000 registered is only the first step to achieving consistent software quality.
Reviews the literature on capacity planning at strategic, tactical and operational levels but points out that, in practice, many enterprise resource planning systems make unrealistic assumptions for production planning; and the advanced production software packages which can deal with uncertainty are both complex and expensive. Uses a theoretical company to demonstrate how a normal Excel spreadsheet can be used in conjunction with a common add‐on package (@RISK) to improve analysis and run Monte Carlo simulations as a basis for decision making. Compares the results produced with standard spreadsheet analysis and discusses the additional financial and operational insights they provide into the implications of different capacity levels under conditions of uncertainty. Warns that the validity of the simulation depends on the quality of the data and model; and that human judgement is still required to actually make a decision.
In this paper, a model is developed to investigate the design of pro® t-sharing incentive plans in an environment, e.g. just-in-time production, where the worker' s responsibility has been enlarged to perform multiple tasks, e.g. production and setup time and costs reduction. The incentive model is based on the agency theory and the Scanlon pro® t-sharing plans developed in the USA. Comparing inventory cost with a pre-established cost target, each employee receives a share of pro® ts or loss in proportion to his or her wage or salary level. The main contribution of this paper is to explore the roles of risk attitudes, production risk and monitoring mechanisms in developing such pro® t-sharing plans. Understanding these human and environmental factors will help managers design more eå ective incentive systems.
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