Abstract

International Journal of Production Research, 2019 Vol. 57, No. 21, 6702–6704, https://doi.org/10.1080/00207543.2019.1645442 EDITORIAL Enterprise sustainability will be important for businesses in the intelligence-connected (Internet of Things, etc.) era, espe- cially for high-variety low-volume businesses facing complex manufacturing problems for their products. We propose that many efficient management models are being developed to cope with these issues, applying highly flexible resource configurations to enable quick response to an ever-changing market environment. Supply chains inherently involve complexity, as multiple organizational supply chains have become predominant as opposed to the traditional vertically organized monopolies such as Standard Oil and US Steel. Turner, Aitken, and Bozarth (2018) examined the literature to describe supply chain complexity. The strategic role of information systems was noted by Turunen, Eloranta, and Hakanen (2018), while Zdravkovice ´ tal. (2018) reviewed issues in the relationship of enterprise information systems infrastructure in the Internet-of-Things era. This complexity within supply chains involves many interactions across levels (Dittfeld, Scholten, and Van Donk 2018). Advances in technology have led to smarter factories that can be optimized in some sense (Yin et al. 2018). Intelligent planning enables more intelligent systems, enabling standardized complex physical entities and processes, accumulation of knowledge at different levels of