Life Cycle Based Evaluation of Environmental and Economic Impacts of Agricultural Productions in the Mediterranean Area

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) applied to estimate the cradle-to-grave environmental impact of agricultural products or processes. Furthermore, including in the analysis an economic evaluation, from the perspective of an integrated life cycle approach, appears nowadays as a fundamental improvement. In particular, Life Cycle Costing (LCC), is a method that could integrate financial data and cost information with metrics of life cycle approaches. In this study, LCA in conjunction with LCC methods were used, with the aim to evaluate the main cost drivers—environmental and economic—of five widely diffused and market-valued agricultural productions (organic tomato and pear, integrated wheat, apple and chicory) and to combine the results in order to understand the long-term externalities impacts of agricultural productions. Data obtained in local assessment show a wide margin of improvement of resources management at farms level in the short-term, but also allow for the investigation of future effects of environmental impacts not expressed in product price on the market. Reaching a real sustainable model for agriculture could be a value added approach firstly for farmers, but also for all the people who live in rural areas or use agricultural products

Re-engineering the mission life cycle with ABC and IDEF

The theory behind re-engineering a business process is to remove the non-value added activities thereby lowering the process cost. In order to achieve this, one must be able to identify where the non-value added elements are located which is not a trivial task. This is because the non-value added elements are often hidden in the form of overhead and/or pooled resources. In order to be able to isolate these non-value added processes from among the other processes, one must first decompose the overall top level process into lower layers of sub-processes. In addition, costing data must be assigned to each sub-process along with the value the sub-process adds towards the final product. IDEF0 is a Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) process-modeling tool that allows for this functional decomposition through structured analysis. In addition, it illustrates the relationship of the process and the value added to the product or service. The value added portion is further defined in IDEF1X which is an entity relationship diagramming tool. The entity relationship model is the blueprint of the product as it moves along the 'assembly line' and therefore relates all of the parts to each other and the final product. It also relates the parts to the tools that produce the product and all of the paper work that is used in their acquisition. The use of IDEF therefore facilitates the use of Activity Based Costing (ABC). ABC is an essential method in a high variety, product-customizing environment, to facilitate rapid response to externally caused change. This paper describes the work being done in the Mission Operations Division to re-engineer the development and operation life cycle of Mission Operations Centers using these tools

Implementing Lean Tools in the Manufacturing Process of Trimmings Products

The increasing requirements regarding quality assurance and processes traceability require the implementation of continuous improvement procedures, with a view of maintaining the company’s levels of competitiveness and satisfaction for its customers in terms of quality. The optimization of information flows and manufacturing processes are, in general, extremely important factors in any company’s life. It is therefore important that companies quickly self-adapt to this kind of reality and adopt policies of product innovation and standardization of its production processes, in order to allow rapid adaptation to the constant market changes. The present work aims to identify problems and finding solutions through a combination of PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) cycle, 5S (Seiri, Seiton, Seiso, Seiketsu, Shitzuke) and 5W2H (5 Whys + 2 Hows) tools those can be implemented into a program of continuous improvement, with a view of standardizing of processes, ensuring real profits in products typically with critical added-value. The combination of tools was implemented and the results have been checked, showing a significant impact in the Weaving production process, with gains of 10% in the useful available time by the operator.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

An Ontology for Product-Service Systems

Industries are transforming their business strategy from a product-centric to a more service-centric nature by bundling products and services into integrated solutions to enhance the relationship between their customers. Since Product- Service Systems design research is currently at a rudimentary stage, the development of a robust ontology for this area would be helpful. The advantages of a standardized ontology are that it could help researchers and practitioners to communicate their views without ambiguity and thus encourage the conception and implementation of useful methods and tools. In this paper, an initial structure of a PSS ontology from the design perspective is proposed and evaluated

ISO55000 Standard as A Driver for Effective Maintenance Budgeting

Companies are suffering from major industrial disasters, financial crisis and continued global instability caused by civil unrest and economic pressure.With the attendant issues associated with the increased economic and market globalization comes the criticality of standards and its role in, increasing productivity and efficiency, decreasing non-value-added information and promoting process through structured asset management techniques. The International Standard for Organization (ISO 55000) was developed specifically for Asset Management (AM), which consists of a series of three components, ISO 55000, ISO 55001 and ISO 55002. ISO 55000 takes a holistic approach to asset management; it is not just about maintenance but also about value creation. ISO 55000 requires changes in policy, processes and people thereby challenge the status quo and it leads to a new regime of asset care. Asset care requires organizations to comply with standards and various regulations. Adopting ISO 55000 will allow organization to align the way assets are managed and maintained, it improves return on investments by reducing costs, while supporting asset value without sacrificing organizational objectives. Maintenance and reliability processes, programs are aligned with ISO 55000, and span the entire life cycle of the assets including design, engineering, procurement, installation, start-up, operation, maintenance, restoration, decommissioning, and disposal. A popular term for the process is 'from cradle to grave'. Physical assets are often taken for granted and with increased reliability. Managing assets today is more complex, yet in many organizations, the management of those assets is often unfocused and inappropriate. Organizations with a strong profit focus need to examine ISO 55000 from the perspective of finding methods to leverage it into lower costs and increased outputs. The aim of this paper is to classify the necessary elements in ISO 550000, which organizations need to adopt in order to improve their approach to asset maintenance budgeting. It will highlight the main issues that need to be addressed when implementing ISO 55000 standard

Value-Based Business-IT Alignment in Networked Constellations of Enterprises

Business-ICT alignment is the problem of matching ICTservices with the requirements of the business. In businesses of any significant size, business-ICT alignment is a hard problem, which is currently not solved completely. With the advent of networked constellations of enterprises, the problem gets a new dimension, because in such a network, there is not a single point of authority for making decisions about ICT support to solve conflicts in requirements these various enterprises may have. Network constellations exist when different businesses decide to cooperate by means of ICT networks, but they also exist in large corporations, which often consist of nearly independent business units, and thus have no single point of authority anymore. In this position paper we discuss the need for several solution techniques to address the problem of business-ICT alignment in networked constellations. Such techniques include: -RE techniques to describe networked value constellations requesting and offering ICT services as economic value. These techniques should allow reasoning about the matching of business needs with available ICT services in the constellation. - RE techniques to design a networked ICT architecture that supports ICT services required by the business, taking the value offered by those services, and the costs incurred by the architecture, into account. - Models of decision processes about ICT services and their architecture, and maturity models of those processes.The techniques and methods will be developed and validated using case studies and action research

Value stream mapping for software development process

Includes bibliographical references

Managing Process Variants in the Process Life Cycle

When designing process-aware information systems, often variants of the same process have to be specified. Each variant then constitutes an adjustment of a particular process to specific requirements building the process context. Current Business Process Management (BPM) tools do not adequately support the management of process variants. Usually, the variants have to be kept in separate process models. This leads to huge modeling and maintenance efforts. In particular, more fundamental process changes (e.g., changes of legal regulations) often require the adjustment of all process variants derived from the same process; i.e., the variants have to be adapted separately to meet the new requirements. This redundancy in modeling and adapting process variants is both time consuming and error-prone. This paper presents the Provop approach, which provides a more flexible solution for managing process variants in the process life cycle. In particular, process variants can be configured out of a basic process following an operational approach; i.e., a specific variant is derived from the basic process by applying a set of well-defined change operations to it. Provop provides full process life cycle support and allows for flexible process configuration resulting in a maintainable collection of process variants

Product Service Systems and Sustainability: Opportunities for Sustainable Solutions

Given that the concept of PSS is beginning to 'catch on' and gain attention, it is time for UNEP to contribute to, and influence the progress of PSS, to ensure that in concept and application it incorporates the idea of sustainability. In this context its potential is not generally understood by the public and private sectors or civil society. This booklet is intended to contribute to the dissemination and the discussion of the PSS concept as a promising approach to sustainability. The ultimate goal must be to achieve Sustainable Product-Service Systems. This UNEP publication is targeted at industry and government, academia and civil society to explain PSS – their potential benefits and limitations – in the sustainability context – using real company examples. To prepare this booklet, UNEP has drawn on the knowledge and experience of PSS experts to flesh out the concept of a sustainable PSS, to collect case studies of PSS in practice, to begin to document both its benefits and the hurdles which need to be overcome in its application, and to suggest ways forward in its development