Validating Virtual Safety Stock Effectiveness through Simulation

As a means of avoiding stock‐outs, safety stocks play an important role in achieving customer satisfaction and retention. However, traditional safety stock theory is based on the assumption of the immediate delivery of the ordered products, which is not a common condition in business‐to‐business contexts. Virtual safety stock theory was conceived to raise the service level by exploiting the potential time interval in the order‐to‐delivery process. Nevertheless, its mathematical complexity prevented this technique from being widely adopted in the industrial world. In this paper, we present a simple method to test virtual safety stock effectiveness through simulation in an inventory system using a base stock policy with periodic reviews and backorders.  This approach can be useful for researchers as well as practitioners who want to model the behaviour of an inventory system under uncertain conditions and verify the opportunity for setting up a virtual safety stock on top of, or instead of, the traditional physical safety stock

Optimizing spare parts inventory in shipping industry

The paper aims at proposing a criterion to optimize the initial level of spare parts inventory for a ship. Adequate stockholding of critical spare parts becomes essential in naval industry characterized by heavy utilization of equipment and machinery and by really specific operating conditions. Generic approaches are inadequate and specific ones result in analysis too shallow. An application for estimating the initial level of spare parts for a tanker is presented

The source of competitive advantage in University spin-offs: a case study

University Spin-Offs are incorporated to exploit the knowledge and skills achieved within Universities. Often, their competitive advantage is represented by specific know-how that may be hardly imitated by competitors. In this article we present an analysis of the intellectual capital assets owned by a University Spin-Off using a framework recently introduced in literature. The framework resorts to a series of structured interviews to key figures within the organization. The interviews are synthesized through the Analytic Network Process and the results are compared using graphical and cost/ benefit analyses. The implementation of the framework creates a useful panel for the planning of investments in intellectual capital assets in order to create value. Moreover, it may emphasize possible discrepancies among interviewees about the importance of each intellectual capital asset

Sustainable choice of the location of a biomass plant: an application in Tuscany

The management of complex systems often requires taking decisions that may affect the company's future. Making decisions is not easy and requires you to take serious responsibility. The company character appointed to this task, is the “decision-makers” who, within a job or project, must make a selection among several alternatives. To carry out this task, you must perform a process called "decision analysis". It can be aided by qualitative and quantitative tools, able to rationalize a multifactorial choice and bring it to a judgment of performance parameters more easily comparable. In fact, if this problem is addressed considering only the economic aspects, other fundamental parameters will be neglected such as, for example, the environmental ones. Actually, bringing many different aspects to a simple economic performance, or anyway one-dimensional, proves to be a limiting and unsatisfactory approach. In addition, if we consider the concepts of sustainability, we should at least take into account the three dimensions that describe it, namely the economic, environmental and social issues. Then, a strategy of decision making more complete that could integrate all the three aspects, becomes much more appropriate. In this context, the multi-criteria analysis are particularly suitable for this purpose. In this study we aim at investigating how one of the most popular multi-criteria methods, the Analytic Network Process (ANP) can be used to define the location of a cogeneration plant fuelled by biomass. The novelty of this study consists of having categorized and divided into homogeneous areas an entire region. In addition, to evaluate the economic efficiency, as compared to other authoritative work on the subject, also the water content in the raw material was considered, influencing the amount of biomass consumed. The results show that the ANP allows decisions making according to an overall view, considering a wide variety of parameters and allows the decision makers to better represent the needs of the stakeholder

Multi-criteria decision-making model for supporting manufacturing settlements location in Africa after COVID-19

The COVID-19 emergency is affecting manufacturing industries all over the world. Notably, it has generated several issues in the products’ supply and the global value chain in African countries. Besides this, Africa’s manufacturing value-added rate grew only 1.5 since 2018, and the foreign direct investment (FDI) from multinational enterprises (MNEs) remains very low due to high-risk factors. Most of these factors are linked to a non-optimized location selection that can adversely affect plant performance. For these reasons, supporting decision-makers in selecting the suitable country location in Africa is crucial, both for contributing to countries’ growth and companies’ performance. This research aims at presenting a comprehensive multi-criteria decision-making model (MCDM) to be used by MNEs to evaluate the best countries to develop new manufacturing settlements, highlighting the criteria that COVID-19 has impacted. Thus, it has affected countries’ performance, impacting the plant location selection choices. A combination of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and the Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) methods have also been used for comparative analysis. The criteria used in the proposed approach have been validated with a panel of MNEs experts

The diffusion of international standards on managerial practices

This article presents a comprehensive framework which identifies the relevant factors that can influence the standard adoption process, along with insights for performing a qualitative perspective analysis on the possible market diffusion of a specific standard under development or under review. This article also shows an example of framework application to the ISO 22400 standard, evidencing organizational and managerial implications on the standard adoption process

Industry 4.0 and world class manufacturing integration: 100 technologies for a WCM-I4.0 matrix

In the last decade, technological progress has profoundly influenced the industrial world and all industrial sectors have been confronted with a change in technological paradigms. In such a context, this study aims to analyze the synergies between the technological world of Industry 4.0 and the purely organizational and managerial domain ofWorld Class Manufacturing, a model of Operational Excellence. The objective is relating the driving dimensions of the World Class Manufacturing (WCM) system to the technological macrocategories of Industry 4.0: this would allow the identification of which technological solution to leverage on, aiming at optimization in a given World Class Manufacturing pillar. The result is a "WCM-I4.0 matrix": a proposal to reconcile, exploit and trace the relations between the two complex concepts. The WCM-I4.0 matrix includes, by now, 100 Industry 4.0 technologies that best suits with the World Class Manufacturing pillars

Waste reduction in production processes through simulation and VSM

Corporate managers often face the need to choose the optimal configurations of production processes to reduce waste. Research has shown that simulation is an effective tool among those conceived to support the manager's decisions. Nevertheless, the use of simulation at the company level remains limited due to the complexity in the design phase. In this context, the Value Stream Map (VSM)-a tool of the Lean philosophy-is here exploited as a link between the strategic needs of the management and the operational aspect of the simulation process in order to approach sustainability issues. The presented approach is divided into two main parts: a set of criteria for expanding the VSM are identified in order to increase the level of details of the represented processes; then, data categories required for the inputs and outputs of each sub-process modeling are defined, including environmental indicators. Specifically, an extended version of the classical VSM (X-VSM), conceived to support process simulation, is here proposed: the X-VSM is used to guide the design of the simulation so that the management decisions, in terms of waste reduction, can be easily evaluated. The proposal was validated on a production process of a large multinational manufacturing company

La gestione del livello di buffer per la programmazione operativa in processi a ciclo non definito

Viene affrontato il problema della programmazione operativa con riferimento a processi produttivi per i quali non riesce possibile disporre fin dall’inizio di tutte le informazioni al riguardo necessarie. In tali processi (a ciclo non definito) le specifiche del prodotto, non determinate a priori, possono anche mutare in corso di lavorazione, ciò che impedisce l’impiego efficace di sistemi tradizionali di planning. In precedenza, trattando la stessa casistica, si era scelto di utilizzare un modello statistico appositamente sviluppato per determinare la configurazione probabile dei cicli di lavorazione, impiegato per calcolare un valore atteso del grado di utilizzazione delle risorse di produzione ed individuare possibili colli di bottiglia. In questa sede ci proponiamo inoltre di sincronizzare il flusso produttivo agendo sul time buffer posto a protezione della risorsa critica, come sopra individuata. La dimensione ottima del buffer è determinata attraverso il trade-off tra il vantaggio di un’idonea saturazione dell’anzidetta risorsa critica ed il costo alternativo della coda in attesa. Ciò vale a definire efficaci regole di rilascio dei job per le stazioni di lavoro a monte. Il monitoraggio del buffer è necessario inoltre per aggiornare la programmazione al variare delle condizioni operative. L’efficacia del criterio proposto è stata verificata dagli stessi autori attraverso diretta applicazione presso un’azienda operante nel settore della revisione di motori aeronautici. I risultati ottenuti si sono rivelati più che soddisfacenti in ordine al migliore sfruttamento delle risorse produttive nonché in termini di abbattimento del work in process