Analysing Critical Factors of Strategic Alignment Between Operational Excellence and Industry 4.0 Technologies in Smart Manufacturing

The manufacturing sector is highly competitive and operationally complex. Therefore, the strategic alignment between operational excellence methodologies and Industry 4.0 technologies is one of the issues that need to be addressed. The main aim of the study is to determine the critical factors of strategic alignment between operational excellence methodologies and Industry 4.0 technologies for manufacturing industries and make comparative analyses between automotive, food, and textile industries in terms of strategic alignment between operational excellence methodologies and Industry 4.0 technologies. Firstly, determining the critical factors based on literature review and expert opinions, these criteria are weighted, and Analytical Hierarchy Process is run to calculate the weights of these criteria. Afterwards, the best sector is determined by the Gray Relational Analysis method according to the criteria for the three manufacturing industries selected for the study. As a result of AHP, ‘Infrastructure for Right Methodology, Techniques and Tools, is in the first place, ‘Organizational Strategy, is in the second place, while the third highest critical factor is ‘Capital Investment’. Moreover, based on Gray Relational Analysis results, the automotive industry is determined as the best alternative in terms of strategic alignment between OPEX methodologies and I4.0 technologies. This study is unique in that it is primarily possible to obtain the order of importance within the criteria and to make comparisons between three important manufacturing industries that are important for the economies of the world

Investigating the role of stakeholder engagement for more resilient vaccine supply chains during COVID-19

The complexity of the supply chains and the uncertainties in the processes cause business to become more vulnerable in the face of disruptions. Pandemic situations such as COVID-19 cause sudden disruptions in supply chains, causing processes to be disrupted. Especially in multi-stakeholder supply chains, the importance of stakeholder communication, motivation, and regulations i.e. comes to the forefront in order to ensure the resilience of supply chains. As learned with the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccine supply chains are also one of the multi-stakeholder supply chains and are extremely vulnerable to disruptions. In COVID-19 times, the importance of vaccine supply chain management and the resilience in vaccine supply chains increased. To have more resilient vaccine supply chains, stakeholder engagement is an essential issue. Therefore, the Graph Theory Matrix Approach has been used to determine factors of stakeholder engagement in multi-stakeholder vaccine supply chains and to specify the relationships between the factors of project and stakeholder engagement in vaccine supply chains to increase resilience in disruption times. The aim of the study is to identify the factors of project and stakeholder engagement that are necessary to ensure the resilience of multi-stakeholder vaccine supply chains and not be affected by disruptions such as COVID-19 as it is today. As a result of the study, innovativeness of stakeholders is the most important factor of stakeholder engagement in vaccine supply chainsScopu