Teamwork, for competitive advantage, involving techno-socio-cultural aspects of organizations for engineering developments, is gaining importance rather rapidly due to advent of globalization. The purpose of this study is to identify the importance of teamwork culture for new product develop-ment (NPD) success through enriching the NPD team’s capability in Indian manufacturing industries. It accumulates the teamwork culture dynamics and practices, their interrelationships and their combined impact on NPD team’s capability in terms of technological developments for NPD success. This practical analysis collects primary data from 263 design and development experts from Indian engineering manufacturing companies. Structural equation modeling (SEM) approach is applied to investigate the interrelationship among associated variables of teamwork culture and NPD team’s capability for NPD success. Concurrent engineering team (CET), communication infrastruc-ture (CI), system integration (SI) and result orientation (RO) have been recognized as allied factors of teamwork culture. Successful adoption of associated variables ensures NPD success through influencing NPD team’s capability which in turn articulated by technological developments. The realization of combined impact of teamwork and its allied variables escalates technological developments which in turn enriches NPD team’s capability assuring organizational success. The result indicates that both CI and SI support CET for accelerating NPD team’s capability through technological developments. Besides, CET motivates innovation orientation most precisely referred as RO for escalating NPD team’s capability through technological developments for innovation.

The purpose of this paper is to explore and integrate the role of human resources with the internal practices of the Indian manufacturing industries towards successful implementation of lean manu-facturing (LM). An extensive literature survey is carried out. An attempt is made to build an ex-haustive list of all the input manifests related to human resources and internal practices necessary for LM implementation, coupled with a similar exhaustive list of the benefits accrued from its suc-cessful implementation. A structural model is thus conceptualized, which is empirically validated based on the data from the Indian manufacturing sector. Hardly any survey based empirical study in India has been found to integrate human resources with the internal processes towards success-ful LM implementation. This empirical research is thus carried out in the Indian manufacturing in-dustries. The analysis reveals six key input constructs and three output constructs, indicating that these constructs should act in unison to maximize the benefits of implementing lean. The structural model presented in this paper may be treated as a guide to integrate human resources with internal practices to successfully implement lean, leading to an optimum utilization of resources. This work is one of the very first researches to have a survey-based empirical analysis of the role of human resources and internal practices of the Indian manufacturing sector towards an effective lean im-plementation.

In recent years, major challenges such as, increase in inflexible consumer demands and to improve the competitive advantage, it has become necessary for various industrial organizations all over the world to focus on strategies that will help them achieve cost reduction, continual quality improvement, increased customer satisfaction and on time delivery performance. As a result, selection of the most suitable and optimal facility location for a new organization or expansion of an existing location is one of the most important strategic issues, required to fulfill all of these above mentioned objectives. In order to sustain in the global competitive market of 21st century, many industrial organizations have begun to concentrate on the proper selection of the plant site or best facility location. The best location is that which results in higher economic benefits through increased productivity and good distribution network. When a choice is to be made from among several alternative facility locations, it is necessary to compare their performance characteristics in a decisive way. As the facility location selection problem involves multiple conflicting criteria and a finite set of potential candidate alternatives, different multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods can be effectively applied to solve such type of problem. In this paper, four well known MCDM methods have been applied on a facility location selection problem and their relative ranking performances are compared. Because of disagreement in the ranks obtained by the four different MCDM methods a final ranking method based on REGIME has been proposed by the authors to facilitate the decision making process.