Seru Production System

Seru production system is a flexible, cost-effective, workforce competence-oriented manufacturing management system that provides the opportunity to respond quickly to customer demand. As in parallel to technology and physical improvements, customer demands are also effective for development of production systems. The impact of change in demand has been seen on changeover from job shop to mass production, flexible, and lean manufacturing systems. Seru production system is more appropriate for targeting work both cost-effectively like mass production and maximum diversification like job shop production. This chapter clarifies the Seru production system and explain its use and benefits in the clothing industry. In the application, a shirt production is illustrated according to the principles of mass production, lean production, and Seru production. Thus, different types of production systems have been benchmarked. There will be potential study areas for proving the efficiency of Seru soon.

Pull Production Systems

This chapter aims to organize knowledge about pull production systems by presenting the underlying concepts of lean manufacturing as for its origin, principles, and relations with PPC. Pull production is one the fundamental principles of lean manufacturing, and its implementation can bring positive impacts. For such a purpose, sequential and mixed supermarket pull systems stand out in which the integration between pull production systems and PPC and its various levels is a main subject of discussion. The JIT model or Kanban method and hybrid systems, such as conwip and lung-drum-string theory, are mechanisms for managing pull production systems. Finally, a pull production system implementation is presented for illustration purposes. At the end of this chapter, it is expected that skills are developed by readers, which are going to assist them in using the tools presented to model production systems and aid decision-making processes.

Green Transformational Leadership as a Redefinition of the Organizational Psychological Contract

This study grounds on the contemporary concern towards sustainability, reviewing literature to ascertain the personality traits of current leaders, framing them under the most effective leadership style in order to leverage organizational green consciousness and performance. It provides insights on the multilevel social dynamics outlining individual citizenship behaviors at work, as it advances that organizations shall rely on green transformational leadership to enhance the workforce green cognitions and behaviors, providing workplace opportunities to engage in environmental management related activities, thus leveraging green consciousness and performance. Hence, this study maps the current leader's personality traits so that their leadership paradigm may be best captured in terms of the value congruence between leaders/followers, solidifying a green psychological climate at the organization, impacting on its psychological capital and ownership, reconfiguring the organizational psychological contract by defining it as a collaborative learning process.

Towards Sustainable Factories

Sustainability is becoming a major objective of factories worldwide in an effort to eliminate or reduce the use of toxic materials and greenhouse emissions, extend the life of products, reuse waste, and conserve energy, not only for meeting the needs of consumers, but also the multi-stakeholders from both within and beyond the supply chain. The increasing global demand for scarce natural resources is posing a great challenge for producing companies. In recent years, the advent of new technologies and the changes in demography and working conditions as well as the desire for individualized products has added greater complexity to manufacturing. In this context, this chapter provides an overview of the main issues affecting the industrial sector on the way ahead towards sustainability, including contemporary trends triggering the requirements for factories of the future as well as the main research and innovation lines necessary to answer such requirements.

Assessing the Soft Skills of IT Professionals

This research aims to assess the soft skills of information technology professionals in the information and communication technologies sector. The research method used was a combination of qualitative techniques to survey data about the most valued skills. As major results of this research, the following skills stand out: teamwork, problem solving, organization, leadership, communication skills, dynamism, initiative, autonomy, motivation, creativity, time management, attitude, responsibility, and proactivity. Based on collected data, a cross-cutting skills framework was constructed for five functional areas: trainee, junior consultant, consultant, senior consultant, and business development consultant. It was found that skills are transversal to all functions, and only the indicators vary in relation to the categories.

Like a Cog in a Machine

Similar to its sisters, the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Industry 4.0) has sparked varying sentiments and views regarding the ethicality and effectiveness of employing artificial intelligence (AI) tools in human resource management (HRM) in a way that triggers the need for a synthesis of current published work on the different views in that respect. This chapter presents an attempt to engage the different cogs with each other so the millstone will go around, and an updated understanding of AI-powered HRM from different angles is provided. This work reviews the main concepts revolving around AI and Industry 4.0. Also, it offers an up-to-date investigation of AI uses in HRM (e.g., People Analytics) and what risks or ethical concerns are being argued in contemporary discourse.

Leadership

The main aim of this chapter is to examine the role played by leaders as determinant agents of a special type of banking institution such as the mutual agricultural credit banks (or Caixas de Crédito Agrícola Mútuo [CCAM]). In other words, it looks to study and understand to what extent employees with leadership roles use their position to maximize CCAM performance through their direct intervention on the teams. Considering that both leaders and subordinates have their own aims (organizational/professional and personal, respectively), and in order to find the necessary equilibrium between them, it also seems to be relevant to better understand the way leaders can mobilize and support organizational subordinates. In sum, issues like leadership, motivation, satisfaction, and personal development are studied in this chapter.

Human Resources Management in the Portuguese Education System

Acknowledging the revival of the debate around school management models, following the criticism neoliberalism has brought into discussion, this work focusses on the human resources management paradigm in the Portuguese compulsory public education system. Analysing secondary quantitative and qualitative data, it describes the observed performance comparing it to the expected one (strategic human resources management). The system's main coordination mechanism is the standardization of competencies, centrally delegated from the Ministry of Education and Science, as so, “mobilization” is the vector in which the system is more constrained towards the expected performance, harming its potential for flexibilization and adaptation. This work concludes there is no strategic human resources management in the Portuguese compulsory public education, despite some positive efforts already being taken to overcome such situation. These insights can be used as an analytical guide to the implementation of changes towards the expected performance in the Portuguese education system.