1,720,961 research outputs found
Balancing storage cost and customization time in product platform design: a bi-objective optimization model
Get PDFIn the modern market scenario governed by the Mass Customization paradigm, the so-called delayed product differentiation (DPD) rose as a production strategy best balancing traditional Make-to-Stock (MTS) and Make-to-Order (MTO), potentially reducing storage cost and customization time. In industry, DPD uses product platforms, defined as a set of components forming a common structure, from which a stream of derivative variants is produced. Early-stage platforms, made of few components, limit their storage cost, increasing the time to customize and turn them into final variants. The literature widely discusses the product platform design problem, asking to explore quantitatively the trade-off between platform storage cost and customization time. This paper contributes to applied research in mass customization, proposing and applying a bi-objective optimization model able to assign the most suitable production strategy to each product variant among MTS, MTO, and DPD. In the case of DPD selection, the model designs the product platforms best balancing storage cost and customization time as the target metrics to optimize, subject to industrial constraints to produce and store them, matching each variant to the most suitable platform. A case study adapted from the electronic components sector exemplifies the use of the bi-objective model, supporting companies in managing high-variety mixes
Managing Mass Customization through Delayed Product Differentiation: a bi-objective model for product platforms design
Get PDFIn recent years, the heterogeneity of customer needs caused a wide proliferation of product variants, asking industrial companies to adopt new strategies to remain competitive in the transition from mass production to mass customization. Traditional production strategies such as Make-to-Order (MTO) and Make-to-Stock (MTS) are no longer adequate for the efficient manufacturing of multiple product variants. In such a scenario, the Delayed Product Differentiation (DPD) rose as a hybrid strategy overcoming the main limitations of traditional production strategies, best balancing high product variety and quick response time with low storage cost through the so-called product platforms. These platforms are subsystems of components, forming a common base structure from which a stream of product variants can be efficiently derived. Platforms are produced and stocked in advance, following an MTS strategy, and customized into different variants after the order arrival, according to an MTO strategy. Platforms dimension affects in an opposite manner their storage cost and their customization time, as platforms made of few components require long time for customization activities, reducing the storage cost. The best platform design and association to product variants are open topics in current literature, having major impact on the trade-off between platform storage cost and customization time. This paper contributes to applied research in mass customization, proposing a bi-objective optimization model for platform design and association to product variants, determining at the same time the best production strategy among MTO, MTS and DPD for each product variant to best balance platforms storage cost and customization time. The model is applied to a reference case study providing a multi-scenario analysis about the main effects of the limitation in the number of possible platform types on platform configurations, customization tasks and their correspondent customization time and storage cost
Interaction between Lean and Green Supply Chain Management: experiences from the automotive sector
Get PDFLean Management (LM) is a business and operations strategy embraced by several industries, to minimize waste in manufacturing and supply chain, increasing productivity, efficiency and continuous improvement actions. The Lean Supply Chain Management (LSCM) looks at streamlined, highly efficient systems able to offer finished products at the pace customer’s demand. During the last decades, the rising concern around the environmental burdens of industrial processes made sustainability performances critical issues for companies. The greater attention to sustainability by society and users and the regulations introduced by institutions and policy makers led companies to adopt sustainable strategies in manufacturing and supply chain activities. The integration between LSCM and Green Supply Chain Management (GSCM) is a hot stream of research, looking for convergences and gaps faced by companies belonging to different sectors in the joint implementation of LSCM and GSCM. This working paper follows this research stream, discussing interactions in the current and potential implementations of lean and green principles within supply chain management. The automotive sector is focused, presenting industrial case histories and best practices, showcasing the adoption of lean strategies fostering green practices
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
A Clustering-Based Algorithm for Product Platform Design in the Mass Customization Era
Get PDFThe modern industry is facing the great challenge of meeting the changeable needs of the highly competitive global market, asking for an increasing variety of customized products. To manage the product variety, minimizing time to market and costs, companies started adopting a hybrid production strategy named delayed product differentiation (DPD) through the use of the so-called product platforms. Platforms are sub-systems forming a common structure from which a stream of derivative variants can be efficiently produced. Platforms are typically manufactured and stocked following a Make-to-Stock (MTS) strategy, while the personalization is managed according to a Make-to-Order (MTO) strategy after the arrival of the customers’ orders. Most of the existing methods addressing the platform design uses optimization techniques, resulting in high computational complexity to manage the real size of the industrial instances. To support practitioners, this paper proposes a hierarchical clustering algorithm, based on the definition of a new similarity index. The algorithm uses the similarity index to evaluate the production cycle of the variants provided as input and returning a set of product variants’ clusters, assigning a platform to each of them. The proposed methodology is applied to an industrial case study to exemplify the management of high-variety production mixes
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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