The field of industrial and systems engineering has long been seen as championing efficiency in designing, operating, and managing manufacturing entities. A growing body of research, however, has been questioning the primacy of efficiency objectives in that too often they conflict with and or render low regard for higher-order objectives of customer responsiveness, a pursuit that positively impacts competitiveness and overall organisational effectiveness. A segment of that literature embraces the simple term/concept of flow manufacturing or flow management. Whilst an efficiency focus may strongly embrace quick, simple flows within productive operations, and perhaps the supply chains as well, efficiencies are commonly gained through long production runs that push product mixes out of synch with customer demand: product distribution channels characterized by stop-and-go rather than to-customer-driven flow.

This special issue invites research that aligns well with a flexibly quick customer responsiveness (FQCR) orientation. This theme is of high relevance for both industry and academia, in that literature searches show excessive focuses on efficiencies in production that result in unsatisfactory responsiveness, both in time and quality, to customer demand; concomitant impacts center on customer defections and overall in deterioration in organisational performance.

The FQCR theme is likely to resonate with authors of works that embrace the need for industrial systems research that reaches outward toward customer-focused effectiveness. Examples include (not an exhaustive list): advanced manufacturing technologies and plant configurations that aim at downstream flexibility; supply-chain extending to demand-chain practices; lean accounting and cost management; total quality; ambidextrous operational capabilities; operations flow effectiveness; strategic integration of operations, marketing, and financial entities; quick-response manufacturing (QRM); and concurrent production (CP).

Appropriate to this special issue are case-study formats (preferable of survey research); examination of trends in the literature of industrial and manufacturing systems engineering; theory building perspectives; applied vs. academic treatments of subject matter; production-management methodologies; and roles of production managers, industrial and systems engineers, and front-line operatives.