The aims and methods of the education and training of shop stewards: a case study

The author's research indicates that management's objectives in releasing shop stewards for courses and the shop stewards' objectives may be quite different. Views on how far courses should be “education” and how far “training”, and the best structure for courses, also emerged from this study.     

Simulation study of a closed-loop job shop

This study investigates the behavior of a job shop depicted as an integral component of a firm. A market places demands for the firm's products by dynamically evaluating the organization's quoted delivery times and actual delivery performance. The closed-loop model simulated in this study is described and the salient research results are reported. These experimental outcomes suggest that other conventional open-loop job shop studies tend to neglect important interactions with factors external to the shop itself.     

服务作坊及其营销策略探讨

美国学者罗杰·施米诺依据定制及其交互程度和劳动力密集程度两个维度,将服务分为四类,即服务工厂、服务作坊、大众服务和专业服务。本文阐述了其中的服务作坊及其特征,分析了其面临的营销机遇和挑战,进而提出了具体的营销策略,这对服务作坊开展营销活动具有现实指导意义。     

An empirical analysis of job shop dispatch rule selection

Job shop scheduling usually includes the process of selecting dispatch rules for loading shops with work. Traditionally, dispatch rules have been formed on the basis of processing time, operating time, or queueing order. A job shop scheduling model was developed to include external factors (such as due dates), internal factors (e.g., capacity), as well as influence factors (e.g., job status). Based on the model developed in this report a survey of industrial engineers, shop foremen, and production control supervisors was undertaken to determine what dispatch rules experienced job shop schedulers would select and if the selection process could be influenced by schedule conditions (status) or other organizational factors. Results suggest that schedulers may be influenced by other factors. This article suggests a model for further research with respect to job shop scheduling.     

Shop steward tenure and workplace organisation*

The shop steward theme is continued in this article which is based upon research carried out in six manufacturing plants in Hull. Graham Winch identifies the problem of shop steward turnover and argues that the most important cause lies in the shop steward being deprived of resources necessary for carrying out the job.     

A typology of shop stewards

The role of the shop steward in Australian industrial relations is probably as important as that of his British counterpart. In this article the author uses the three types of shop steward described by Miller and Form: management, union and employee oriented, to analyse a survey of 260 shop stewards in Western Australia.     

零售店的竞争导向定价分析

影响顾客择店的主要因素是价格扣购物成本。零售店如何运用竞争导向定价?在主要考虑消费者到该零售店的距离和零售店的销售面积这两个因素的情况下,本文中我们通过运用豪泰林价格竞争模型和零售引力模型,分析在已知竞争对手价格和购物成本的情况下,该零售店的最佳价格,以及两零售店经过多次博弈后达到纳什均衡时各自的价格。     

An evaluation of overtime policies for a repair shop

This article presents the first attempt to develop and examine overtime policies for a repair shop environment. Overtime is used to augment repair capacity as needed to offset short-term demand fluctuations. If overtime provides sufficient additional repair capacity, it may be possible to reduce investment in spare parts inventory.The use of overtime in a repair shop requires managerial attention to several issues. In this article, the following five issues are examined: The relationship between overtime policies and spares stocking levels The timing of overtime—reactive or proactive The amount of overtime to use The level in the product structure at which overtime is most beneficial The priority scheduling and labor assignment policies usedSix overtime policies are developed that explore the above issues. These are examined using a simulation model of a hypothetical repair shop. Since the focus of the article is on overtime policies, a single labor assignment policy is used in conjunction with two priority scheduling rules.The results indicate that reactive overtime policies work well in this environment and overtime is most effective at the lowest level of the product structure, where repair times are relatively shorter. In addition, lowest level parts provide more usage flexibility to handle anticipated future failures.     

Paradise postponed: dilemmas facing shop stewards in the new South Africa—accommodation orresistance?

The growth of the shop stewards movement in South Africa prior to majority rule represented a challenge to the institutionalised managerial prerogative and cemented the position of black trade unions in the workplace, posing a threat to both Apartheid’s cheap labour system and also to the political control of the Apartheid regime. With the advent of majority rule in 1994, shop stewards are now expected to comply with, and co-operate in, the implementation of workplace changes which they would have traditionally opposed. This, plus the move towards Japanese-style ‘lean’ work practices, is creating farreaching challenges for the ‘New’ South African shop steward movement.     

上市公司变更审计师的动因分析——以丰华股份公司为例

上市公司如何避免被出具非标准审计意见？其方法大致有两种：一是收买或威胁现任审计师;第二是更换审计师：近年柬中国上市公司变更会计师事务所的现象频繁出现,受到学术界和监管机构的广泛关注。本文以丰华股份公司变更会计师事务所为例,探讨审计师变更的动因.     

Manufacturing Resistance: Rationalizing the Irrationality of Managerial Control on the Shop Floor in a US Medical Electronics Factory

Juravich (1985) asserts that the organization of US industrial manufacturing is irrational as well as appearing chaotic from the workers’ viewpoint because of management’s refusal to integrate the workers’ knowledge into the production process. Because of this, Juravich argues, if and when the workers’ knowledge is integrated into the production system, the workers no longer will experience “chaos on the shop floor.” Extending Devinatz’s (1993) analysis in response to Juravich, this article argues that workers use resistance as a logical strategy for rationalizing what they perceive to be the irrationality of the shop floor. Utilizing Kusterer’s (1978) work, I argue that the use of many, but not all, resistance strategies constitutes a type of “survival knowledge” acquired and used by workers in response to managerial control. I maintain that these strategies constitute a special type of workplace resistance which I refer to as “pure and simple resistance.”     

提高汽车4S店售后服务管理的措施

汽车4S店售后服务是汽车企业获得经济来源的主要渠道之一,提高汽车4S店售后服务管理是汽车企业发展建设过程中必须关注的重点内容。笔者结合多年工作经验,从存在的问题着手,对相关解决措施做了简单介绍。     

Use of the net present value criterion in a random job shop where early shipments are forbidden

Both practitioners and researchers in the field of Operations Management have suggested that shop scheduling should be an integral component in both the strategic and tactical plans for an organization's assets. This paper examines the use of an accepted measure of return on assets, net present value (NPV), in a simulated shop scheduling environment where early shipment of jobs before their due dates is forbidden. In addition, early shipment of raw materials to the shop is also forbidden. This shop environment is consistent with the prevalent practice in industry of accepting orders only on a just-in-time basis to reduce purchased parts inventories. The NPV measure provides a means of balancing a variety of performance criteria that have been treated as separate objectives previously, including work-in-process inventory, finished goods inventory, mean flow time and mean tardiness, while also providing a means of measuring monetarily the value of various shop scheduling approaches.The NPV performance of priority scheduling rules and order release policies is measured in this research through the simulation of a random job shop under a variety of environmental conditions. It is found in a comparison of priority rules that use time-based information with those that use job value information that the Critical Ratio rule provides higher average performance than the three other rules used in the study. However, in some situations that are consistent with JIT practice, value-based priority rules also perform well. The use of a mechanism for delaying the release of jobs to each work center in the shop provided higher average NPV when shop utilization was set at a low level of 80%, while immediate release of work upon its arrival to the shop provided superior performance at a higher shop utilization level of 94%. While JIT materials delivery and costing yields higher NPV, it did not alter the relative ranking of priority rule/release policy combinations. In addition, it was found that environmental factors, including average job length, average number of tasks per job and level of tardiness penalty, resulted in greater variations in NPV performance than the institution of a JIT raw materials delivery policy.     

Labor relations at the shop floor level

The tenacious myth that a free economy and free society impoverish working people undergirds modern government interference in labor markets and legal privilege for adversarial labor unions. Managers are concerned about harmony and productivity at the shop floor level. The opposite characteristics of conflict, disco-ordination and inefficiency are anathema. Most of the union difficulties managers must cope with at the shop floor level stem from a fundamental source, namely the philosophy of collectivism. This paper analyzes the fable of labor's disadvantage, wage determination under personal and impersonal conditions, public policy toward labor contracts and the role of businessmen in making labor markets operate more efficiently.     

The challenge from below: an analysis of the role of the shop steward in industrial relations

An analysis of the shop steward's position in industry makes it clear that his task is complicated by the different roles demanded of him by management, his union, the rank and file, and not least, his own conception of his role.     

An investigation of labor assignment rules in a dual-constrained job shop

One of the management decisions required to operate a dual-constrained job shop is the labor assignment rule. This study examines the effects of various labor assignment rules on the shop's performance. Eleven different labor assignment rules are simulated. A longest-queue rule and the traditional counterparts of the first-in-system, first-served, shortest operation time, job due date, critical ratio and shortest processing time dispatching rules are used to determine to which work center available workers should be transferred. Also tested are five new labor assignment rules that use an average of the priority values of all jobs in queue at a particular work center to determine whether that work center should receive the available worker.A SIMSCRIPT simulation program that models nine work centers provided the mechanism by which these rules were tested. Five dispatching rules, the counterparts of the five “traditional counterpart” labor assignment rules mentioned earlier, provided different shop environments. Also, the level of staffing of the work centers was altered to provide additional ship environments. Staffing levels of 50% and 67% were employed.The results show that none of the eleven labor assignment rules had a significant impact on shop performance. This is an important result because it implies that a manager can make the labor assignment decision based on other criteria such as ease or cost of application of the rules. These results were relatively insensitive to the shop environment, as represented by the dispatching rule and the staffing level.     

新形势下汽车4S店财务管理的重点

汽车4S店是一种集销售、售后、零配件及信息反馈为一体的汽车销售模式,是当前各大汽车生产厂家占领市场与促进销售的重要手段。对于汽车4S店而言,财务管理是企业管理中的重要内容,是保证企业发展的重要管理手段。本文通过简单分析加强汽车4S店财务管理的重要性,并对其财务管理的重点进行探讨。     

关于汽车销售4S店财务核算与管理分析

伴随当前汽车市场的不断成熟,客户在对汽车的消费过程中产生越来越高的要求,同时也越来越严格。在经济飞速发展的今天,汽车已经成为人们生活中的必需品,同时汽车在品牌方面的归口管理需求也迫切需要汽车4S店的产生。因此,汽车4S店是一种必然的发展趋势。本文将重点对汽车销售4S店的财务核算和管理进行分析,从而为汽车4S店的高效运营提供决策参考。     

Scheduling of re-entrant flow shops

We propose and develop a scheduling system for a very special type of flow shop. This flow shop processes a variety of jobs that are identical from a processing point of view. All jobs have the same routing over the facilities of the shop and require the same amount of processing time at each facility. Individual jobs, though, may differ since they may have different tasks performed upon them at a particular facility. Examples of such shops are flexible machining systems and integrated circuit fabrication processes. In a flexible machining system, all jobs may have the same routing over the facilities, but the actual tasks performed may differ; for instance, a drilling operation may vary in the placement or size of the holes. Similarly, for integrated circuit manufacturing, although all jobs may follow the same routing, the jobs will be differentiated at the photolithographic operations. The photolitho-graphic process establishes patterns upon the silicon wafers where the patterns differ according to the mask that is used.The flow shop that we consider has another important feature, namely the job routing is such that a job may return one or more times to any facility. We say that when a job returns to a facility it reenters the flow at that facility, and consequently we call the shop a re-entrant flow shop. In integrated circuit manufacturing, a particular integrated circuit will return several times to the photolithographic process in order to place several layers of patterns on the wafer. Similarly, in a flexible machining system, a job may have to return to a particular station several times for additional metal-cutting operations.These re-entrant flow shops are usually operated and scheduled as general job shops, ignoring the inherent structure of the shop flow. Viewing such shops as job shops means using myopic scheduling rules to sequence jobs at each facility and usually requires large queues of work-in-process inventory in order to maintain high facility utilization, but at the expense of long throughput times.In this paper we develop a cyclic scheduling method that takes advantage of the flow character of the process. The cycle period is the inverse of the desired production rate (jobs per day). The cyclic schedule is predicated upon the requirement that during each cycle the shop should perform all of the tasks required to complete a job, although possibly on different jobs. In other words, during a cycle period we require each facility to do each task assigned to it exactly once. With this requirement, a cyclic schedule is just the sequencing and timing on each facility of all of the tasks that that facility must perform during each cycle period. This cyclic schedule is to be repeated by each facility each cycle period. The determination of the best cyclic schedule is a very difficult combinatorial optimization problem that we cannot solve optimally for actual operations. Rather, we present a computerized heuristic procedure that seems very effective at producing good schedules. We have found that the throughput time of these schedules is much less than that achievable with myopic sequencing rules as used in a job shop. We are attempting to implement the scheduling system at an integrated circuit fabrication facility.     

绘本馆经营模式分析

随着家长和孩子对绘本的热衷,绘本馆也应运而生,出现了实体店和网络绘本馆等多种经营模式。这个新兴的行业,需要考虑的问题有很多。本文分析了目前存在的图书馆模式,存在的问题,绘本馆需要不断提供优质的服务内容,进行行业资源整合,才能使绘本馆更好地发展。