Human Aspect on Chain of Custody (CoC) System Performance

The tropical forests cover 24% of tropical land area. They are the most productive terrestrial ecosystems on earth with high priorities for biodiversity conservation. These forests store a substantial amount of carbon in biomass and soil, and they also regulate the transfer of carbon into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide (CO2). Indonesia is having the third tropical forest area in the world after Brazil and Congo. Over 50 years forest has been felled both legally as well as illegally. High rate of forest degradation resulted from unsustainable forest management, rampant illegal logging, forest area encroachment, conversion and natural disaster. All urges rapid improvement of management system of Indonesia’s forest resources (Holmes, 2002). Forest certification is one tool that can support the achievement of sustainable forest management goal. Under current operation of join certification protocol between the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and the Indonesian Ecolabelling Institute (LEI) in Indonesia, forest management units must be able to show the required performance indicated in LEI criteria and indicator as well as FSC principles and criteria to attain certification of their products. The gap between current practices and performance required by forest certifications schemes is still enormous. The performance of forest certification system from LEI is determined very much by the human that is involved in the process of planning and operation. The name of certification system is chain of custody (CoC) certification. CoC operation involves activities such as tracing raw material from the forest to the factory, through shipping and manufacturing, to the final end product. In all of the above processes, the roles of human are critical, although the specific roles played from one process to another are different. In this paper we present an identification of human aspect and other factors that predominantly affect CoC system performance

New Manufacturing Environments with Micro- and Nanorobotics

UIDB/04647/2020 UIDP/04647/2020The convergence of nano-, bio-, information, and cognitive sciences and technologies (NBIC) is advancing continuously in many societal spheres. This also applies to the manufacturing sector, where technological transformations in robotics push the boundaries of human–machine interaction (HMI). Here, current technological advances in micro- and nanomanufacturing are accompanied by new socio-economic concepts for different sectors of the process industry. Although these developments are still ongoing, the blurring of the boundaries of HMI in processes at the micro- and nano- level can already be observed. According to the authors, these new socio-technical HMIs may lead to the development of new work environments, which can also have an impact on work organization. While there is still little empirical evidence, the following contribution focuses on the question whether the “manufacturing (or working) life” using enhancement practices pushes the boundaries of HMI and how these effects enable new modes of working in manufacturing. Issues of standardization, acceleration of processes, and order-oriented production become essential for technological innovation in this field. However, these trends tend to lead to a “manufacturing life” in work environments rather than to new modes of work in industry.publishersversionepub_ahead_of_prin

Low-cost Automation – changing the traditional view on automation strategies using collaborative applications

The labor cost has been one of the main reasons for industry to move some of the production to so called low-cost countries. Research has shown that this issue is more complex than just calculate labor cost as main driver. Organization culture, research and development and technical competence is also important drivers for a successful automation strategy. Another important factor when it comes to automation strategies is what production parameters to consider choosing the right automation. Traditionally five parameters have been considered i.e. Volume, batch sizes, variants, investment cost and labor cost. With new and cheaper solutions for automation these two views on automation and lowcost production need to be considered and changed. This paper will describe three demonstrators using low-cost automation solutions to automate simple tasks in final assembly systems. The stations\u27 investment cost is all below 50,000 euro. The first demonstrators have been set up and tested in a lab environment. The results show a high precision, easiness in programming and high quality. The aim is to test this further in real industrial environment to stress the system and to put it into a tougher environment

Supply Chain

Traditionally supply chain management has meant factories, assembly lines, warehouses, transportation vehicles, and time sheets. Modern supply chain management is a highly complex, multidimensional problem set with virtually endless number of variables for optimization. An Internet enabled supply chain may have just-in-time delivery, precise inventory visibility, and up-to-the-minute distribution-tracking capabilities. Technology advances have enabled supply chains to become strategic weapons that can help avoid disasters, lower costs, and make money. From internal enterprise processes to external business transactions with suppliers, transporters, channels and end-users marks the wide range of challenges researchers have to handle. The aim of this book is at revealing and illustrating this diversity in terms of scientific and theoretical fundamentals, prevailing concepts as well as current practical applications

Production Scheduling

Generally speaking, scheduling is the procedure of mapping a set of tasks or jobs (studied objects) to a set of target resources efficiently. More specifically, as a part of a larger planning and scheduling process, production scheduling is essential for the proper functioning of a manufacturing enterprise. This book presents ten chapters divided into five sections. Section 1 discusses rescheduling strategies, policies, and methods for production scheduling. Section 2 presents two chapters about flow shop scheduling. Section 3 describes heuristic and metaheuristic methods for treating the scheduling problem in an efficient manner. In addition, two test cases are presented in Section 4. The first uses simulation, while the second shows a real implementation of a production scheduling system. Finally, Section 5 presents some modeling strategies for building production scheduling systems. This book will be of interest to those working in the decision-making branches of production, in various operational research areas, as well as computational methods design. People from a diverse background ranging from academia and research to those working in industry, can take advantage of this volume

Simulation for Product Driven Systems

Due to globalisation, companies have to become more and more agile in order to face demand fluctuations and growing customisation needs. Indeed, the mass production market moves to a mass customization one, which could be defined as the production of a wide variety of end products at a low unit cost. During last years, many efforts have been done in order to improve operating system reactivity (with the Flexible Manufacturing initiative for example), but the manufacturing decision process did not really change, and then doesn't enable to fully make the most of these new operating system skills. Facing these new trends, a lot of new research works are focusing on identification technologies, like Auto-ID, biometry or vision ones. Radio Frequency Identification technology (RFID) represents a quick and safe way to track products, opening the way of linking informational and physical flows, and providing an accurate, real time vision of the shop floor. These new technologies appear like a catalyst to change the fifty years old way of controlling production through traditional MRP² systems

Problem solving and the co-ordination of innovative activities

In the context of increasingly globalized markets, ever more complex supply chains and international manufacturing networks, corporate decision-making processes involve more and more actors, variables and criteria. This is a challenge for corporate head quarters. Many have argued that the role once attributed to the integrated innovative organisation and its R&D laboratories is increasingly associated with the functioning of networks of specialised innovators. The aim of this paper is to argue that the role of large firms may have changed, but it is far from disappeared. It looks at the interplay of increasing knowledge specialisation, the development of products of increasing complexity that perform a widening range of functionalities, and the emergence and diffusion of new design strategies for both products and organisations, namely modularity. The emergence of modularity as a product and organisational design strategy is clearly connected to recent trends in organisational design. Modularity would allow the decoupling of complex artifacts into simpler, self-contained modules. Each module would, at the extreme, become the sole business of a specialised trade. This paper builds upon the idea that there are cognitive limits to this process of modularisation: what kinds of problems firms solve, and how they solve them, set limits to the extent of division of labour among firms. We draw implications of such limits for both management and economic theory.large firms, knowledge specialisation, complex products, modularity,