Management, Technology and Learning for Individuals, Organisations and Society in Turbulent Environments

This book presents the collection of fifty two papers which were presented on the First International Conference on BUSINESS SUSTAINABILITY ’08 - Management, Technology and Learning for Individuals, Organisations and Society in Turbulent Environments, held in Ofir, Portugal, from 25th to 27th of June, 2008. The main motive of the meeting was the growing awareness of the importance of the sustainability issue. This importance had emerged from the growing uncertainty of the market behaviour that leads to the characterization of the market, i.e. environment, as turbulent. Actually, the characterization of the environment as uncertain and turbulent reflects the fact that the traditional technocratic and/or socio-technical approaches cannot effectively and efficiently lead with the present situation. In other words, the rise of the sustainability issue means the quest for new instruments to deal with uncertainty and/or turbulence. The sustainability issue has a complex nature and solutions are sought in a wide range of domains and instruments to achieve and manage it. The domains range from environmental sustainability (referring to natural environment) through organisational and business sustainability towards social sustainability. Concerning the instruments for sustainability, they range from traditional engineering and management methodologies towards “soft” instruments such as knowledge, learning, creativity. The papers in this book address virtually whole sustainability problems space in a greater or lesser extent. However, although the uncertainty and/or turbulence, or in other words the dynamic properties, come from coupling of management, technology, learning, individuals, organisations and society, meaning that everything is at the same time effect and cause, we wanted to put the emphasis on business with the intention to address primarily the companies and their businesses. From this reason, the main title of the book is “Business Sustainability” but with the approach of coupling Management, Technology and Learning for individuals, organisations and society in Turbulent Environments. Concerning the First International Conference on BUSINESS SUSTAINABILITY, its particularity was that it had served primarily as a learning environment in which the papers published in this book were the ground for further individual and collective growth in understanding and perception of sustainability and capacity for building new instruments for business sustainability. In that respect, the methodology of the conference work was basically dialogical, meaning promoting dialog on the papers, but also including formal paper presentations. In this way, the conference presented a rich space for satisfying different authors’ and participants’ needs. Additionally, promoting the widest and global learning environment and participativeness, the Conference Organisation provided the broadcasting over Internet of the Conference sessions, dialogical and formal presentations, for all authors’ and participants’ institutions, as an innovative Conference feature. In these terms, this book could also be understood as a complementary instrument to the Conference authors’ and participants’, but also to the wider readerships’ interested in the sustainability issues. The book brought together 97 authors from 10 countries, namely from Australia, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Portugal, Russia, Serbia, Sweden and United Kingdom. The authors “ranged” from senior and renowned scientists to young researchers providing a rich and learning environment. At the end, the editors hope and would like that this book will be useful, meeting the expectation of the authors and wider readership and serving for enhancing the individual and collective learning, and to incentive further scientific development and creation of new papers. Also, the editors would use this opportunity to announce the intention to continue with new editions of the conference and subsequent editions of accompanying books on the subject of BUSINESS SUSTAINABILITY, the second of which is planned for year 2011.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Management, Technology and Learning for Individuals, Organisations and Society in Turbulent Environments

This book presents the collection of fifty papers which were presented in the Second International Conference on BUSINESS SUSTAINABILITY 2011 - Management, Technology and Learning for Individuals, Organisations and Society in Turbulent Environments , held in Póvoa de Varzim, Portugal, from 22ndto 24thof June, 2011.The main motive of the meeting was growing awareness of the importance of the sustainability issue. This importance had emerged from the growing uncertainty of the market behaviour that leads to the characterization of the market, i.e. environment, as turbulent. Actually, the characterization of the environment as uncertain and turbulent reflects the fact that the traditional technocratic and/or socio-technical approaches cannot effectively and efficiently lead with the present situation. In other words, the rise of the sustainability issue means the quest for new instruments to deal with uncertainty and/or turbulence. The sustainability issue has a complex nature and solutions are sought in a wide range of domains and instruments to achieve and manage it. The domains range from environmental sustainability (referring to natural environment) through organisational and business sustainability towards social sustainability. Concerning the instruments for sustainability, they range from traditional engineering and management methodologies towards “soft” instruments such as knowledge, learning, and creativity. The papers in this book address virtually whole sustainability problems space in a greater or lesser extent. However, although the uncertainty and/or turbulence, or in other words the dynamic properties, come from coupling of management, technology, learning, individuals, organisations and society, meaning that everything is at the same time effect and cause, we wanted to put the emphasis on business with the intention to address primarily companies and their businesses. Due to this reason, the main title of the book is “Business Sustainability 2.0” but with the approach of coupling Management, Technology and Learning for individuals, organisations and society in Turbulent Environments. Also, the notation“2.0” is to promote the publication as a step further from our previous publication – “Business Sustainability I” – as would be for a new version of software. Concerning the Second International Conference on BUSINESS SUSTAINABILITY, its particularity was that it had served primarily as a learning environment in which the papers published in this book were the ground for further individual and collective growth in understanding and perception of sustainability and capacity for building new instruments for business sustainability. In that respect, the methodology of the conference work was basically dialogical, meaning promoting dialog on the papers, but also including formal paper presentations. In this way, the conference presented a rich space for satisfying different authors’ and participants’ needs. Additionally, promoting the widest and global learning environment and participation, in accordance with the Conference's assumed mission to promote Proactive Generative Collaborative Learning, the Conference Organisation shares/puts open to the community the papers presented in this book, as well as the papers presented on the previous Conference(s). These papers can be accessed from the conference webpage (http://labve.dps.uminho.pt/bs11). In these terms, this book could also be understood as a complementary instrument to the Conference authors’ and participants’, but also to the wider readerships’ interested in the sustainability issues. The book brought together 107 authors from 11 countries, namely from Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Serbia, Switzerland, and United States of America. The authors “ranged” from senior and renowned scientists to young researchers providing a rich and learning environment. At the end, the editors hope, and would like, that this book to be useful, meeting the expectation of the authors and wider readership and serving for enhancing the individual and collective learning, and to incentive further scientific development and creation of new papers. Also, the editors would use this opportunity to announce the intention to continue with new editions of the conference and subsequent editions of accompanying books on the subject of BUSINESS SUSTAINABILITY, the third of which is planned for year 2013.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The excellence in metrology

The excellence in Quality is possible… but only if theirs supports are excellences also. A Portuguese legal definition of Quality (in Decreto-Lei 142/2007) is: «Quality is the set of attributes and characteristics of an entity or product that determine their suitability to meet reach needs and expectations of society». It is important to note that what we want, it is no more to please the client or the customer, but to please the entire society. But, if the society needs Quality, an important item for the society satisfaction, so the society needs good supports of Quality. These supports are: Qualification; Standardization; and Metrology. We believe that Metrology is the special one support! Why we say that? Because the Metrology is the support of Quality with the complete structure and better international organization! In this paper we make to note the importance of the traceability concept and postulate that without good traceability it is not possible excellence in Metrology. And, without excellence in Metrology, there we will never have excellence in Quality. By this path – Quality, Qualification, Standardization and Metrology – we, the society, could expect the excellence!info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Contribution to align the small/individual companies to the global players

Nowadays the quality of the products, customer satisfaction and customer’s fidelity are of most importance. However to commercialise a product it’s critical the “time to market”, so how can the small companies compete in the global market? And how can they work with the global players? We may think that to implement an organization into a Supply Chain Management (SCM) the companies must already be a global player (strong economic groups) and have a high developed dimension. Yet, smaller enterprises may still have many opportunities if they give significant importance to the “aptitude” to cooperate. Besides that, they must not only cooperate in business information, but also in technologies, capacities, and to take advantage of small gains to increase more and more business efficiency. The question that we will try to help the answer is: Is it possible to be a small company and participate in one or many global supply chains? We will see in this work that is possible but some procedures have to be implemented. Firstly this work intends to characterize the problem and then gives some orientations to prepare small /individual companies to work with the global “players”. It defines a process of change of the traditional logistics management for the supply chain management, and above all alert to the need to collaborate in information, technology and process management.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Manufacturing system and enterprise management for Industry 4.0: Guest editorial

Industry 4.0 (I4.0) represents a significant step in the processes transformation in practically every industry, where the smart concept emerges in autonomous decisions and cyber-physical systems based production systems [1]. The role played by the usually referred technological pillars of I4.0 (such as internet of things (IoT), horizontal and vertical system integration, simulation, autonomous robots, big data and analytics, augmented reality, additive manufacturing, cloud computing and cybersecurity), based on technological advancements (mainly Information and Communications Technology (ICT)), in adhering to I4.0, are well known by the industry and academia (attending the huge number of research papers available), and have being implemented with more or less success. Notwithstanding the significant expected opportunities and impact of the fourth industrial revolution identified by researchers, experts are not convinced that the changes will be as significant as forecasted [2 - 4]. According to [5], only rare and recent attempts to understand the critical success factors of I4.0 implementation in manufacturing companies can be found in literature. A few recent studies reviewed in [5], point out that some of the critical factors are related to the management for I4.0. Cumulatively, the research in the field of management for I4.0, is still scarce, compared with the research on technologies for I4.0. The title of this Special Issue “Manufacturing System and Enterprise Management for Industry 4.0” is aligned with that concern and its content should be seen as a contribution to overcome management deficit problem of I4.0 implementation success. Nowadays, the challenges are related to the way how I4.0 is implemented and managed, in order to achieve the desired outcomes, economic, environmental, and social.First, our acknowledgments and greatest thanks go to Professor Bosko Rasuo, Editor-in-Chief of the FME Transactions, for his highest support and professionalism and, more importantly, his highest collaboration, understanding and patience during the development of this Special Issue. Next, our acknowledgments go to the authors, for their contributions and collaboration, and to the reviewers, for their great effort during the review process and for the suggestions they provided to the authors. Acknowledgments go also to our institutions, University of Minho and Polytechnic of Porto, and to the Research centres within which this project on this Special Issue has been developed, namely to ALGORITMI Research Center of the University of Minho and INESC TEC - Institute for Systems and Computer Engineering, Technology and Science. The guest editors want to acknowledge as well that this work has been supported by FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the R&D Units Project Scope: UIDB/00319/2020.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

An Approach About the Value Analysis Methodology

The markets globalization requires enterprises to continually investing in innovation, competitiveness and excellence. It is important to create a value culture in organizations, through methods such as Value Analysis (VA). We pretend to enhance the relevance of the value concept and the creation of a value culture in the organizations, in order to foment and increment their success. In this paper we intend to provide a better knowledge of value analysis and suggest possible ways of its application. These allow us to put on perspective in a sustainable way new slopes to be incorporated that contributes to increase surplus values in the enterprises.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Value Analysis: a way to increase the value creation

The value analysis is an important tool to create a value culture in organizations. It is intended to enhance the relevance of the value concept and the creation of a value culture, to foment and increment the success of the methodology application. The importance of the value analysis increases with the application in the conception phase, so it is necessary to expand the boundaries of the method utilization to every type of project or configuration models. The differentiation of a product can be defined by the constant seek in joining more and new values to the products. We pretend to provide a better knowledge of value analysis and suggest possible ways of its application to increase surplus values in the organizations.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A contribution to clarification of definitions and relationship between processes, operations, process plans, jobs, tasks and orders

The terminology and semantics concerning process plans, operations, orders, jobs and tasks are unfortunately not used in a canonical way, and many times there is misunderstandings, confusion or even ignorance of the relationships between the terms, among the practitioners and students. This paper contributes to clarification of basic canonical definitions and relationship between processes, operations, process plans, jobs, tasks and orders. The paper presents the concepts of “Process Plan”, job, task, orders and their relationship. It is suggested that adoption of canonical forms of these concepts, definitions and relationships will facilitate implementation of advanced methodologies and technologies and techniques and integration with other systems and partners (networking).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Domain of applicability of Value Analysis approach in the pre-selection of resources

For the project of an Agile/Virtual Enterprise (A/V E) the resources selection is a key factor. The output of the selection process should be prepared to guarantee quality, efficiency and cost-attractiveness, in order to ensure the agility and integrability of the A/V E. Despite the potential of Value Analysis (VA), none of the resources selection models found in the literature incorporates the VA integration. The main objective is to quantify the selection process performance with VA integrated into the pre-selection of resources in accordance with the developed model. The paper presents through the simulation results analysis, some of the benefits of VA application: greater applicability domain for candidate resources and number of tasks; and reduction of the selection time.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

An analysis about the resources selection process in agile/virtual enterprises

We intend in the context of this work, to do an analysis on studies, literary revisions and mainly on existent models, in the universe of virtual enterprises resources selection, in order to allow us to put on perspective, in a sustainable way, new slopes to be incorporated that contributes to an improvement of the whole global process. This analysis for the A/VE was focused in several areas and basic slopes for the whole global process of the problem in question, namely in terms of the pre-selection phases and requisites; selection phases, requisites and methods; mathematical models, used tools and other important areas. There were incorporated the decision process of create an A/VE project and the requisites of the process principal phases. We approach the essential aspects for the work that is intended to develop, such as the integration of the existent models with the tasks plan (PT) of the product, namely if there are contemplated the eformulation and evaluation of the PT, and other important characteristics such as the weighting of resources and the incorporation of the value concept in the existent models, being that in our opinion an integration of a methodology of the type of Value Analysis will be able to incorporate surplus values in all this process. Conclusions were withdrawn on the whole global process, pointing to gaps and limitations and trying to do an approach which allows to sinthetize and put in perspective an efficient analysis of the whole extent of the problem in question.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio