Cost cutting by transferring the production capacity to low-wage countries cannot by itself guarantee the survival of the manufacturing industry in the European Community. This book poses a number of topical questions, regarding competitive production for the 21st century, in four key areas.

Manufacturing towards Excellence in spinning mills aims to help the relevant organization to cut costs, improve throughput, effective utilization of resources and to safeguard the interests of stakeholders. Major aspects discussed includes quality assurance, production management, maintenance management of modern machinery and laboratory equipment towards achieving manufacturing excellence with benchmarking

The health of American manufacturing has been a cause of real concern during the 1980s. Foreign competition, hostile takeovers, new technologies and a host of other factors have caused dramatic changes in this key sector of the American economy. Many ob servers of this process of change are singing the

Implementing co-operative production networks to secure and foster future competitiveness on the global market is a major strategic target for many small- and medium-sized enterprises. The text starts begins with a look at strategic management before moving onto operational product development and operations execution, and in doing so provides a

Agile manufacturing is defined as the capability of surviving and prospering in a competitive environment of continuous and unpredictable change by reacting quickly and effectively to changing markets, driven by customer-designed products and services. Critical to successfully accomplishing AM are a few enabling technologies such as the standard for the