A coupled evaluation and optimization approach to drive product variety towards sustainability

Increasing customer demands for highly personalized and environmentally friendly products urge companies to find new ways for managing their production systems. The aim is to cope with diversity of items while delivering profitable products with lower environmental impact. This paper proposes a coupled evaluation and optimization approach to steer product variety towards environmental and economic sustainability. A predefined set of indicators enriched with weights given by the user ensures the evaluation, while optimization uses linear programming. The paper highlights the impact of variety steering on environmental and economic sustainability indicators. Additionally, the paper underlines the need to translate regulations into concrete company goals through integrating carbon markets into the proposed model. Keywords: sustainability, evaluation, variety, linear programming, analytic hierarchy proces

Évaluation de la performance d’entreprises dans le contexte de la personnalisation de masse durable

Demand variety and emergence of niche markets, accompanied by engagement of governments and society in sustainable development makes sustainable mass customization a promising strategy. According to which, companies should meet the needs of individuals on a large scale, while ensuring sustainable development. This requires a continuous process of performance evaluation of the company to make sure it moves forward to sustainable mass customization.In this thesis, we focused on sustainable mass customizing enterprises’ performance evaluation, more particularly we addressed the question: how can we help sustainable mass customizing enterprises measuring and improving their performance?We have proposed a conceptual model of the sustainable mass customizing enterprise (SMC-E) where we grouped enterprise objects impacting enterprise performance. Such a model provided the basis for building a simulation model aimed at evaluating different improvement scenarios of the performance by using indicators. Improvement scenarios are identified with the help of an influence diagram which tracks the causal links between performance inductors and indicators. These latter are chosen and prioritized using a three steps method based on interviews. We have proposed a general methodology to put together coherently all the proposed tools and methods and developed a demonstrator as a first implementation effort.The proposition is illustrated with a case study in the kitchen furniture sector that showed its usefulness and pointed out several improvement rooms.La diversité de la demande et l’émergence de niches de marchés, accompagnées par la mobilisation des gouvernements et de la société en vue d’un développement durable font de la personnalisation de masse durable une stratégie prometteuse. Selon quoi, les entreprises sont amenées à répondre aux besoins des individus à grande échelle, tout en assurant un développement durable. Cela requiert une évaluation continue de la performance de l’entreprise afin de s’assurer du progrès vers la personnalisation de masse durable.Ce travail s’intéresse à l’évaluation de la performance des entreprises adoptant une stratégie de personnalisation de masse et engagées sur la voie du développement durable en tentant de répondre à la question : Comment aider les entreprises faisant de la personnalisation de masse et visant à assurer un développement durable à mesurer et améliorer leurs performances ?Afin de traiter cette problématique, nous avons proposé un modèle conceptuel qui groupe les objets d’entreprise influant sur la performance en termes de durabilité et de personnalisation de masse. Un tel modèle a également servi pour la construction d’un modèle de simulation ayant pour objectif d’évaluer différents scénarios d’amélioration avec des indicateurs de performance. L’identification de ces scénarios est supportée par un diagramme d’influence qui retrace les liens de causalité entre les indicateurs et les inducteurs de performance. Le choix des indicateurs et leur priorisation sont assurés par une méthode de trois étapes basée sur des interviews. Nous avons proposé une méthodologie générale qui met l’ensemble de ces outils et méthodes en cohérence. Nous avons également développé un démonstrateur qui présente un premier travail d’implémentation des différentes étapes de la méthodologie.L’application à un cas d’étude dans le secteur de cuisines personnalisées a montré l’intérêt de la proposition, mais a aussi permis d’identifier les zones d’amélioration

Modularity and variety spinoffs: a supply chain planning perspective

International audienc

Modularity and variety spinoffs: a supply chain planning perspective

International audienc

A framework for agility improvement projects in the post mass customisation era

International audienceChanging customer requirements and turbulent markets require suitably adapted capabilities to proactively cope with rapid changes. Agile manufacturing emerged in the late 1990s as a competitive concept to respond to these business challenges. While several seminal research works address agility in terms of concept definition, drivers and strategic capabilities, there is a lack of implementation frameworks of agile manufacturing. The current paper is concerned with the question of how to improve the agility of manufacturing companies. To address this question, a framework is iteratively developed with the aim of supporting decision makers in planning and implementing agility improvement projects. To this end, Design Science Research (DSR) methodology is used in conjunction with CIMO-logic (Context, Intervention, Mechanism, Outcome). The iterative development of the framework relies heavily on insights from case studies and from practitioners in the broad manufacturing sector. The paper provides evidence of the validity of the framework as well as outlining further research perspectives

Teaching customer centric-operations management – Evidence from an experiential learning oriented mass customisation class

International audienceThe increase of individualized customer demands and tough competition in the manufacturing sector gave rise to more customer centric operations management such as products and services (mass) customisation. Mass customization which inherits the ‘economy of scale’ from mass production, aims to meet specific customer demands with near mass production efficiency. Such an overarching concept has multiple impacts on operations management. This requires highly qualified and multi-skilled engineers who are well prepared for managing mass customisation. Therefore, this concept should be properly addressed by engineering education curricula which needs to keep up with the emerging business trends. This paper introduces a novel course about mass customisation and variety in operations management which recalls several Experiential Learning (EL) practices consistently with the principle of an active learning. The paper aims to analyse to which extent EL can improve the efficiency of the teaching methods and the retention rate in the context of operations management. The proposed course is given to engineering students whose’ perceptions are collected using semi-structured questionnaires and analysed quantitatively and qualitatively. The paper highlights the relevance i) of teaching mass customisation, and ii) of active learning in engineering education, through the specific application in the domain of mass customisation

Customer order fulfilment in mass customisation context - an agent-based approach

International audienceThe ever increasing customer specific needs require suitable strategies to accommodate his requirements and deliver exactly what he wants and in due course. Mass customisation, as a successor of mass production is one of these strategies, it aims at satisfying customer needs with near mass production efficiency. However, achieving efficiency is challenged by several issues such as customer order fulfilment in a customisation environment. In fact, product variety induced by customer choices requires flexible production systems able to manage internal complexity caused by such external variety. This paper proposes a multi-agent-based model to manage customer orders by: 1) defining production requirements of each order; 2) simulating the execution of the production and delivery operations. It then illustrates the proposed model with a case study and investigates the impact of inventory management on the enterprise economic performance. The case study shows how the model supports the decision-making process with respect to customer order fulfilment

9th CIRP Global Web Conference – Sustainable, resilient, and agile manufacturing and service operations : Lessons from COVID-19

International audienceCIRP is the world leading organization in production engineering research and is at the forefront of design, optimization, control and management of processes, machines and systems. The Academy has restricted membership based on demonstrated excellence in research and has some 600 academic and industrial members from 50 industrialized countries.Young researchers, whose research contribution in the area of production/manufacturing science has been deemed significant, can be officially nominated as CIRP Research Affiliates.The objective of the Research Affiliates program is to create, develop, and promote a sustainable, CIRP-related, network of outstanding young researchers in the field of production engineering.The CIRP Global Web Conference – CIRPe is an initiative of the CIRP Research Affiliates and aims to involve scientists, researchers and engineers from all over the world to promote discussion on the latest achievements in Production Engineering

Analysis of the performance of supply chains configurations using multi-agent systems

International audienceThis paper analyses the performance of supply chains by using agent-based simulation. The proposed agents are based on the Supply Chain Operations Reference (SCOR) model. Most of the time, indicators and negotiation mechanisms within a supply chain are still primarily designed for local management (one-to-one relationship). The paper discusses different effects of supply chain configurations and the competitive environment on SCOR performance indicators from a global point of view. A modified version of a traditional SCOR indicator is introduced with the a priori knowledge of the network connectivity

Towards a generic meta-model for PSS scenarios modelling and analysis

International audienceThe transition from a product–oriented business towards a PSS-oriented business, known in the scientific literature as ‘servitization’ involves complex changes for decision-makers. Over the past years, the scientific literature has provided consistent advances in PSS decision-support systems including PSS modelling. However, concerning PSS modelling languages or formalisms, most initiatives remain context dependent; to date only a small a piece of literature addresses the need for reproducibility of PSS modelling methods. The objective of this paper is to make a first step forward in this direction, by proposing an iterative procedure dedicated to build generic meta-models and by applying it to generate a first proposal of PSS meta-model, expected to be re-usable in several distinct modelling and decision-making contexts