Operations and supply chain management

The CEO wants to increase collaboration and cut costs with an open-plan work space, but the knowledge workers say they need their walls, their doors, and their privacy.

Following up on his pledge to provide greater support for manufacturing in his State of the Union address, President Obama has announced a proposal to...

Just five years ago, salespeople at Whirlpool were in the habit of referring to their supply chain organization as the "sales disablers." Now the company...

That is, if businesses embrace a circular economy.

Your organization needs to change too.

When most organizations design new work processes, they assume that team members will make the best possible use of them to improve team performance....

In the early 1980s, visitors on an hour-long tour of a factory headed by Eugene Goodson reported surprisingly accurate details about the plant, its technology,...

The Toyota story has been intensively researched and painstakingly documented, yet what really happens inside the company remains a mystery. Here’s new insight into the unspoken rules that give Toyota its competitive edge.

Nowhere in a company is the need for coordination more acute than between the people who are responsible for product design and those responsible for manufacturing. As Daniel E. Whitney argued in these pages recently (“Manufacturing by Design,” July–August 1988), most companies have operated for years in an environment where design and manufacturing communicate infrequently, […]

This blog post is part of the HBR Online Forum The Future of Retail. Retailers periodically update their product assortments, deleting slow sellers and...

They're using the wrong data to assess job quality.

The first article of this series reported that, traditionally, European firms fire employees by expense categories-the most expensive first, followed...

By centralizing oversight of business travel and transportation, companies can improve efficiency, raise employee satisfaction, and reduce costs.

These days, Unilever is often described as one of the foremost transnational companies. Yet our organization of diverse operations around the world is not the outcome of a conscious effort to become what is now known among academics as a transnational. When Unilever was founded in 1930 as a Dutch-British company, it produced soap, processed […]

What makes service industries so distinct from manufacturing ones is their immediacy: the hamburgers have to be hot, the motel rooms exactly where the sleepy travelers want them, and the airline seats empty when the customers want to fly. Balancing the supply and demand sides of a service industry is not easy, and whether a […]

Fixing a dysfunctional plant isn't easy, but it can be done if you involve everyone in the overhaul.

There is no one right way.

And they reduce costs too.

Entrepreneurs have always needed imagination and daring. What’s different today, says one of the architects of the new economy, is that they have to move a lot faster than ever before, with a lot less room for error.