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Introduction
In the last decade the scenario concerning production management and at-large operations management has dramatically changed. Companies of whatever sector have faced crises with unprecedented frequency, complexity and impact (Mitroff, 2005), which has affected operations management and its processes. As a consequence, companies have to set and deploy new strategies and objectives for modern operations management. Among manufacturing companies, strategies such as servitisation, agile processes, lead time reduction, on-time delivery performance and quality management have become fundamental to compete worldwide. These strategies are typically linked to Lean and agile manufacturing (Hallgren and Olhager, 2009; Bhasin, 2012; Karim and Arif-Uz-Zaman, 2013) as well as Six Sigma and total quality management (TQM) (Chiarini, 2013a, b; Bhamu and Singh, 2014). These strategies also involve the whole supply chain not just internal operations. Specific competencies of the supply chain have to be built and integrated into operations.
At the same time manufacturing companies are dealing with greening of production and the supply chain (Bhamu and Singh, 2014) as part of a more general system of corporate social responsibility (CSR) for a sustainable business and for risk-based thinking (Asbury, 2013). Indeed, some CSR scandals of the last decade have jeopardised several companies, leading to a drop in stakeholders’ satisfaction such as consumers, employees, shareholders and various communities (Wang and Yu, 2014).
Moreover, many manufacturing companies have gone through deep reorganisations based on the implementation of new software for managing operations and production processes. This software, usually enterprise resource planning (ERP) class, has led to a new era of E-operations (HassabElnaby et al., 2012; Dey et al., 2013) integrating Leanness and agile systems.
In such a scenario this research enlarges the debate on the operations management strategies pursued by manufacturing companies. It focusses on large European manufacturing companies of different sectors with expected positive economic-financial results in the next five years. The research is mainly based on a questionnaire administered to senior managers, in which the questions were derived from a literature review. The research questions measure the level of agreement/disagreement by means of an ordinal Likert scale. The questionnaire also contains notes that the interviewed managers inserted, giving further qualitative data useful for the discussion. The internal consistency of the questionnaire was tested through a Cronbach’s α;...