Increasing integration across the supply chain through an approach to match performance and risk

It is well known by researchers and practitioners that shared risks among actors support integration and collaboration across a supply chain. Moreover many authors have linked risk to performance contribution. Nevertheless these ideas remain still theoretical and in literature applications are missing. The aim of this study is to develop a logical framework in which risk, performance and actors are connected each other. The goal is using the framework as a tool to recognize unbalanced supply chains and the best way to improve them. The benefit should be a better integration among supply chain actors. The logical framework has been thought and then applied in the case of an Integrated Logistic Support (ILS) service

Managing OEE to Optimize Factory Performance

"If you can not measure it, you can not improve it."(Lord Kelvin) It is a common opinion that productivity improvement is nowadays the biggest challenge for companies in order to remain competitive in a global market [1, 2]. A well-known way of measuring the effectiveness is the Overall Equipment Efficiency (OEE) index. It has been firstly developed by the Japan Institute for Plant Maintenance (JIPM) and it is widely used in many industries. Moreover it is the backbone of methodologies for quality improvement as TQM and Lean Production. The strength of the OEE index is in making losses more transparent and in highlighting areas of improvement. OEE is often seen as a catalyst for change and it is easy to understand as a lot of articles and discussion have been generated about this topic over the last years. The aim of this chapter is to answer to general questions as what to measure? how to measure? and how to use the measurements? in order to optimize the factory performance. The goal is to show as OEE is a good base for optimizing the factory performance. Moreover OEE’s evolutions are the perfect response even in advanced frameworks. This chapter begins with an explanation of the difference between efficiency, effectiveness and productivity as well as with a formal definition for the components of effectiveness. Mathematical formulas for calculating OEE are provided too. After the introduction to the fundamental of OEE, some interesting issues concerning the way to implement the index are investigated. Starting with the question that in calculating OEE you have to take into consideration machines as operating in a linked and complex environment. So we analyze almost a model for the OEE calculation that lets a wider approach to the performance of the whole factory. The second issue concerns with monitoring the factory performance through OEE. It implies that information for decision-making have to be guaranteed real-time. It is possible only through automated systems for calculating OEE and through the capability to collect a large amount of data. So we propose an examination of the main automated OEE systems from the simplest to high-level systems integrated into ERP software. Even data collection strategies are screened for rigorous measurement of OEE. The last issue deals with how OEE has evolved into tools like TEEP, PEE, OFE, OPE and OAE in order to fit with different requirements. At the end of the chapter, industrial examples of OEE application are presented and the results are discussed

The Italian Footwear Industry: An Empirical Analysis

This paper aims to provide readers with a deep empirical analysis on the Italian footwear industry in order to investigate the evolution of its structure (trends in sales and production, number of firms and employees, main markets, etc.), together with the identification of the main drivers of competitiveness in order to explain the strategies implemented by local actors

The contribution of the PLM to firms internationalization: A case in the footwear industry

As the globalization of markets in the footwear industry became more evident, several restrictions have been imposed by international directives, standards and regulations, and market requirements. Such external needs are progressively pushing the footwear manufacturers to introduce continuous improvements in their production processes and in general in the firm management. This working paper represents the first step of a research with the aim of evaluating the impact of PLM on a firm internazionalization in the fashion industry. The investigation is at the level of PLM as a business strategy as well as set of technical tools. The research approach mainly includes a survey on footwear industries located in the district of the \u201cRiviera del Brenta\u201d of the Veneto Region in Italy

Product Lifecycle Management as a tool to create value in the fashion system

The aim of this paper is to present the fashion system as a \u201ccluster\u201d and to evaluate the characteristics of Product Lifecycle Management considering various factors, especially the different approaches in dealing the market needs. In particular, the \u201cready-to-wear fashion\u201d and the \u201cfast fashion\u201d models will be presented and compared. The paper, takes the Italian fashion system as the unit of analysis and it also assumes that consumer behavioral factors act in a non predictable way (randomly) under the constantly changing social and cultural environment. Considering the inner complexity of a whole market system, a simplified System Dynamics modeling is proposed

How to Increase the Value of the Project Management Maturity Model as a Business-oriented Framework

An organization’s effectiveness partly depends on the success of its projects. With this in mind, many efforts have been spent in recent decades to enhance the project management culture, but results are still highly unsatisfactory. Project Management Maturity Models (PMMMs) are seen by both the academic and the industrial communities as a solid instrument to achieve this goal. The point at issue is that surveys and researches show PMMMs must be better linked to business and financial performance. The aim of this paper is to explore the scope for improvement to evolve PMMMs as business-oriented frameworks

Development of a Drone-Supported Emergency Medical Service

There is a scientific consensus that the delivery of prompt emergency medical services (EMSs) guarantees a higher survival rate. An EMS is generally able to respond to 90% of higher priority calls in less than 9 minutes, with the best chance of survival being with a response time of 4–5 minutes. The major obstacle here is that a shorter response time would require the needed resources not to pass a certain threshold in a cost/benefit analysis. This paper aims to investigate the use of drones in as an EMS to improve response times. Although the literature already provides many examples of drones used for this purpose, they have all been developed as a prototype. This confirms the technical feasibility of a drone-based solution, but there is no evidence of the economic viability for such a service. The answer to this comes by analyzing the performance of an integrated-with-drones service as a whole. For this reason, we have redesigned the entire EMS model by including drones, and we have addressed the main issues, such as which types of service can be provided from drones, in which case, what the technical requirements for drones would be, and so on. Furthermore, we developed a specific procedure to keep the number of drones at a minimum level under the constraint of the minimum intervention time. The proposed model has been applied to a real EMS case for a city in the south of Italy. The outcome was that 96 drones were able to cover an area of 2,800 km2, providing an intervention time of 4.5 minutes on average at an annual cost of less than €300,000. These results highlight that an integrated-with-drones service drastically improves the response time when compared with the traditional service, doing so at a viable cost

Introduzione alla manutenzione

1. Il libro affronta la manutenzione in maniera rigorosa collocandola all’interno della teoria organizzativa, ma con una prospettiva non spiccatamente da “addetto ai lavori”, consentendo così anche a chi opera nelle aree di confine con Ingegneria della Manutenzione di afferrare le più interessanti tendenze evolutive che permeano la materia. D’altro canto il libro consente agli “addetti ai lavori” di capire quali sono le frontiere su cui occorre puntare per migliorare la cultura e la gestione delle risorse umane che operano nella manutenzione in azienda