Contextual impacts on industrial processes brought by the digital transformation of manufacturing: a systematic review

The digital transformation of manufacturing (a phenomenon also known as "Industry 4.0" or "Smart Manufacturing") is finding a growing interest both at practitioner and academic levels, but is still in its infancy and needs deeper investigation. Even though current and potential advantages of digital manufacturing are remarkable, in terms of improved efficiency, sustainability, customization, and flexibility, only a limited number of companies has already developed ad hoc strategies necessary to achieve a superior performance. Through a systematic review, this study aims at assessing the current state of the art of the academic literature regarding the paradigm shift occurring in the manufacturing settings, in order to provide definitions as well as point out recurring patterns and gaps to be addressed by future research. For the literature search, the most representative keywords, strict criteria, and classification schemes based on authoritative reference studies were used. The final sample of 156 primary publications was analyzed through a systematic coding process to identify theoretical and methodological approaches, together with other significant elements. This analysis allowed a mapping of the literature based on clusters of critical themes to synthesize the developments of different research streams and provide the most representative picture of its current state. Research areas, insights, and gaps resulting from this analysis contributed to create a schematic research agenda, which clearly indicates the space for future evolutions of the state of knowledge in this field

Taxonomy of knowedge management research in hospitality and tourism

The hospitality industry is operating in an ever increasing knowledge-based economy, where hotels have to increase customer satisfaction and retention levels, lower employees turnover rates and operating expenses, maximize profits and strive to gain a sustainable competitive advantage. “Knowledge management caters to the critical issues of organizational adaptation, survival, and competence in the face of increasingly discontinuous environmental change. Essentially, it embodies organizational processes that seek synergistic combinations of data and information processing capacity of information technologies, and the creative and innovative capacity of human beings” (Civi, 2000, p.166). Knowledge Management (KM) is not a new concept. It has its origins back in 1959 when Peter F. Drucker created the term “the knowledge worker” (Haag, 2000). Since the 1995 introduction of knowledge management to the business and hospitality industry, different interpretations, concepts and definitions are used to best describe the main idea of knowledge management. Many scholars have published different definitions of knowledge management and emphasized the importance of continued KM research (Groff & Jones, 2003; DiMattia & Oder, 1997; Skyrme, 2002). However, there is no clear consensus on the definition of KM as a process nor there is an established theme on KM research to describe the direction and the impact of findings of published research on this topic

The ‘responsibility’ factor in imagining the future of education in China

Design and creativity have been a considerable force for improving life conditions. A lot of effort has been invested in explaining the design process and creativity mainly through the design thinking methodology, but design accountability and responsible actions in the design process are, yet, to be fully explored. The concept of design ethics is now increasingly scrutinized on both the level of business organization and of the individual designer. A 4-day design workshop that involved creativity techniques provided the base to explore responsibility in the fuzzy front end of the design process. The future of education in 2030 was defined as the workshop's theme and fifty-six students from China were asked to create detailed alternative scenarios. A number of imagination exercises, implementation of technological innovations and macro-environment evolutions employed in the workshop are discussed. The aim was to incite moral and responsible actions among students less familiar with creative educational contexts of student-led discovery and collaborative learning. This paper reflects on the use of creativity methods to stimulate anticipation in (non)design students

Ethical sourcing : an analysis of the literature and implications for future research

The purpose of this study is to present a rigorous, focused review on how this field of ethical sourcing research has grown and evolved over the decades, providing implications for future research. We combine two research methodologies in this study: a systematic literature review and a citation network analysis. The former is used as a scientific tool to select the most relevant ethical sourcing articles, while the latter is then applied as a research technique to analyse these selected articles. Such a combined approach allows for a rigorous investigation into this field of research in a more scientific and objective way. Based on this approach, we identify (1) distinctive features of ethical sourcing studies such as growth trends and content issues; (2) important articles that have played a significant role in developing this field; (3) evolutionary paths that show how its knowledge has been created and transferred; (4) emerging trends that have received growing attention in the recent literature; (5) main research areas that underlie the entire ethical sourcing studies; and (6) major implications that need to be pursued in future research. The results of this study provide not only the current status of the literature but also the patters of evolution in this field of research, thus contributing to the existing literature

Method for Developing an Implementation Strategy of Cyber-Physical Production Systems for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises in China

Enabled by the development of internet technologies, cyber-physical production systems (CPPS) are expected to open up entirely new possibilities to improve the efficiency of existing assembly systems of industrial companies. Nevertheless, realizing the potential of CPPS still remains a difficult task for small and medium-sized enterprises (SME), given the high variety of improvement possibilities offered by CPPS enabling technologies and the limited resources for their deployment. Hence, it is necessary to develop an implementation strategy of CPPS. Meanwhile, the consideration of location factors could support industrial companies to identify the appropriate CPPS implementation strategy since the location factors highly effect assembly system environment. In this context, a new approach to analyse the influence of location factors on the implementation of CPPS is exposed in this paper, which aims at investigating and identifying of relationships in between. Firstly, an application map of CPPS is generated. Secondly, the manufacturing industry status analyzed and subsequently a catalog of currently important location factors for the assembly systems are identified. Then a qualitative model of a relational analysis is established by an agglomerative hierarchical clustering algorithm. An industrial case study is used to demonstrate the applicability and the validity of the proposed approach

The Application of Text Mining and Data Visualization Techniques to Textual Corpus Exploration

Unstructured data in the digital universe is growing rapidly and shows no evidence of slowing anytime soon. With the acceleration of growth in digital data being generated and stored on the World Wide Web, the prospect of information overload is much more prevalent now than it has been in the past. As a preemptive analytic measure, organizations across many industries have begun implementing text mining techniques to analyze such large sources of unstructured data. Utilizing various text mining techniques such as n -gram analysis, document and term frequency analysis, correlation analysis, and topic modeling methodologies, this research seeks to develop a tool to allow analysts to maneuver effectively and efficiently through large corpuses of potentially unknown textual data. Additionally, this research explores two notional data exploration scenarios through a large corpus of text data, each exhibiting unique navigation methods analysts may elect to take. Research concludes with the validation of inferential results obtained through each corpus’s exploration scenario