Iskra Dukovska-Popovska

Creating sustainable fresh food supply chains through waste reduction

Purpose – The aim of this empirical paper is to study information sharing in fresh food supply chains, with a specific goal of reducing waste and facilitating sustainable performance. The study focuses on material and information flow issues, specifically on sharing demand and shelf‐life data.Design/methodology/approach – This work has been designed as an exploratory case study in three fresh food supply chains, milk, fresh fish, and fresh poultry, in the Nordic countries. The cases are based on interviews and data from the databases of the companies involved. Each case focuses on analyzing information flow, particularly the current order patterns and forecasting and planning process, and material flow, focusing on the supply chain structure. In two cases significant changes have been made to forecasting processes and material flow, while the third case intends to identify the most beneficial uses of shared information to create a sustainable fresh food supply chain.Findings – The performance of the peris...

Improved Product Development Performance through Agile/Stage-Gate Hybrids: The Next-Generation Stage-Gate Process?

OVERVIEW: Product development at manufacturing companies is increasingly complex. Linear product development processes, including the traditional Stage-Gate process, cannot support the iterative cycles and external collaboration that characterize todays product development efforts. Hybrid processes combining elements of Agile and Stage-Gate models offer a more flexible alternative to conventional systems. A comparative case study of seven technology-intensive companies shows how combining Stage-Gate models, at the strategic level, with the Agile method Scrum, implemented at the execution level, can offer performance improvements and other advantages over even improved Stage-Gate processes. The key contribution of this study is a generic Agile/Stage-Gate hybrid process based on best practices as identified in the case companies.

Sales and operations planning: responding to the needs of industrial food producers

This paper investigates sales and operations planning (S&OP) at four Scandinavian industrial food producers in order to explore how the use of S&OP might help leaders to deal with the challenges set by the planning environment. Variables connected to the product and market, e.g. frequency of new product development, customer service levels and supply uncertainty, were identified as particularly critical for the S&OP process. It was found that there is great potential for S&OP in the food industry, foremost to cope with the imbalances between demand and supply and to create prerequisites for a stable production process.

Participation and dialogue in strategic manufacturing development

Increased competition and the dynamics of technological and market developments have made operations in industrial enterprises very complex, with many stakeholders in and around the enterprise. At the same time, it has become important to address strategic issues of manufacturing. To plan and manage an appropriate degree of participation in strategy development has become a key issue, especially to ensure ideas and ownership from those who will be involved in the implementation of a manufacturing strategy. We have developed and implemented a five-phased process for developing a manufacturing vision adopting a participatory approach. It revolves around a series of one-day workshops, typically with 15–20 participants. The paper will focus on the importance of participation and dialogue in the process of developing a manufacturing vision. We will present a model for monitoring and managing dialogues during a workshop, part of which is a dialogue-monitoring instrument. Empirical studies will draw out process elements of participation and dialogue and demonstrate the applicability of the model. Finally, implications are spelled out for planning and managing workshops in different phases of the process of manufacturing vision development.

Contingency between S & OP design and planning environment

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to understand how companies design sales and operations planning (SO further studies need to explore the effect of the alignment of S&OP and the PE on the planning performance. Originality/value – In the literature, S&OP is presented as a generic process with a strict formal design that is equal for all companies. The study provides insights into how companies adjust S&OP according to the PE.

RFID technology to support environmentally sustainable supply chain management

RFID is one of the contemporary technologies that has the potential to enable improved data gathering and cross-companies integration, and thus achieve cost efficiency. However, RFID has not yet become primary approach to collect data from the supply chain activities. This is partly due to (relative) high cost of implementation, partly due to technical deficiencies, as well as cross-company systems integration issues. This paper discusses a potential application area for RFID technology, which is environmentally sustainable supply chain management. The paper discusses the current practices in green supply chain management, and proposes possible applications of RFID enabling green supply chain management. The paper also proposes an idea of ad hoc RFID systems which are rapidly deployable and require minimal, if at all, pre-existing infrastructure.

Agile Product Development Governance – On Governing the Emerging Scrum/Stage-Gate Hybrids

Product Development (PD) management is changing through the emergence and implementation of agile principles into existing PD frameworks. This process changes PD governance assets, even though this aspect is not yet described in existing literature. Thus, this paper introduces PD governance of agile/stage-gate hybrid solutions through a comparative study including five case companies supported by a review of existing literature. The results include an overview of applied governance assets including which are supportive for PD management. The study indicates that only assets not part of corporate governance are affected by the introduction of agile, and that unaltered corporate assets affect PD performance of the hybrid solutions negatively.

Framework for Information Sharing in a Small-to-Medium Port System Supply Chain

Small-to-medium ports are characterised with inefficient, ineffective and resource intensive information sharing, which is not supporting their complex and dynamic environment. This creates challenges both for optimizing the internal planning of the activities at the port according to the demand, and for stronger supply chain integration with the external actors. This paper focuses on identifying the needs and criteria for an information sharing system, and proposes an approach for sharing operational data in port systems for improved supply chain integration, in the context of logistic engineering. The proposed approach has the potential to alleviate some of the problems when operating in a dynamic demand environment.

Scrum integration in stage-gate models for collaborative product development: A case study of three industrial manufacturers

The relevance of collaborative Product Development (PD) is rising with the decrease of product life cycles combined with growing customer demands. Industrial manufacturers now experience competition in the global market where differentiation is necessary for survival. Hence, in order to differentiate from low-cost competitors and increase PD performance, some industrial manufacturers now seek competitive advantage by experimenting with new ways for collaborative PD. This includes integrating customer-focused agile process models like Scrum from the software industry into their existing PD models. Thus, instead of replacing traditional stage-gate models, agile methods are currently integrated in existing PD models generating hybrid solution for collaborative PD. This paper includes a study of three industrial cases that have successfully integrated Scrum into the stage-gate process model for collaborative PD. The paper introduces the three functional hybrid models, including the impact on PD performance, PD roles and customer collaboration.

Supply Uncertainty in Food Processing Supply Chain: Sources and Coping Strategies

Supply uncertainty aspects haven’t been treated specifically in the food processing supply chain management literature, as the focus was mainly on the demand aspects. This paper provides an initial survey on the existing literature dealing with supply uncertainty of food processors. Specifically, the focus is on the types of supply uncertainty and sources that are causing them, as well as how the food processing companies are coping with it in the food supply chain.