Degree of leanness and managerial commitment in an aerospace company

Lean manufacturing is a popular concept practiced in most Japanese and western company to increase their competitiveness. However, only few of them succeed to get good result. To achieve success in implementation of lean manufacturing, company has to make changes. Managerial commitment is important in this investment. Thus, the objective of this paper is to determine the degree of leanness and managerial commitment in companies. All the information of lean manufacturing practice and role of management in the implementation were compiled from related journal, book and website. Basically, this paper refers to three published journal papers by Karlsson et al. (1996), Boyer (1996), and Soriano-Meier et al. (2002). A study was conducted in an aerospace manufacturer in Malaysia. A five-point scale questionnaire has been selected to be the study instrument. These questionnaires were distributed to 45 employees work in kitting department and 8 top management people. The results indicate that the degree of leanness and managerial commitment of the company were moderate

Best Practices for Online Business Education

This integrative review of literature on online educational best practices is intended to provide a quick reference for those interested in designing online business courses and programs. Primarily American in its perspective, this review may be helpful for business schools seeking optimal online course designs that foster quality learning experiences comparable in outcomes to traditional methods. Paramount in this review are the emphases on consistency, cohesiveness, and assessment

Decisor: A Software Tool to Drive Complex Decisions with Analytic Hierarchy Process

Addressing consistent and reliable decision-making are crucial activities when choosing seemingly related alternatives for a set of criteria. Models and methods for aiding decisions such as analytic hierarchy process (AHP) were developed to handle quantified assessments of quality attributes, usually intangible and numerically hard to cope. We introduce the Decisor software tool to assist the use of AHP to drive complex decision modeling. We present a study of related tools describing advantages and drawbacks. The tool is user friendly, with intuitive data entry fields. Users may input alternatives and criteria, assigning weights from different judgment scales. Decisor's main characteristic is its simple interface where the tool computes priority vectors for all alternatives and its consistency rates. It is also possible to operate with negative weighting, inferring Benefits, Opportunities, Costs, and Risks. The tool implements Group Decisions, using the geometric mean to combine criteria comparisons from selected stakeholders.</p