MSMEs in the ceramics industry are still experiencing a difficult period even though they have entered the post-pandemic period. Will competitive advantage be created from supply chain collaboration in terms of obtaining resource information which will ultimately create innovation and increase market demand? This research involved 200 ceramic MSMEs in Bali with the condition that the perpetrators had been running their business for more than one year, analyzed with SEM-PLS with the SmartPls processing tool. The results show that the relationship between market demands has a positive effect on competitive advantage and will give a boost to the performance of ceramics SMEs. While the collaborative relationship of innovation value does not have a positive effect on performance and competitive advantage because so far ceramic SMEs, especially photocatalysts, are still relatively new and are still running their business in one small group and no organization has yet been formed to support the acquisition of information related to the innovations to be carried out. This research also shows that the mediation of competitive advantage is the perfect mediation in creating market demand in improving the performance of MSMEs.

In this paper, we address the optimization of an integrated line balancing process with workstation inventory management. While doing so, we have studied the interconnection between line balancing and its conversion process. Almost each and every moderate to large manufacturing industry depends on a long and integrated supply chain, consisting of inbound logistic, conversion process and outbound logistic. In this sense an approach addresses a very general problem of integrated line balancing. Research works reported in the literature so far mainly deals with minimization of cost for inbound and outbound logistic subsystems. In most of the cases conversion process has been ignored. We suggest a generic approach for linking the balancing of the line of production in the conversion area with the customers’ rate of demand in the market and for configuring the related stock chambers. Thus, the main aim of this paper is to translate the underlying problem in the form of mixed nonlinear programming problem and design the optimum supply chain so that the total inventory cost and the cost of balancing loss of the conversion process is jointly minimized and ideal cycle time of the production process is determined along with ideal sizes of the stock chambers. A numerical example has been added to demonstrate the suitability of our approach.