Value-driven partner search for <i>Energy from Waste</i> projects

Energy from Waste (EfW) projects require complex value chains to operate effectively. To identify business partners, plant operators need to network with organisations whose strategic objectives are aligned with their own. Supplier organisations need to work out where they fit in the value chain. Our aim is to support people in identifying potential business partners, based on their organisation’s interpretation of value. Value for an organisation should reflect its strategy and may be interpreted using key priorities and KPIs (key performance indicators). KPIs may comprise any or all of knowledge, operational, economic, social and convenience indicators. This paper presents an ontology for modelling and prioritising connections within the business environment, and in the process provides means for defining value and mapping these to corresponding KPIs. The ontology is used to guide the design of a visual representation of the environment to aid partner search

A simulation Approach to Assess Partners Selected for a Collaborative Network

[EN] Manufacturing enterprises are increasingly more aware of the importance of establishing collaborative relationships with their network partners, due to the advantages associated to collaboration. Nevertheless, the participation in a collaborative network (CN) comes with associated challenges, namely the need to reduce the potential for conflicts among partners. A CN consists of heterogeneous partners, each one defining its own objectives and activating its own strategies. In this context, the ability to quickly identify partners with aligned strategies is crucial for smooth operation of the CN. The main aim of this paper is to address the partners' selection problem in the context of Virtual organizations Breeding Environments (VBE) that facilitate and enable the creation of Virtual Organisations (VO), as one type of CN. In a first stage, the sets of enterprises, characterised by having the required competencies to create the VO, are identified among different potential candidates within the VBE. In a second stage, the strategies alignment approach, based on the system dynamics simulation method, is used for the partners' selection process, identifying the best set of enterprises. In this paper, the final stage of partners' selection process is addressed by obtaining the degree of alignment of the business strategies formulated by each set of enterprises. In the light of this, a system dynamics-simulation model, in AnyLogic, is presented to obtain the set of enterprises that have higher levels of alignment in its strategies. The proposed system dynamics-simulation model is applied to a case in the building industry, to deal with the partners' selection problem in a VBE with the aim of forming a stable and sustainable VO.This work has been funded in part by Programa Val i+d para investigadores en formación (ACIF 2012) and by the Uninova–Center of Technology and Systems and the Portuguese FCT-PEST program UID/EEA/00066/2013.Andres, B.; Poler, R.; Camarinha-Matos, L.; Afsarmanesh, H. (2017). A simulation Approach to Assess Partners Selected for a Collaborative Network. International Journal of Simulation Modelling. 16(3):399-411. https://doi.org/10.2507/IJSIMM16(3)3.382S39941116

Towards a crisis performance-measurement system

International audienceDuring a crisis, the main goal for decision-makers consists in restoring a stabilised nominal mode. The stakeholders face considerable pressure and drastic constraints in response time and coordination. This study proposes a method to support these stakeholders in making responsive and accurate decisions while carrying out a performance evaluation of the activities that run during the crisis-response process. This method is composed of four steps: (1) characterisation of the crisis-response system, (2) selection of system components to evaluate in priority, (3) determination of performance dimensions to consider and (4) creation of indicators. Currently, performance evaluation is only used subsequent to a crisis, due to difficulties in gathering and aggregating information into trustable performance indicators. This paper proposes a method to obtain a relevant and dynamic decision-support system. Decision-makers will use it to resolve the crisis based on performance evaluation, in addition to the essential experience they undergo. A case study of crisis management within the French Red Cross non-governmental organisation is developed, through a Web-based prototype, in order to explain how performance indicators can both support crisis-response management and improve the collaboration of stakeholders

The adoption of lean techniques to optimise the on-shelf availability of products and drive business performance in the food industry: a South African manufacturing and retail case study

Includes bibliographical references.The degree of sustaining business performance, while maintaining competitive costs, satisfied consumers and customers has become more difficult and harder to achieve. To date, both retailers and manufacturers are economically challenged as they enter into a new age and era that is characterised by a restructuring of the supply and demand known today, the one in which the consumer demand chain will both lead and direct all organisational processes. The greatest challenge in manufacturing and retail supply chains today continue to be the inconsistency of product availability. Both retailers and their manufacturers frequently find themselves in positions where they either have too much stock of specific stock-keeping units (SKUs) or insufficient stock levels of a particular SKU, Steve (2010). Retailers and their suppliers both seek to avoid the costly out-of-stock (OOS) situations, which result in lost revenue opportunity for both parties. OOS can also damage shopper loyalty as frustrated consumers might seek out alternative retailers for the same merchandise, while on the other hand suppliers' brand loyalty can be impacted if a competitor's product is substituted instead. It remains true that the two pillars of business, namely demand and supply, still rule. Traditionally, putting supply before demand, with its implied precedence, was the correct approach to apply, but in today's business environment, there is a major shift taking place, predominantly driven by the cycles in globalisation that would be faster than in the traditional way, oversupply in the fast -moving consumer goods industry, a parallel loss of pricing power, consumers with a twenty-four hours access to precise pricing information, which terminates the power of information scarcity, and shorter product life cycles. The global economic crash that represented a global economic storm led many organisations to rethink the manner in which organisations are led. A consensus exists among many authors and commentators that the emerging economic order has imposed changes to the very way companies are doing business

Método de seleção de parceiros logísticos baseado em indicadores de desempenho para organizações virtuais

Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro Tecnológico. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Engenharia de Automação e SistemasCom o crescimento do mercado de consumo e a criação de novos produtos tem levado a um aumento na demanda pela contratação de provedores de serviços logísticos especializados. Quando os provedores logísticos trabalham dentro de um ambiente de redes estratégicas muito voláteis, como é o caso das organizações virtuais (OV), cresce sensivelmente o grau de dificuldade para selecionar os provedores mais apropriados para cada oportunidade de negócio que surge. Quando a produção dos vários membros de uma OV envolve a distribuição física de produtos e subprodutos, o processo de criação da OV demanda a seleção tanto de parceiros ditos industriais (responsáveis pela manufatura em si) como de parceiros ditos logísticos (responsáveis pela movimentação, armazenamento intermediário e transporte dos produtos). Porém, diferentemente das redes menos voláteis, como as cadeias de suprimentos tradicionais, os parceiros logísticos que irão compor a OV não são fixos, já que a seleção depende do tipo do negócio, do cliente e seus desejos/exigências, das legislações e regulamentações que regem o país ou a região tanto do cliente como das indústrias/empresas, dentre outras restrições. Assim, uma adequada escolha dos parceiros logísticos, assim como a necessidade de uma mais estreita colaboração entre os parceiros industriais e logísticos, passa a ser fundamental a fim de garantir que os requisitos gerais do negócioda OV sejam melhor atingidos. Observou-se na literatura pesquisada que praticamente todos os trabalhos sobre seleção de parceiros para OVs focam especificamente na seleção dos chamados parceiros industriais, desconsiderando a seleção dos parceiros logísticos, que complementam a composição da cadeia de valor. Se baseando numa abordagem de medição do desempenho, esta tese propõe um modelo de KPI (Key Performance Indicator) e um método de suporte à seleção dos parceiros logísticos mais adequados a uma dada OV, que usufrui da experiência dos tomadores de decisão para a seleção final. Uma das principais vantagens deste método é a sistematização de todo o processo de seleção de parceiros. O modelo de KPI é constituído por quinze indicadores estratégicos,que contempla não apenas a perspectiva intra-organizacional, como também a inter-organizacional.A sugestão dos parceiros se dá fundamentalmente através do cálculo do nível de colaboração, um conceito inédito desenvolvido neste trabalho, que avalia ponderadamente o desempenho de cada parceiro com base nos seus históricos. O trabalho é validado através de um protótipo computacional que implementa a proposta, avaliada junto a um grupo de especialistas nas áreas correlatas.With the growth of the consumer market and the creation of new products has led to an increase in demand for hiring specialized logistics service providers.When the logistics providers work in a very volatile strategic network environment, as is the case of virtual organizations (VOs), significantly increases the difficulty to select the most appropriate providers for each business opportunity. When the production of several members of an OV involves the physical distribution of products and byproducts, the process of creating the OV selects the industrial partners (responsible for manufacturing itself) and thelogistics partners (responsible for handling, storage and transport of intermediate products). However, unlike the less volatile networks such as the traditional supply chain, logistics partners that make up the OV are not fixed, since the selection depends on the type of business, customer and their desires / requirements of laws and regulations governing the country or region of both client industries / businesses, among other restrictions.Thus, an appropriate choice of logistics partners, as well as the need for closer collaboration between the industrial and logistics partners, becomes crucial to ensure that the general requirements of the business of OV are best achieved.It was observed in the researched bibliographythat virtually all work on selecting partners for OVS focusing specifically on the selection of so-called industrial partners, disregarding the selection of logistics partners that complement the composition of the value chain.Based on performance measurement, this thesis proposes a model of KPI (Key Performance Indicator) and a method to support the selection of logistic partners best suited to a given VO, which enjoys the experience of decision makers for the final selection. One of the main advantages of this method is the systematization of the whole process of selecting partners.The KPI model is composed of fifteen strategic indicators, which includes not only the intra-organizational perspective,as well as inter-organizational. The partner suggestion process is given primarily by calculating the level of collaboration, a new concept developed in this work, thoughtfully evaluating the performance of each partner based on their historical.The work is validated by using of a computer prototype that implements the proposed and evaluated with a group of experts in related areas

Engage D2.7 Annual combined thematic workshops progress report

This deliverable reports on the organisation and results obtained from the third and fourth editions of the Engage thematic challenge (TC) workshops held in 2021. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the third editions of the TC2 and TC3 workshops, initially scheduled to be held in 2020, were delayed to the beginning of 2021. The TC1 and TC4 workshops reached their third edition in 2021, while TC2 and TC3 closed with the fourth edition. The main lessons learned relate to data availability, collaboration opportunities, machine learning and artificial intelligence methodologies and approaches, and incentives for future ATM implementations

The social reality of initiatives which pursue insight from data

While (big) data promises immense opportunity, initiatives focused on using data to pursue insight have mixed outcomes. The Management Support Systems (MSS) model summarises what we currently understand within Information Systems (IS) about the implementation and use of systems to improve organisations’ use of data. Adopting an ethnographic approach to observe how practitioners in two contrasting organisations actually generate insight from data, this research challenges the implicit information processing and implementation logics of the MMS model. The pragmatic messiness of pursuing insight is described in two monographs, which reveal the socially constructed nature of data in relation to phenomena, and the importance of data engagement to produce insight. Given that this PhD study also seeks to generate insight from data, it is compared and contrasted reflexively to the two cases observed. While the inquiry logic pursued in this study was made explicit, and was regularly reviewed and challenged, the two cases left this largely implicit. The use of tools is shown to facilitate and constrain inquiry, with related data acting as boundary objects between the different practitioner groups involved. An explanatory framework is presented and used to suggest various enhancements to the MSS model. First, the Problem Space is reframed to reflect the distinct, though interdependent logics involved in inquiry versus realising envisaged benefits from insights. Second, the MSS artefact itself is contextualised and Data Engagement rather than MSS or Tool Use is positioned as central. Third, Data are disentangled from the wider MSS artefact, as a critical, distinct construct. Fourth, an Alignment construct is introduced to address the boundary spanning nature of data initiatives. The thesis also highlights the value of using Wenger’s (1998) Communities of Practice (CoP) situated learning framework to study data initiatives, and the related value of mapping groups as a technique for further development. Some questions are provided for practitioners to gain a better understanding of data initiatives. Wider implications are also noted for the socio-material theorising of Data, and distinguishing between Data, Information and Knowledge concepts within the IS discipline