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Ores and minerals are extracted from the earth’s crust depending on the type of deposit. Iron ore mines come under massive deposit patterns and have their own mine development and life cycles. This study aims to depict the development and life cycle of large open-pit iron ore mines and the intertwined organizational design of the departments/sections operated within the industry.

Primary data were collected on the site by participant observation, in-depth interviews of the field staff and executives, and field notes. Secondary data were collected from the literature review to compare and cite similar or previous studies on each mining activity. Finally, interactions were conducted with academic experts and top field executives to validate the findings. An organizational ethnography methodology was employed to study and analyse four large-scale iron ore mines of India’s largest iron-producing state, Odisha, from January to April 2023.

Six stages were observed for development and life cycle, and the operations have been depicted in a schematic diagram for ease of understanding. The intertwined functioning of organizational set-up is also discovered.

The paper will benefit entrepreneurs, mining and geology students, new recruits, and professionals in allied services linked to large iron ore mines. It offers valuable insights for knowledge enhancement, operational manual preparation and further research endeavours.

This study aims to identify the impact of commercial issues (CIs), financial issues (FIs) and corporate affairs (CAs) on operational excellence (OE) of the mining industry.

A purposive sample of size 321 was collected from Indian mining executives with more than ten years of exposure to the mining field. Factors are identified and confirmed with the use of confirmatory factor analysis. The structural equation modeling technique was then applied to understand the unique as well as the complex relationships between FI, CI, CA and OE.

The results indicate that all three issues, CI, FI and CA, have an influence on OE in the Indian mining industry. Among the variables of the issues considered in this study, marketing products and size and quality of products (from CI); scale of economies (from FI); risk management (from CA); and transportation and machine operation (from OE) are the highest influencing variables.

This study has its limitations in sampling, the timing of sample collection and their mode. The samples were collected from only massively deposited large mines.

Business managers of the mining industry will be more vigilant and aware of those indirect variables such as marketing products, size and quality of products, scale of economies and risk management, which can influence OE apart from major influencing variables such as transportation and machine operations and production scheduling.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study in the mining industry to evaluate the impact of these three issues on OE. The originality of this research lies in testing the CI, FI and CA of the mining industry with OE, which is completely new to this field.

The purchase is becoming a more difficult cum tactical decision that affects the cost factor, quality factor, time factor and responsive factor of the buy and maintains them. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of inventory management (IM) practices on operational efficiencies (OEs) in Indian steel manufacturing firms.

The study is based on a quantitative research design that has collected information from 321 key officials of Indian steel manufacturing firms. The analyses are carried out with the use of statistical techniques such as confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling (SEM).

The paper finds that inventory management (IE) has a considerable impact on the OE of steel manufacturing firms in India. The manufacturing industry must highlight the significance of inventory management practice (IMP) for enhancing firm efficiencies in a volatile environment with the help of management teams. Understanding the impact of IE practices on firms’ OE would be helpful for company shareholders and investors.

The paper suggests the manufacturing industry to emphasize the role of inventory management practices to have better productivity of the firm. This research focuses on the relationship between IMP and OE.

Effective and efficient use of inventory will be helpful in reducing the overall cost of production and reduced costs to customers.

Companies require resources to attain a long-term competitive edge. Also, as a consequence, the research is compatible with resource-based view (RBV) theory.

The purpose of this paper is to explore operation influencing factors of mining. To collect gaps of study and to form a thematic representation of principal influencing factors and their unique influencing factors.

Articles were collected from different sources from 1974 to 2019 consisting of research articles, technical papers, expert blogs, working papers and conference papers covering various disciplines from psychology, human resource, finance and economics to mining engineering. Mining operation influencing factors were noted down. Four massively deposed mines were visited to observe the sequence of mining process. The field experts were also consulted to identify factors influencing their respected industry. Gaps were observed while comparing with the reviewed articles and opinions of field experts. Finally, senior experts were consulted to identify unique factors from the final list prepared and a framework of seven thematic categories consisting of unique factors was formulated.

A total of 197 sub-factors were collected from literature review and 2 sub-factors from Indian Mining experts during field study. These 199 sub-factors were initially categorised as 48 factors and one more factor was collected from Indian field experts. Finally, these 49 factors were thematically represented as principal factors and termed as operation, marketing and management, human resource, finance, resource and utility, corporate affairs and corporate social responsibility and environment.

This study can be very helpful in the direction of different qualitative and quantitative studies, as the factors and sub-factors groups are identified.

The paper fulfils an identified need to provide a holistic review for understanding and documenting principal factors, unique factors and sub-factors those influence mining operation, profitability or sustainability issues of mines.