Corporate governance and firm performance: Evidence from Japanese manufacturing industries after the lost decade

This study investigates whether a series of recent economic reforms on corporate governance influence the operational performance of Japanese manufacturing industries after the bubble economy. This study finds that stable shareholding is an important aspect of traditional Japanese corporate governance. Many Japanese corporate leaders still believe that the stable shareholders are important for their governance. However, the stable shareholding enhances their operational performance only when the ratio of shares held by stable shareholders is more than 61.21%. This result is inconsistent with the previous governance strategy of Japanese management. Moreover, the foreign investment enhances the operational performance of Japanese firms until the ratio of shares held by foreign shareholders becomes 19.49%. Japanese corporate leaders are very afraid of the foreign investment. This result is inconsistent with their opinions, as well. The second result indicates that Japanese firms need to accept more foreign investment and pay attention to the opinion of foreign investors. Finally, it is important for Japanese firms to make a balance between the traditional stable shareholding and the foreign investment.     

Measuring bank operations performance: an approach based on Grey Relation Analysis

The aim of this paper is to use a new approach of performance evaluation, Grey Relation Analysis (GRA), which is a concept borrowed from the study of industry and increasingly applied to commerce. GRA is used to evaluate the relative performance of three investment Taiwanese trust firms, which have been reorganized into banks. The result of the study indicates that although the sample size is small and the distribution of data is unknown, GRA can still be successfully used in evaluating bank performance. In addition, this paper compares the GRA results with the Financial Statement Analysis (FSA) and shows that the same result can be obtained.     

The shift team formation problem in multi-shift manufacturing operations

This paper addresses the problem of assigning operators to teams that work in 1-, 2-, or 3-daily-shift systems. The problem was motivated by, and illustrated with a case situation encountered in Dutch manufacturing industry. The problem addressed forms an extension of cell formation problems which are currently in the phase of addressing labor-related issues in cell design. A generalized goal problem formulation is presented to address multiple, conflicting objectives covering cross-training of workers, ensuring adequate levels of labor flexibility and minimizing labor-related costs. The proposed solution procedure consists of two phases. In the first phase, shift systems, in which applicable machines and the sizes of each shift team are identified. The next phase deals with assignment of operators to various teams and identification of specific cross-training needs for various workers. This phase involves the use of interactive goal programming. The methodology is illustrated by a numerical example derived from the case situation.     

Latent variable modelling of price‐change in 295 manufacturing industries

In contrast to traditional regression analysis, latent variable modelling (LVM) can explicitly differentiate between measurement errors and other random disturbances in the specification and estimation of econometric models. This paper argues that LVM could be a promising approach to test economic theories because applied research in business and economics is based on statistical information, which is frequently inaccurately measured. Considering the theory of industry‐price determination, where the price variables involved are known to include a large measurement error, a latent variable, structural‐equations model is constructed and applied to data on 7381 product categories classified into 295 manufacturing industries of the USA economy. The obtained estimates, compared and evaluated against a traditional regression model fitted to the same data, show the advantages of the LVM analytical framework, which could lead a long drawn‐out conflict between empirical results and theory to a satisfactory reconciliation. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Shaping the manufacturing industry performance: MIDAS approach

We aim to find out whether the exchange rate (against US dollar) or the interest rate (in local currency) is a better variable in predicting the capacity utilization rate of manufacturing industry (CUR) of Turkey after the 2008 global financial crisis. In that manner, we implement dynamic mixed data sampling (MIDAS) regression model to forecast monthly changes in CUR by using daily changes in the exchange rate and the interest rate separately. The results show that exchange rate has a better forecast performance suggesting that it is a stronger determinant in shaping the manufacturing industry.     

Measuring and managing educational performance

Performance measures have come to play a central role in the management of the education sector. This paper identifies a number of desirable properties for educational performance measures, whose breach is likely to result in sub-optimal patterns of educational outcomes and resource management. Recent trends in the study of mathematics in schools give particular cause for concern. The paper examines several outstanding issues that require further attention if performance evaluation techniques are to provide reliable measures of school effectiveness.     

Measuring the performance of manufacturing firms with super slacks based model of data envelopment analysis: An application of 500 major industrial enterprises in Turkey

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is a mathematical programming technique which has a wide application area. There are many applications of DEA to measure firms’ performance. Balance sheet data is frequently used in order to measure performance of firms through DEA. So it is the characteristic of balance sheets that assets and liabilities amount to the same value. When the data for inputs and outputs are selected from both assets and liabilities sections of the balance sheet, it is important that more attention be paid to the analysis since values assigned to inputs and outputs could be included in assets and liabilities at the same time. Such a situation could create problems concerning the conclusions drawn as a result of analysis.     

Measuring aggregate process performance using AHP

When one undertakes a benchmarking study, it is quite typical to collect performance data on a set of business processes from a variety of organizations. While one can compare efficiency on a process-by-process level, how can one compare the overall efficiency of one organization versus another using this process-level data? This note presents a methodology that combines tournament ranking and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) approaches to create a ranking scheme that deals explicitly with missing data and ties in the tournament scheme.     

Measurement of loading and operations flexibility in flexible manufacturing systems: An information-theoretic approach

An information-theoretic approach is applied for measuring the flexibility in flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs). The general relation between flexibility and entropy is discussed. The entropy for a Markovian process is obtained and then applied to closed queueing network models of FMSs to discuss loading flexibility which arises from the power to regulate the frequency of the visit of a part to different work stations. The concept of operations entropy as a measure of operations flexibility, which arises from the power to choose the work station and the corresponding operations, is introduced. The operations entropy has been decomposed into entropies within and between operations and entropies within and between groups of operations. This measure has been used to determine the next operation to be performed on a part by using the principle of least reduction of flexibility.The present paper is an improved version of the paper On measurement of flexibility in flexible manufacturing systems: An information-theoretic approach, presented at the II ORSA/TIMS Special Conference on Flexible Manufacturing Systems, held at Ann Arbor in August 1986.     

Measuring energy efficiency in the context of an emerging economy: The case of indian manufacturing

In recent years the Indian economy has achieved a rapid growth rate. However, one of the challenges facing the economy is the large energy supply that would be needed to sustain this growth path. Hence attaining energy efficiency is crucial for the economy. This paper examines the Indian manufacturing sector and utilizes a variant of the directional distance function to obtain comprehensive measures of performance of the major manufacturing states, given the joint goals of achieving energy conservation and output growth. The results of the empirical application reveal that given the prevailing technology, the average manufacturing firm across the states could reduce energy input and increase output simultaneously by an annual average of 3.84%, by improving technical efficiency. To accommodate a larger simultaneous increase in output and reduction in energy use, India should adopt superior technologies so as to shift the efficient frontier outward.     

The relationship between preventive maintenance and manufacturing system performance

A common lament of the preventive maintenance (PM) crusaders is that production supervisors are often unwilling to lose valuable machine time when there are job waiting to be processed and do not assign high enough priority to PM. Maintenance activities that depend dynamically on system state are too complicated to implement and their overall impact on system performance, measured in terms of average tardiness or work-in-process (WIP) inventory, is difficult to predict. In this article, we present some easy to implement state-dependent PM policies that are consistent with the realities of production environment. We also develop polling models based analyses that could be used to obtain system performance metrics when such policies are implemented. We show that there are situations in which increased PM activity can lower total expected WIP (and overall tardiness) on its own, i.e., without accounting for the lower unplanned downtime. We also include examples that explain the interaction between duration of PM activity and switchover times. We identify cases in which a simple state-independent PM policy outperforms the more sophisticated state-dependent policies.     

Protective capacity positioning: Impact on manufacturing cell performance

Protective capacity is the `extra' capacity placed at non-bottleneck resources to absorb random disruptions in planned levels of performance so that the bottleneck resource is more effectively utilized. Although informative, the research related to protective capacity offers little insight into the preferred placement of protective capacity. By building on the existing research, our study develops hypotheses related to protective capacity positioning and then tested them by using a simulation model of a manufacturing cell. The results indicate that the placement of the protective capacity has no practical influence on mean flow time, but it strongly influences bottleneck shiftiness. Specifically, the study's results may indicate that under conditions of high work center utilization, the placement of protective capacity immediately before and after the bottleneck with a higher proportion distributed to the upstream work centers may significantly lower bottleneck shiftiness. Several future research needs are discussed.     

Optimal performance analysis of manufacturing systems subject to tool availability

This paper deals with the approximate performance analysis and optimal allocation of spare tools at work stations in manufacturing systems that are subject to the availability of tools to process jobs.     

Scheduling of production and logistics operations of steam production systems in food industries: a case study of the tomato processing industry

This study presents an optimization approach by mathematical modelling to support some of the main operational decisions in steam production systems with multiple industrial boilers. Decisions are related to boiler operations scheduling (start-up, warm-up and shutdown time), fuel replenishment (transportation and inventory management) and fuel composition consumed by each piece of equipment. These decisions are often taken based on practical experience of people involved, instead of any decision support tool using optimization techniques; as a consequence, unnecessary costs are likely to be incurred. The optimization approach is based on mixed integer programming and parameters experimental adjustment procedures. A case study of a large tomato processing plant in Brazil was carried out along 1 year using a 3-year database. Owing to the reasonably good outcomes achieved (annually potential savings around 10%), we consider the proposed approach as a suitable tool to support some of the key decisions in boiler scheduling and fuel logistics in steam production systems for tomato processing and other similar industries.     

Measuring retail company performance using credit scoring techniques

This paper discusses models for evaluating credit risk in relation to the retailing industry. Hunt’s [Hunt, S.D., 2000. A General Theory of Competition. Sage Publications Inc., California] Resource–Advantage Theory of Competition is used as a basis for variable selection, given the theory’s relevancy to retail competition. The study focuses on the US retail market. Four standard credit scoring methodologies: Naïve Bayes, Logistic Regression, Recursive Partitioning and Artificial Neural Network, are compared with Sequential Minimal Optimization (SMO), using a sample of 195 healthy companies and 51 distressed firms over five time periods from 1994 to 2002.