Economic measure of productivity, quality and flexibility in advanced manufacturing systems

Service operations strategy, flexibility and performance in engineering consulting firms

“…Under these assumptions, OM literature has focused on identifying different dimensions and types of¯exibility (Brill and Mandelbaum, 1989;Browne et al, 1984;Carter, 1986;Chatterjee et al, 1984;Gerwin, 1987;Gupta and Goyal, 1992;Gupta and Somers, 1992;Hyun and Ahn, 1990;Son and Park, 1987). However, there is still no clear consensus about which are the exact costs and bene®ts of exibility implementation according to every dimension.…”

Performance, labour flexibility and migrant workers in hotels: An establishment and departmental level analysis

“…Bloom and van Reenen (2007) were unable to deconstruct work flexibility into its different components. This is important because although earlier researchers contended there was a negative relationship between flexibility and firm performance (Gustavsson 1984;Son and Park 1987), separate consideration of numerical and functional flexibility provides a more nuanced conclusion. Functional versus numerical flexibility involve different wage costs and skills availability (both task and firm specific), but the effects are likely to be highly contingent on the nature of the production, demand and skills requirements.…”

Measuring manufacturing flexibility a resource-elements based approach

“…The measures proposed by Brill and Mandelbaum (1989) are based upon the relative importance of the operations a machine executes and the efficiencies of machine tools in performing such operations. Son and Park (1987) measure "machine" flexibility in terms of the capability of the machine to add value to raw materials. Das and Nagendra (1993) measure "machine" flexibility as the sum of the efficiencies by which it performs different operations.…”

“…Carter (1986) defines flexibility as a collection of properties of a manufacturing system that support changes in production activities or capabilities and discusses how different types of flexibility impact production in different time frames including very short term, short term, medium term and long term. Son and Park (1987) define flexibility as a measure of manufacturing performance which indicates the adaptability of manufacturing systems to changes in the manufacturing environment and consider four different types of flexibility relating to, equipment; Product; process and demand. Sethi and Sethi (1990) define flexibility as adaptability of a system to a wide range of possible environments that may encounter and discuss eleven different types of flexibility which comprise: machine, material handling, operation, process, product, routing, volume, expansion, program, production and market.…”