New Product Development in the Fashion Industry: An Empirical Investigation of Italian Firms

This paper investigates how companies in the fashion industry organize, plan and perform their New Product Development process (NPD). The results have been achieved through an empirical study carried out by the authors with the support of the GeCo Observatory, an Italian research initiative launched in 2012. This paper shows the details of eight selected case studies from the Italian fashion industry

Analysing product development process and plm features in the food and fashion industries

The food and fashion industries are well-known as areas of excellence representing Italy globally. Their products include innovative features, have short lifecycles and a high level of customisation. Both the pipelines have to respond quickly to unpredictable demand in order to minimize stock-outs, forced markdowns, obsolete inventory and they focus their Supply Chain (SC) strategies on quality and time-to-market. Although they are characterized by many different aspects, both leverage on the same point of strength: their internal Product Development (PD) process. The opposite occurs in the automotive industry, with its standard and functional products and its efficient pipeline centred on cost reduction. Starting from previous works presented during the last PLM conference (PLM16), the research aims at investigating similarities and differences between these sectors, focusing on their PD process and their main critical success factors. Moreover, the authors analyse how Food and Fashion companies are managing the entire set of information throughout PD and the strategic role of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). In order to reach these goals, a multiple case study analysis has been performed, involving companies belonging to the Food and Fashion industries. The results will be relevant both for academics and practitioners. Indeed, there is a literature gap about this topic, because of the lack of researches concerning Food and Fashion PD. From the practitioners point of view, the results of this work will help Food and Fashion companies to support their business analysing the PD process and to better understand how the use of the PLM system could improve it

Product development kpis: A case study analysis in food and fashion companies

Two of the main industries that are currently paying huge attention to Product Development (PD) are Food & Fashion (F&F). Even if the remaining supply chain processes (production, distribution, sales) are managed in different ways and dissimilar outsourcing policies are adopted, PD is the most valuable process that both the industries are emphasizing. In the Italian context, F&F also represent two of the three excellences of the Made in Italy (Furniture is the third element), also known as "3F". Therefore, this research constitutes a progress of a previous work, which has examined critical success factors, PD features and PLM functionalities in the two sectors. The aim of this study is to analyse how to control, to monitor and to enhance PD through Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in F&F companies. From the methodological point of view, case study is adopted as a research strategy, designing two questionnaires with a common structure in order to obtain the required information. Indeed, different companies, belonging to the sectors of interest, have been selected and interviewed. As a result, KPIs are identified and classified. Moreover, a comparison between the previously listed metrics is performed and the drivers affecting similarities and differences are highlighted. This research helps to fill the literature gap, given the few contributions related to product development in the F&F supply chains. It also represents a valuable insight for practitioners who are trying to improve business processes and to increase the control over product development

Physiological aging of potato tubers produced during fall and spring growing seasons and stored under different temperatures

Adequate tuber storage is necessary to maintain a good availability of potato tubers in the market and to get seeds with adequate physiological age at planting. The objective of this work was to determine the effect of different storage temperatures on tuber physiological aging of three potato clones produced during fall and spring growing seasons. The experiment was carried out as factorial of three clones (Asterix, SMIJ461-1 and SMINIA793101-3) by four storage temperatures (4, 8, 12 and 25 ºC) and two growing seasons (fall and spring) in a random design with four replications. At 30-day intervals, tubers were evaluated from the beginning to 180 days of storage. Cold storage increased dormancy period, reduced sprout number and kept health tubers. Tubers produced during fall season did not sprout at the storage temperatures of 4 and 8 ºC. Tuber fresh weight loss and respiration increased with storage period and temperature. Crop growing season changes tuber physiological aging during storage. Storage in low temperature (4 and 8 ºC) conditions is efficient to slow down tuber aging

Proposal of a framework for the evaluation and comparison of production schedules

Production Planning and Control (PP&C) has been increasingly becoming a critical activity, since competition in the markets is leveraging on a multitude of factors ranging from product quality, to delivery times and pre-sales and after-sales services. Among PP&C activities, scheduling decisions are the final temporal decision-making phase where plant and supply chain managers have to act for fixing any short noticed variations and maintaining satisfying overall production system performances, “assigning scarce resources to competing activities over a given time horizon to obtain the best possible system performance”. In particular, lot of work has been done in the past (and is currently on-going) on Performance Measurement for manufacturing systems at a strategic level. However, at a more operative scheduling level, a comprehensive approach seems to be still missing. In order to provide an answer to this main issue, the paper illustrates the main distinctive features of the PMS-ESS, a performance measurement system for the evaluation of production scheduling systems, and its application in a test case

An Exploratory Study on Product Lifecycle Management in the Fashion Chain: Evidences from the Italian Leather Luxury Industry

New Product Development (NPD) in most manufacturing sectors is stressed by an increasing global competition and pressure to improve product quality and innovation, reduce product cost and time-tomarket (TTM), and rapidly respond to changing customer needs and shortened product lifecycles. These requirements are increasingly fulfilled by applying the PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) approach, a widely accepted concept that generally defines the adoption of a large number of ICT (Information and Communication Technology) solutions for managing product data along the product lifecycle. This contribution shows the results of research concerning the application of PLM within the luxury fashion supply chain, conducted in 2009 in Italy, with the analysis of 20 companies of the leather market. The research shows some of the differences that exist between the luxury industry and other more PLMoriented sectors (e.g. automotive) in terms of adopted ICT tools, criticalities, problems, and benefits expected and realized