Improving the industrialization of a new product in an international production network: a case study from the machinery industry

The paper deals with cross-functional disciplines affecting product industrialization in organizations competing with an international production network. The output of the research is a framework for industrialization of in-dustrial products. The framework, based on the use of general morphological analysis, is meant to be used at strategic and tactical level by managers in me-dium sized manufacturing enterprises. The framework is tailored to a case study company some operational guidelines are provided to develop the industrializa-tion framework for other organizations

New service development in capital goods manufacturers: empirical evidence from an Italian sample and proposal of a conceptual framework

Since Italian capital goods manufacturers are still strongly product-oriented while current trends are pushing traditionally manufacturers towards the servitization of their business, practitioners in this sector call for support in approaching the service innovation in a more clearly defined way; this could prevent them to miss a new service innovation opportunity or to fail in developing new services. In this respect, the aim of the research presented in this paper is to evaluate the state-of-the-art of the development of the New Service Development (NSD) process in the capital goods sector, both through a literature review and trough the analysis of qualitative case studies of a sample of 23 Italian companies. From the analysis it has emerged that there is the lack of defined models for NSD both in literature and in practice. Reasons could be related to the difficulties in modeling such a process within this manufacturing context since usually industrial service providers customize service offering according to individual customer needs so that new services are developed on a single base and not in a systematic way. For these reasons, starting from the analysis of the state-of-the-art, a conceptual framework and related guidelines have been developed to support practitioners in improve the effectiveness and the efficiency of the innovation process taking into consideration the peculiarities of the reference sector. The research is still at its first steps, so further work is called for to support those companies in approaching the service innovation

ICT tools to support capital goods manufacturers in the service management: trends and opportunities from the analysis of an Italian sample

Starting from the assumption that the ICT support can be considered as an enabling factor for the servitization of manufacturing, this paper investigates the ICT and web 2.0 support in improving the efficiency of the service provision in the Capital goods sector, taking evidence from the analysis of an Italian sample. In the reference sector, an efficient management of the after-sale service is hard to achieve due to the high level of collaboration and integration within the different organizational units, IT systems and processes deployed along the service supply chain. For these reasons, a tactical tool to support practitioners in this sector in the adoption of the right technological solutions able to im-prove the management of their service business could be considered of great relevance. The research presented in this paper is a first step towards the de-velopment of this tool being based on the analyzed sample only. Further vali-dation and generalization is thus called for

Challenges for offshored operations: findings from a comparative multi-case study analysis of Italian and Spanish companies

Small-medium sized companies competing in different industries also need to design and manage an international manufacturing network to be more competitive. Aim of this paper is to investigate the decisional process that leads to the location, design and start up process of a new plant in a low cost country for these companies by means of a multi-case studiy research involving Italian and Spanish companies. Main empirical evidences and differences of the strategic choices when locating and designing the new plants and the factors considered in the start up process are exposed

Does the breakup process affect the reaction dynamics for the systems 17O, 17F + 58Ni at Coulomb barrier energies?

The scattering processes of two mirror projectiles, the well bound 17O (Sn = 4.143 MeV) and the loosely bound radioactive 17F (Sp = 0.600 MeV), on the proton closed shell target 58Ni were measured at several energies around the Coulomb barrier. The experimental data were analyzed within the framework of the optical model to extract the reaction cross section and to investigate the role played by direct reaction channels at near-barrier energies. The comparison shows a similar behaviour for the two A = 17 projectiles despite their very different binding energies and suggests a rather small effect of the 17F breakup channel on the reaction dynamics