Mass Customization: A Supply Chain Approach is a text on the emerging topic of mass customization in manufacturing. The contributed chapters in this book provide a unified treatment to the topic by offering coverage in four main categories - concepts and current state of research; problem solving frameworks, models, and methodologies; supportive techniques and technologies for enabling mass customization; and future research agenda. The book blends theory and practice and includes prototypical applications to illustrate this complex, yet emerging field of inquiry.

In the last half of the twentieth century industry encountered a revolutionary change brought about by the harnessed power of seemingly ever-increasing capacity, speed and functionality of computers and microprocessors. This strength provided management and workers within industries with new capabilities for management, planning and control, design, quality assurance and customer support. Organized information flow became the mainstay of industrial companies. New tools and information technology systems emerged and evolved to enable companies to integrate the various departments (Design, Procurement, Manufacturing, Sales and Finance) within companies, particularly the lager ones, including international corporations. This was to give them a chance to meet new demands for product time to market, just in time supply of orders, and customer support. To the smaller company these changes were not so apparent. Neither the tools nor systems nor indeed their economic value seemed appropriate to them except for special cases. While all this was happening the structure of the larger companies began to disintegrate. Strong competitive pressures and globalization of the market place brought this about. Shedding unwanted competence and subcontracting it to others became common practice. Regional market pressures triggered companies to reorganize to create, produce, and distribute goods and services. Greater dependency on chains of supply from external companies became the norm. Medium and smaller sized companies began to gain some advantage and at the same time some were sucked into management and control systems governed by the larger companies.

Metaheuristic Procedures For Training Neural Networks provides successful implementations of metaheuristic methods for neural network training. Moreover, the basic principles and fundamental ideas given in the book will allow the readers to create successful training methods on their own. Apart from Chapter 1, which reviews classical training methods, the chapters are divided into three main categories. The first one is devoted to local search based methods, including Simulated Annealing, Tabu Search, and Variable Neighborhood Search. The second part of the book presents population based methods, such as Estimation Distribution algorithms, Scatter Search, and Genetic Algorithms. The third part covers other advanced techniques, such as Ant Colony Optimization, Co-evolutionary methods, GRASP, and Memetic algorithms. Overall, the book's objective is engineered to provide a broad coverage of the concepts, methods, and tools of this important area of ANNs within the realm of continuous optimization.

This book offers comprehensive insights into the latest developments in biodiversity, sustainability, and agri-food supply chains, fostering an informed approach to policymaking decisions in the agriculture and agri-food industry within the global economy. By addressing key societal and environmental challenges, such as desertification, floods, epidemics, rising trade costs, and food insecurity, it presents pioneering research initiatives to guide informed decision-making.

Operations Management Training Program (Course 1 of 8)

On Integration computer applications have by now entered almost all enterprises, but mostly in an uncoordinated way without long term integration plans or automation strategies. Departments introduced computing equipment and purchased or developed programs to support their department operations. This approach divided an enterprise into small and almost autonomous enterprises, each with the goal to deploy the computer to make their department and its associated activities work more efficiently. Thus many departments acquired computers, developed and installed automation systems and PCs and educated their staff, announcing this was done to make the work force aware of the large benefits that computers bring. In this fashion the most important functions in an enterprise were more or less computerized (accounting more, CAM and CAD less). In 1986 Europe, the level of computerization in descending order of significance was as follows: Accounting, Inventory Control, Order Entry, Production Planning & Control, Purchasing, Distribution, Sales Planning, Shop Floor Control, Process Control, Quality Control, Manufacturing Engineering (including CAM), and finally Design Engineering (with CAD) [1].

Steel, Cement, Bricks, Tiles Business Management, Construction management, Entrepreneurship, Business development

Competing through advanced services involves offering products-as-a-service, delivering outcomes for customers, and regularly earning revenue when customers get the results they value. This strategic move towards delivering outcomes can present many challenges for a firm. Part of the Palgrave Executive Essentials series, this book introduces outcome-based business models as Advanced Services Business Models and provides a practical guide on how a firm can innovate these services through a process known as servitization.

This book proposes a wealth-additive scheme of managing and maximizing (win–win and sharing) the marginal value (eco-entropy) of artifacts by humanizing the artifacts’ enterprise and their economics with nature. This type of clockwork would be achieved on a base of the science of nature versus artifacts and the body of science in my Springer books since 2008. My books are advancing factory science, economics, and the science of artifacts and play their role in the sandwich theory and its pair-map microcosm of the 3D-type, toward the development of body science. Then, the wealth-additive goal of the “body” is not only similar to the marginal profit, GDP, and value in economics, but also means the marginal diversity (eco-entropy) and its wealth of economics versus reliability (sustainability) in the body of the world.

Achieving the promise of e-business Two divergent approaches exist in purchasing and supply management organizations today, which give at least the perception of conflicting direction: 1. Some organizations, counseled by consultants and e-procurement software suppliers, but without a clear understanding of current actual procurement processes, have implemented expensive systems with the expectations of tremendous savings and spectacular supply chain improvements. The results often haven’t lived up to the claims. 2. Many buyers and purchasing managers, failing to grasp the potential benefits from e-procurement, have resisted change, and not given their full support to system improvements. Those who have delayed have missed the opportunities of vastly improved processes and supplier contributions. Both have valid viewpoints, but neither has delivered on the true promise of supply chain improvements, so the lessons of this book should benefit both. Active supporters of e-procurement can benefit from understanding the “nuts and bolts” approach to the fundamental supply management processes in a global context. Moreover, buyers and their managers with a better vision of the future will be better prepared to adapt to and support the needed changes.

The great, complex and rapid change happening in fonner Soviet Union is overfloading an impressive impact on the western world, especially Europe, and, in the close future, on the global world. Most of this change is generating positive effects and even more optimistic expectations, but surely the difficulties to support and to render these results real and longlasting cannot be underestimated . In fact, difficulties in the adaptation, especially of the most important Countries capabilities, like R&D process and Innovation development and transfer, are being evidenced in the transitional period to completely new socio-economic and political conditions. For the above reasons various Conferences and Meetings have been organised on international base, most of them taking care of identifying and developing recommendations for improving organisation of Science in East Europe and reshaping the research in Science and Technology in the context of new socio-economic conditions. These efforts were mainly confined to scientific research that was considered one of the most important wealth's of Soviet Union, giving not specific attention to the strategic importance of Science and, even more, Innovation for industrial and socio-economic growth in the new N.I.S. Countries. Furthennore, the impressive speed of change in Innovation on the global market coupled to the enonnous change realised by N.I.S. Countries, especially by the leader Russia, is accelerating the need of an operating solution capable of linking these Countries with the Western World, rules and market, starting from Europe.

This book focuses on the following three key topics in social network large-scale decision-making: structure-heterogeneous information fusion, clustering analysis with multiple measurement attributes, and consensus building considering trust loss. To address the aggregation and distance measurement of structure-heterogeneous evaluation information, we propose a fusion method based on trust and behavior analysis. Then, two clustering algorithms are put forward, including trust Cop-K-means clustering algorithm and compatibility distance-oriented off-center clustering algorithm. The above clustering algorithms emphasize the similarity of opinions and social relationships as important measurement attributes of clustering. Finally, this book explores the impact of trust loss originating from social relationships on the CRP and develops two consensus-reaching models, namely the improved minimum-cost consensus model that takes into account voluntary trust loss and the punishment-driven consensus-reaching model. Some case studies, a large number of numerical experiments, and comparative analyses are provided in this book to demonstrate the characteristics and advantages of the proposed methods and models.