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The manufacturing industry contributes to climate change and must take action to reach its high-set target. Implementation of circularity to reach sustainability has shown to be beneficial for products, but there is a lack of knowledge on how to transfer the concept to the design of factories. The purpose of the paper is to identify and systemically analyse areas of importance to enable circularity in production development to better understand what requires attention to achieve a circular factory. The focus of the study is on production development narrowed down to production equipment. A case study approach was used with interviews as the main method for data collection. Four main themes were identified: competence, collaboration, mindset and time. These were considered as areas of importance to enable circularity and to understand what needs further attention they were analysed in a systemic view of macro-, meso- and microlevel. The findings stress the need for investing in circularity in early phases to achieve circularity and that all levels of the industry need to take part in the transition towards circularity. Further, research within areas with similar complexities could benefit and learn from each other.

This paper explores the concept of green design in the context of production, focusing on investment projects for production equipment design and acquisition by a manufacturing firm. Research towards making manufacturing and production related activities more sustainable is increasing. In the manufacturing sector, environmental sustainability tends to be more commonly approached from the operations perspective. However, the decisions taken in the design phase of the production equipment significantly impact the operations phase. Therefore, proactive design approaches for sustainability applied in product design settings could be transferred to the design of the production equipment to build in green aspects from the outset. This study explores the research questions of what green production equipment design entails and how the concept of green design has evolved in the context of production. Overall, this conceptual paper highlights the importance of incorporating green design principles from the outset of the production design. Transferable methodological issues are also explored for further detailed investigation in the production equipment design context. Strong collaboration between equipment suppliers and the buying manufacturer that aims to integrate sustainability as part of requirements is proposed as an enabler for the way forward. The paper also provides insights into the evolution of the concept in this context for possible future research. 

Employee wellbeing and good mental health is essential for good business. Identifyingpsychosocial work factors, assessing their potential effect and treating psychosocial risks before harm has occurred are recommended as a proactive measure to prevent harm and promote wellbeing in the workplace. To compare these theories to practice, five 45 – 60 min telephone interviews were carried out with respondents working with health and safety processes on a national level from 5 large companies in Sweden. Thematic Analysis and Direct Content Analysis were used to analyze the data. The results indicate that the respondents identify the same work factors in their workplace as those in the Stress Indicator Tool, a questionnaire operationalizing psychosocial risks. The participant’s name three additional work factors to those included in the Stress Indicator Tool as relevant for the psychosocial work environment; availability, identification with work and self-leadership. Risk assessments appear to be carried out in companies using e.g. employee satisfaction index and manager/employee dialogue. The respondents also described risk treatment being carried out on the primary, secondary and tertiary levels. A novel finding was that the new legislation (AFS, 2015) in Sweden has had an impact on company’s actions to manage the psychosocial work environment. All five companies named actions related to increased dialogue as a direct result of the new legislation in Sweden. The main limitation of this study is the very small sample size which restricting its generalizability. Future research could investigate the process from identification of a psychosocial work factor to the treatment chosen by the company. 

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to understand how the characteristics of low-volume manufacturing industries influence the product introduction process and factors which can facilitate that process in low-volume manufacturing industries.

Design/methodology/approach: A literature review in combination with a multiple-case study were used to achieve the purpose of the paper. The multiple-case study was based on two product development projects in a low-volume manufacturing company.

Findings: The main identified characteristics of the product introduction process in low-volume manufacturing industries were a low number of prototypes, absence of conventional production ramp-up, reduced complexity of the process, failure to consider the manufacturability of the products due to an extensive focus on their functionality, and increased complexity of resource allocation. It was determined that knowledge and experiences from prior production of similar products could serve as a facilitator of the manufacturing process.

Research limitations/implications: The main limitation of this study is that the identified characteristics and facilitating factors are confined to the internal variables of the studied company. A study of the role of external variables during the product introduction process such as suppliers and customers could be the subject of future studies.

Practical implications: This research will provide practitioners in low-volume manufacturing industries with general insight about the characteristics of the product introduction process and the aspects that should be considered during the process.

The environmental concern requires manufacturing industries to direct resources and effort toward strategies and activities that help reducing their overall environmental impact. Using environmental management systems (EMSs) such as ISO 14001 or similar is common. However, as the EMSs do not put absolute requirements on the organization's environmental performance, it is still up to each manufacturing company to set the ambition level. As part of the EMSs, the identification of the environmental aspects to be dealt with during the operations phase could be supported by an industrial applicable method called Green Performance Map (GPM), engaging the employees on all levels to work with those environmental improvements they could impact. While most manufacturing companies are implementing the concept of lean production, it is advantageous to integrate the environmental improvement work into the existing lean infrastructure with, for example, daily management systems and scheduled activities for continuous improvement. Another approach discussed in the article is the need for emphasizing the design of the production system as an upstream activity that has fundamental impact on the environmental performance downstream, that is, in the operations phase. When designing new production equipment or renovating existing equipment, the opportunities to incorporate more energy- and resource-efficient solutions are much greater and cheaper compared to investing in such solutions afterward during serial production. Arguably, a combined design and operations approach is necessary in order to achieve a complete green mindset that will guide the environmental actions on both the strategic, tactical, and operational levels. Managing the environmental tasks is part of the overall strive toward lean and clean energy systems in manufacturing industry.

The global speed of change within the manufacturing industry forces companies to constantly improve production performance. In that effort, performance measures are critical for driving and managing production improvements. Two of the most commonly used measures in operations are productivity and overall equipment efficiency (OEE). However, the potential of using these measures as improvement drivers is not fully utilized in industry today due, for example, to ambiguities in definitions and their interpretation. A study of available theory indicates a gap between these implications from a theoretical perspective vs. the industrial perspective. Bridging this theory-practice gap implies great potential for competitiveness and growth in manufacturing, since the latent production capacity that could be utilized is tremendous. Even if a high degree of complexity in definition and calculation when applied in operational conditions might be perceived, this paper will show that a systematically used combined set of OEE and productivity measures can successfully drive production improvements. Also, two new productivity measures for driving improvements at the shop floor level are proposed. The empirical findings are based on a two-year case study within a manufacturing company in the automotive industry using an interactive research approach. 

Product development process has a considerable effect on factors such as time to market and quality of product which are vital for manufacturing companies to remain competitive. Therefore, study of the factors which influence the product development process such as characteristics of products and production systems is necessary to support and improve the product development process. Since most of the studies have been conducted in the context of high-volume manufacturing industries, the influences of characteristics of low-volume products and production systems on the product development process in such industries have not been considered sufficiently. In this paper, characteristics of low-volume products and production systems, their inter-relations and their influences on the product development process have been studied through a multiple case study. A general map of characteristics of low-volume products and production systems and their inter-relations was presented in this paper. Moreover, the influences of these characteristics on product development process including the reduced complexity of the process and lack of opportunities for test and refinement were discussed.

The challenge for every multinational manufacturing company with the ambition to implement the lean production concept is how to implement it worldwide within its global manufacturing footprint. There are many decisions that need to be taken from a company group perspective when planning and implementing a lean program. These concern the level of standardization on principles and tools, how to structure and organize additional resources, how to share experiences within the organization, and how to sustain the effort. These factors are elaborated in this chapter from a factory perspective based on the presentation of the lean journey of Gyproc AB, a process industry company within the Gypsum part of the large Saint Gobain group. The company has worked for about ten years with implementing world-class manufacturing and has extensive experience of the issues of starting-up and sustaining the lean-based concept. 

Collaborative development between the user and the equipment supplier of production technology has an increasingly important effect in terms of generating innovative, sustainable, and unique production process ideas that can be easily ramped-up to high volume production. However, joint development of production technology is challenging and has received surprisingly limited attention. Against this background the objective of the paper is to explore collaborative challenges from the equipment suppliers and customers’ perspectives in production technology development projects, and to suggest strategies for how these challenges can be addressed. Empirically the results are based on multiple case studies from two manufacturing companies in Sweden (i.e. users) and two equipment suppliers, ensuring that the perspectives of both the user and supplier sides in production technology development projects are considered. Our findings show that the identified collaboration challenges do not only relate to inter-organizational development activities but also to the companies’ internal characteristics, i.e. the prerequisites for company collaboration. Internal characteristics have a clear impact on the ability to bridge the interface with the equipment supplier and thus to advance the collaboration in production technology development projects. Our findings underscore the importance of having intra and inter-organizational strategies to enhance the success related to collaboration in production technology development projects.

The purpose of this research was to investigate the engineering change management process in engineering-to-order projects while comparing the same process in traditional manufacturing. A single-case study at a engineering-to-order – engineering review office was performed and results were analysed in conjuction with literature covering the engineering change process in traditional manufacturing. Engineering-to-order projects and tradional manufacturing are different in many ways but share the need for a reliant engineering change process. This study found that engineering change management post-change analysis could benefit future projects in the form of quantifiable lessons learned from previous project’s engineering change data.