Towards a business model for sustainable supply chain management

Designers make decisions that ultimately impact on both the economic, environmental and social performance of the products and process, and many of these costs and impacts occur across the supply chain. This paper aims to show initials elements of a research which aims to develop an integrated business model for sustainable supply chain management in order to facilitate the business management process in terms of assessment of suppliers and collaboration addressed to the sustainable improvements across supply chain. It is noteworthy that it is an imperative in the current competitive market that companies must be able to manage their entire production chain taking into account sustainable issues as an important factor in their decision processes. Therefore, it is believed that this model can integrate and strengthen a company’s functions and assist its decision processes as well as implement improvements within its supply chain

Factory modelling: data guidance for analysing production, utility and building architecture systems

Work on energy and resource reduction in factories is dependent on the availability of data. Typically, available sources are incomplete or inappropriate for direct use and manipulation is required. Identifying new improvement opportunities through simulation across factory production, utility and building architecture domains requires analysis of model feasibility, particularly in terms of system data composition, input resolution and simulation result fidelity. This paper reviews literature on developing appropriate model data for assessing energy and material flows at factory level. Gaps are found in guidance for analysis and integration of resource-flows across system boundaries. The process for how data was prepared, input and iteratively developed alongside conceptual and simulation models is described. The case of a large-scale UK manufacturer is presented alongside discussions on challenges associated with factory level modelling, and the insights gained from understanding the effect of data clarity on system performance

Factory Eco-Efficiency Modelling: Framework Development and Testing

Eco-efficiency is becoming an increasingly important organisational performance measure. Its indicators are regularly used alongside productivity, cost, quality, health and safety in operations and corporate social responsibility reporting. The purpose of this paper is to show an eco-efficiency modelling framework, and its application in the case of an automotive manufacturer. The framework composes, models and analyses resource and production data. Focus on energy, water distributions and material transformations in manufacturing, utility and facility assets are used to analyse eco-efficiency. Resources are examined in respect to three data granularity factors: subdivision, pulse, and magnitude. Models are linked with performance indicators to assess asset eco-efficiency. This work contributes to industrial sustainability literature by introducing a modelling framework that links with data granularity and eco-efficiency indicators

Examining green production and its role within the competitive strategy of manufacturers

Purpose: This paper reviews current literature and contributes a set of findings that capture the current state-of-the-art of the topic of green production. Design/methodology/approach: A literature review to capture, classify and summarize the main body of knowledge on green production and, translate this into a form that is readily accessible to researchers and practitioners in the more mainstream operations management community. Findings: The existing knowledge base is somewhat fragmented. This is a relatively unexplored topic within mainstream operations management research and one which could provide rich opportunities for further exploration. Originality/value: This paper sets out to review current literature, from a more conventional production operations perspective, and contributes a set of findings that capture the current state-of-the-art of this topic

Design of sustainable industrial systems by integrated modeling of factory building and manufacturing processes

This paper presents an integrated approach that combines ‘Sustainable Building Design’ tools and ‘Sustainable Manufacturing Process’ tools to create a tool for the design of sustainable manufacturing systems.’ Currently no such integrated tools are in use by manufacturers to assess energy performance, identify improvement areas and help suggest actions. This paper describes the development of a tool that through such integrated modelling can help identify improvements via its library of tactics. These sustainable manufacturing tactics have to account for location and time, as well as production process, in a manner that is not currently supported by either manufacturing process simulation tools, or building energy tools. Through case study applications, the integrated modelling of real world industrial processes is demonstrated, from target and boundary settings, mapping (manufacturing process systems, material flow, surrounding buildings and facilities), data collection, simulation, improvement opportunities and optimisation

A collection of tools for factory eco-efficiency

co-efficiency is generally defined as doing more with less, aiming to decouple environmental impact from economic and social value creation. This paper presents three tools to guide the implementation of eco-efficiency in factories: (1) definition and patterns of good practices for sustainable manufacturing, (2) a self-assessment tool and maturity grid, and (3) a factory modelling framework

Enablers and barriers to innovation activities in call centres

Call centres have an operating model that aim to reduce costs - this has led to both customers and employees having issues with the current model. This has led to the view that contact centres are not entities in which innovation would occur. This paper identifies the barriers and enablers to innovation activities within call centres and discusses the implications of these to the wider service context

Understanding how organisational characteristics of UK contact centres impact their scope for innovation

Advances in information and communications technology (ICT) has allowed the location of contact centres to be disjointed from the country they are providing service to, resulting in the UK having to compete with other countries as a location for contact centres, but the UK industry cannot match the low labour cost of many offshore locations. This means that the UK contact centres have to now compete on other factors rather than cost. There are many ways in which organisations can compete but one of the key ways for developed economies to compete is through increased innovation. Therefore the aim of the research is to examine how UK contact centres approach innovation. The research is carried out through a structured methodology of a systematic literature review and comparative case studies. The main findings of the research are that UK contact centres approach innovation in two main ways, either structured or ad-hoc and that they are involved in a range of different types of innovation, with the aim innovation type being process innovation

Scheme Independence and the Exact Renormalization Group

We compute critical exponents in a $Z_2$ symmetric scalar field theory in three dimensions, using Wilson's exact renormalization group equations expanded in powers of derivatives. A nontrivial relation between these exponents is confirmed explicitly at the first two orders in the derivative expansion. At leading order all our results are cutoff independent, while at next-to-leading order they are not, and the determination of critical exponents becomes ambiguous. We discuss the possible ways in which this scheme ambiguity might be resolved.Comment: 15 pages, TeX with harvmac, 2 figures in compressed postscript; presentation of first section revised, several minor errors corrected, two references adde