1,720,964 research outputs found
Benchmarking Manufacturing plant performances: Development of a customized model for the Italian Industrial Laundry Sector
No full textItalian Laundry sector have been interested in latest years by an outstanding industrialization process towed by the increase in technology and automation of machineries. This fast growth highlighted the spread lack of a proper industrial culture among the laundries in managing the evolution of work organization from a traditional conception toward an industrial. Since the evolution started, University established a strong cooperation with Italian Industrial Laundry Association (EBLI, the association among Assosistema, the Italian industrial association of this sector, and the sector unions) in order to steer in a proper way the industrialization of the sector and support laundries in developing the necessary industrial culture.
This paper concerns the realization of a Research Project for the definition of a benchmarking model amid Laundries. The project lies in a broader cooperation among EBLI and University through a customized performance measurement model and its dissemination program was realized. The elaboration of benchmarking is now necessary for each laundry to understand its weak points and strong points so as to continue to drive properly the improvement process of the whole sector.
In the first part of the paper Authors will present briefly the industrial contest and how Benchmarking Project is linked with the previous collaboration projects. The second part of the paper will focus on benchmarking model definition. The last part of the paper will show the required steps to implement benchmarking properly, the main analysis tools to investigate performances of both single laundry and the whole sector and the next steps that will be carried out by University and EBLI to ensure industrial culture development inside the sector
Measuring and improving manufacturing plant performances: development and dissemination of a customized model for the italian industrial laundry sector
No full textWithin the Italian Industrial Laundry sector we are assisting to an outstanding industrialization process towed by the increase in technology and automation of machineries. This breakthrough highlights the need for an increase and a dissemination of industrial culture within the laundries. This paper concern the realization of a research project that aims to the define and spread a plant performance measurement and analysis system as a standard for the entire Italian Laundry Sector. In first the first part of the paper Authors will shortly describe the features of the proposed system. The second part of the paper will focus on the dissemination process, necessary to ensure the establishment of the proposed system and the increasing of the industrial culture within the sector
Increasing availability of production flow lines through optimal buffer sizing: a simulative study
No full textIn flow shop highly automated production lines the absence or undersize of inter-operational buffer between consecutive stations is an occurrence as frequent as detrimental for the productivity of the entire production line. A correct sizing of buffers mitigates or even eliminates the propagation, on the entire production line, of small inefficiencies due to stops and / or slowdowns of the single station. This paper describes a simulation approach to investigate the effect buffer between two successive stations and measure its effects in terms of change in the overall efficiency of the line. A wide range of typical production parameter is considered. This allows to extend the paper results to many different production system and to evidence some interesting analogies in production effectiveness behavior depending on buffer size. The introduction of an analytic experimental relation allows to describe the evidenced behavior and to size the buffer without need for further simulations
Steps Toward Smart Governance
No full textGovernance, or a shared system of rules, is essential to civil society both to coordinate interactions and resolve disputes between entities. Without compliance to rules, complex value-cocreation interactions are unsustainable. Nevertheless, compliance alone, without change, adaptation, and innovation, is also unsustainable in dynamic environments with competitive entities. One of the challenges in smart governance is to balance compliance (executive), change (legislative), and dispute resolution (judicial). Where access to technological capabilities impacts future opportunities, the trade-off between rules that provide incentives for innovators (e.g., winner-take-all) and those that provide equity of opportunities (e.g., improve-weakest-link) must also be balanced. Furthermore, smarter governance is complicated by multiple levels of entities, their jurisdictions, and associated information and knowledge “burdens.” Our perspective on smarter governance is informed by previous work from an integrated Service Science (SSME+D) and Viable Systems Approach (VSA) methodology
Designing multichannel value propositions to enhance value-Cocreation phenomenon
No full textService Science introduced the abstraction of service systems, which while jointly interacting can cocreate value. The term "cocreation" captures the collaborative nature of value creation. Whilst value, between two or more service entities, is always cocreated, value-cocreation is rarely considered in designing a service even though this is a main design driver that leads to successful construction of Value Propositions1 (VP). The presence of multiple channels (in-person, phone, and web) may give rise to opportunities for enhanced value-cocreation. Still, different channels may lead the beneficiary of the service to interact as a value coproducer, linking value-cocreation to his/her capability to properly perform the service. The authors explore the opportunity to increase the value cocreated in a service process through improved design using multiple channels. The authors develop a method that guides service designers in the construction of more effective multichannel Value Propositions, increasing the opportunities to enhance the cocreation of value. This paper should be of value to both researchers and practitioners looking for new ways to construct effective multichannel Value Propositions
A Service Operations Model for Public-Utilities to increase Corporate Social Responsibility
No full textIn the modern market one of the most upscale word is certainly “Sustainability”. Frequently enterprises promote sustainability just for advertisement, sometimes because they really believe in it and act for it. This paper concerns the study of public utilities and its position about sustainability. Analyzing the scientific debate concerning the public utilities companies business targets and their position about Corporate Social Responsibility, we want to show how CSR can be (in this sector) strategically and economically convenient. In the second part of the paper we will show how the focus on the public utility/citizen interface is essential to guarantee sustainability. Finally we will propose a model for Service Operations Management in public utilities customer service in order to optimize effectiveness and value creation in a sustainable way
Using Overall Equipment Effectiveness for Manufacturing System Design
No full textDifferent metrics for measuring and analyzing the productivity of manufacturing systems have been studied for several decades. The traditional metrics for measuring productivity were throughput and utilization rate, which only measure part of the performance of manufacturing equipment. But, they were not very helpful for “identifying the problems and underlying improvements needed to increase productivity” [1].
During the last years, several societal elements have raised the interest in analyze the phenomena underlying the identification of productive performance parameters as: capacity, production throughput, utilization, saturation, availability, quality, etc.
This rising interest has highlighted the need for more rigorously defined and acknowledged productivity metrics that allow to take into account a set of synthetic but important factors (availability, performance and quality) [1]. Most relevant causes identified in literature are:
The growing attention devoted by the management to cost reduction approaches [2] [3];
The interest connected to successful eastern productions approaches, like Total Productive Maintenance [4], World Class Manufacturing [5] or Lean production [6];
The importance to go beyond the limits of traditional business management control system [7];
For this reasons, a variety of new performance concepts have been developed. The total productive maintenance (TPM) concept, launched by Seiichi Nakajima [4] in the 1980s, has provided probably the most acknowledged and widespread quantitative metric for the measure of the productivity of any production equipment in a factory: the Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE). OEE is an appropriate measure for manufacturing organizations and it has being used broadly in manufacturing industry, typically to monitor and control the performance (time losses) of an equipment/work station within a production system [8]. The OEE allows to quantify and to assign all the time losses, that affect an equipment whilst the production, to three standard categories. Being standard and widely acknowledged, OEE has constituted a powerful tool for production systems performance benchmarking and characterization, as also the starting point for several analysis techniques, continuous improvement and research [9] [10]. Despite this widespread and relevance, the use of OEE presents limitations. As a matter of fact, OEE focus is on the single equipment, yet the performance of a single equipment in a production system is generally influenced by the performance of other systems to which it is interconnected. The time losses propagation from a station to another may widely affect the performance of a single equipment. Since OEE measures the performance of the equipment within the specific system, a low value of OEE for a given equipment can depend either on little performance of the equipment itself and/or time losses propagation due to other interconnected equipments of the system.
This issue has been widely investigated in literature through the introduction of a new metric: the Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OTE), that considers the whole production system as a whole. OTE embraces the performance losses of a production system both due to the equipments and their interactions.
Process Designers need usually to identify the number of each equipments necessary to realize each activity of the production process, considering the interaction and consequent time losses a priori. Hence, for a proper design of the system, we believe that the OEE provides designer with better information on each equipment than OTE. In this chapter we will show how OEE can be used to carry out a correct equipments sizing and an effective production system design, taking into account both equipment time losses and their propagation throughout the whole production system.
In the first paragraph we will show the approach that a process designer should face when designing a new production system starting from scratch.
In the second paragraph we will investigate the typical time-losses that affect a production system, although are independent from the production system itself.
In the third part we will define all the internal time losses that need to be considered when assessing the OEE, along with the description of a set of critical factors related to OEE assessment, such as buffer-sizing and choice of the plant layout.
In the fourth paragraph we will show and quantify how time losses of a single equipment affects the whole system and vice-versa.
Finally, we will show through the simulation some real cases in which a process design have been fully completed, considering both equipment and time losses propagation
Designing Multichannel Value Propositions to Enhance Value-Cocreation Phenomenon
No full textService Science introduced the abstraction of service systems, which while jointly interacting can cocreate
value. The term “cocreation” captures the collaborative nature of value creation. Whilst value, between two
or more service entities, is always cocreated, value-cocreation is rarely considered in designing a service
even though this is a main design driver that leads to successful construction of Value Propositions1 (VP).
The presence of multiple channels (in-person, phone, and web) may give rise to opportunities for enhanced
value-cocreation. Still, different channels may lead the beneficiary of the service to interact as a value coproducer,
linking value-cocreation to his/her capability to properly perform the service. The authors explore
the opportunity to increase the value cocreated in a service process through improved design using multiple
channels. The authors develop a method that guides service designers in the construction of more effective
multichannel Value Propositions, increasing the opportunities to enhance the cocreation of value. This paper
should be of value to both researchers and practitioners looking for new ways to construct effective multichannel
Value Propositions
Smart Governance to Mediate Human Expectations and Systems Context Interactions
Full text linkToday we need to reframe our modes of thinking about governance as an issue to reformulate and introduce a new logic – the art of governmentality (Foucault, 1977, 1978) – to illustrate how decision makers assess the role of human resources for Service Systems viability.
Our perspective, based on an integrated approach, examines the governance of human expectations, an analysis that implies focusing on processes by means of which government (i.e. decision makers or policy makers) acknowledge, evaluate, measure and graduate the expectations and aims of an organization’s stakeholders.
From a Service System based view (SESYbv) – derived from Service Science Management and Engineering + Design (SSME+D) and the Viable Systems Approach (VSA), our conceptual hypotheses are:
Hp1) Whether governance can be considered as the result of a continuous transformation of governance structure and practices according to the new business and societal liberalism;
and
Hp2) Whether Service Systems are: a) a dynamic configuration of resources; b) a set of value co-creation mechanism between suitable entities; c) an application of competencies-skills-knowledge any person(s) in job or stakeholder roles; d) an adaptive internal organization responding to the dynamic external environment; d) learning and feedback to ensure mutual benefits or value co-creation outcomes; e) a complex viable structure enable to respond to environmental change, where environmental change is mostly generated by other viable systems;
Then
Th) Smart Mechanism of Governance (SMG) to assess skills and mediate human expectations need a conceptual re-interpretation of government as an institution (structure) as well as practice (system) according to the new deal of governance in service systems: governmentality.
In fact, smart governance, based on the new art of governmentality, has to be read as the result of political and economic and technological processes characterized by network cooperation and collaboration at every level of organizations and/or society. In other words, in searching for models to adopt for smart governance, it is important to reject the top-down logic, based on despotic and individual power, and to embrace the bottom-up logic – of networks of governance (Triantafillou, 2004; Piciocchi and Bassano, 2009) –, based on shared knowledge and trust. This change of perspective, is coherent with an (SESYbv) assumption: that the viability of service systems depends on the capability of its government to create and develop mechanisms of value co-creation and to guarantee systemic equifinality, based on a continuous process of mediation of stakeholder expectations (customers, citizens, etc...). According to SESYbv, in service systems, value co-creation and equifinality imply networking cooperation and collaboration, i.e. the new deal of governance (governmentality): multilevel governance systems (Rosenau and Czempiel, 1992)
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