Studies linking the use of lean practices to company performance have been increasing as

markets are becoming more competitive and companies are eager for reducing waste and

therefore implementing the Lean Management (LM) philosophy to improve performance.

However, results from these studies have found various and different impacts and some light

is needed. Extant literature was reviewed and, to achieve the research objective, a metaanalysis

of correlations was carried out. The obtained results suggest a positive relationship

between some lean practices and performance measures. Furthermore, the presence of moderators

influencing the relationship between lean practices and performance outcomes is

highlighted in our results. To our best knowledge, this is the first research that proposes

a comparison of results from primary studies on Lean implementation, by analysing the

linear relationship between lean practices and enterprise performance. It fills this gap and

therefore represents an important contribution.

This study provides a systematic review of the existing academic literature describing the

key components of eMaintenance. The current literature is reviewed by utilizing a number of

academic databases including Scopus, SpringerLink and ScienceDirect, and Google Search is

used to find relevant academic and peer-reviewed journal articles concerning eMaintenance.

The literature describes eMaintenance as an advanced maintenance strategy that takes advantage

of the Internet, information and communication technologies, wireless technologies

and cloud computing. eMaintenance systems are used to provide real time analyses based

on real time data to offer a number of solutions and to define maintenance tasks. The collection

and analysis of appropriate maintenance and process data are critical to create robust

‘maintenance intelligence’ and finally improvements in manufacturing costs, safety, environmental

impact, and equipment reliability. This paper describes how the scientific discussion

on eMaintenance has expanded significantly during the last decade, creating a need for an

up-to-date review. As a conclusion, three research gaps in the area of eMaintenance are

identified, including evaluating the benefits of eMaintenance, agreeing on a

Maintenance is a key manufacturing function that contributes to a company’s productivity, profitability and sustainability. Unfortunately, many aspects of the contribution of maintenance to sustainability in manufacturing remain unexplored, and many enterprises are not yet ready to assess the maintenance impacts on their sustainability. Maturity models are useful tools for assessing maintenance practices; however, no maintenance maturity model that allows the evaluation of the contribution of maintenance to sustainable performance was found in literature. This paper proposes a model for assessing the maturity and sustainability of maintenance processes. The model outputs are: a measure of the maintenance and sustainability maturity level; recommendations for improvement to undertake to enhance maintenance maturity and, thus, meet sustainability standards. The model was applied in three manufacturing enterprises: the calculation of their maintenance maturity and sustainability indices made the maintenance stakeholders more aware of the need to implement effective strategies for more sustainable maintenance performance.

The fourth industrial revolution has broadly transformed the manufacturing system. However, this transformation is somewhat lacking in traditional or manual production systems due to the absence of IT infrastructure. Such traditional industries need to have the advantage of real-time control and monitoring. This study has developed economic assembly planning, scheduling, and control for a traditional assembly system. We used the concept of the configurable virtual workstation as the digitalization framework. Then, we employed the decentralized scheduling concept to reduce the computational effort in scheduling the complex product. The implementation result showed that scheduling and planning have transformed the traditional assembly process into intelligent scheduling and control with low digitalization effort

In the article, the significance and essence of management of intelligent manufacturing in

the era of the fourth industrial revolution has been presented. The current revolution has

a large impact on the operation of the company. Through the changes resulting from the

application of modern technologies, production processes are also undergoing revolutions,

which results in changes in such indicators of business development. Management of intelligent

manufacturing is also a challenge for socially responsible activities; due to solutions of

Industry 4.0, enterprises directly and indirectly influence environmental protection, which

results in benefits for all mankind. In the article, the analysis and assessment of management

of intelligent manufacturing, using modern technologies during the production process,

has been carried out, with particular emphasis on the components of management such as:

monitoring, control, autonomy, optimization. Moreover, the impact of the above components

of management on changes in the following indicators (KPI – Key Performance Indictors)

has been evaluated, i.e. (1) quality, (2) rapidity of the production process implementation,

(3) performance and (4) productivity, (5) decrease in waste generated during the technological

process and (6) amount of consumed electricity. For the purposes of conducting the

research, a case study has been used, developed due to the information shared by the company

manufacturing machinery and equipment for the polymer processing industry, in which

intelligent solutions of Industry 4.0 are being applied. The presented article is a significant

contribution to the current development of knowledge in the field of implementing Industry

4.0 solutions for polymer processing. The article is a combination of theoretical and practical

knowledge in the field of management and practical industrial applications. It refers to the

most current research trends.

The presented method is constructed for optimum scheduling in production lines with parallel

machines and without intermediate buffers. The production system simultaneously

performs operations on various types of products. Multi-option products were taken into

account – products of a given type may differ in terms of details. This allows providing for

individual requirements of the customers. The one-level approach to scheduling for multioption

products is presented. The integer programming is used in the method – optimum

solutions are determined: the shortest schedules for multi-option products. Due to the lack

of the intermediate buffers, two possibilities are taken into account: no-wait scheduling,

possibility of the machines being blocked by products awaiting further operations. These two

types of organizing the flow through the production line were compared using computational

experiments, the results of which are presented in the paper.

In mid-1992, Japanese consultant Yamada Hitoshi was tasked with modifying the production systems of Japanese companies as the existing configurations at manufacturing plants no longer satisfied unstable demands. He made improvements to the overall production system by dividing the long assembly lines into several short ones called cells or seru. Although of the advantages, it is still unclear about how to manage this new production system, and what variables really promoted the desired benefits. We identify in total 39 articles from 2004– 2020 about the progress of the seru production system, and we observe some possibilities to improve the effectiveness of this type of the production system. The first is the possibility of manufacturing the product in flexible sequence, in which the operations are independent among them. We show through the developed example that the makespan may be different. We noted when converting the in-line production system to one pure seru, the makespan tend to increase. Nevertheless, when analyzing the effectiveness of serus working concomitantly considering splitting the same lot, makespan and the cost may be reduced. And finally, when converting to one of pure serus, the performance may be similar to that obtained when serus working concomitantly.

his study explores the impact of augmented reality (AR) on worker performance in manufacturing contexts through an analysis of case studies extant in the literature. Two specific analyses were conducted to assess the impacts of AR technologies on worker performance in terms of objective and subjective metrics, and in terms of their age, experience with the task and experience with the AR device. Regarding objective metrics, the results showed that the task completion time was reduced for some AR devices (projectors, monitors, tablets, smartphones), whereas the use of the head-mounted display (HMD) increased task-completion time; moreover, the error rate was reduced with any AR device compared with traditional methods. Regarding subjective metrics, the analysis underlined that operator perceived a lower workload with the HMD or the monitor compared with traditional methods. The age of operators did not influence performance, while the operators’ experience allowed for the improvement of human performance.