Papers from the 3rd World Conference on Productions and Operations Management (POM) Tokyo 2008

Annotation

The Production and Operations Management World Conference always provides an exciting opportunity for operations management researchers from around the world to exchange ideas, and the 3rd World Conference in Tokyo in 2008 (August 5-8th) was no exception. There was a richness of papers in the quality management stream and this e-book is based on a broad range of them. Methodologies range from highly mathematical experimental design to qualitative case studies and critical literature reviews. The papers are set in the contexts of service, logistics, operations, on-line retailing and manufacturing. One thing that became very apparent from this stream is the need to portray both the soft phenomenological issues and the positivist facts about quality management with suitable measure; in other words one needs to get the right balance between the quantitative and the qualitative aspects of quality management to ensure that the correct image is promoted.