Liberatina Carmela Santillo

Supply chain performance sustainability through resilience function

Todays business world faces challenges and pressures on an unprecedented scale. Many of these obstacles have the potential to severely affect the continuity of a manufacturing enterprise, in particular, through disruption to the wider supply chain. Indeed, it can be argued that supply chain risk is currently greater now than ever before. Resilience is one of the ways to combat disruptions in the supply chain. In this paper the behavior of a Supply chain is studied using a SD model built with Powersim. The paper describes the process of building the model and utilizes the model to demonstrate the massive improvement that resilience can bring in a manufacturing enterprise. The critical issues and strength points in a supply chain are analyzed, in particular, trying to improve their resilience, a feature that has gained even more importance in recent years.

A Perspective on Remanufacturing Business: Issues and Opportunities

This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

A methodological approach to manage WEEE recovery systems in a push/pull logic

This work aims at establishing a new management paradigm for Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) collection and treatment networks, based on Lean Thinking methodological approaches. The objective is to maximize the WEEE recovery rate to effectively support the production of new products, creating on one side the conceptual basis of the Closed Loop Supply Chain, and on the other side minimizing the environmental impact of production processes in exploiting natural resources. The achievement of such results is supported by the application of a System Dynamics simulation approach.

An Innovative Contribution to Health Technology Assessment

Healthcare is moving towards increased assistance needs with limited resources, both in economics terms, in personnel or space terms, leading to the usage of specific analysis for the acquisition, evaluation and assessment of medical technologies. The systematic evaluation of properties, effects or other impacts of a medical (or health) technology with a broad multidisciplinary approach is named Health Technology Assessment (HTA).This work presents an approach of a HTA protocol for the classification of hospitals or health facilities equipments, realized by combining the classic HTA concepts with hierarchic clustering techniques in a multidisciplinary analysis of requirements, cost, impact of logistics, technology associated risks.

A resilient approach to manage a supply chain network

Today we depend more and more on logistic networks, which often know nothing, or worse, on which our power of control is almost zero. It is impossible to imagine a life without certain types of products or food, all of that to get us often follow long and complex network and therefore vulnerable. Let see how increase in energy costs has engulfed many small companies. Differently by rising energy costs, there are also changes that are not so easily predictable, so it is essential for the survival of a company to have “redundant” resources, able to operate strategies and proactive behavior. Its important to be flexible and adapt better to the changes that are imposed by external or even internal conditions. More than on flexibility, it is necessary to focus on the concept of Resilience, which requires the ability to remain calm, to address a crisis, but maybe leave it weakened but with the strength, the ability and the confidence to create a tomorrow of own business, adapting to change.

Reducing the risk of healthcare-associated infections through Lean Six Sigma: The case of the medicine areas at the Federico II University Hospital in Naples (Italy)

Abstract Rationale, aims, and objectives Lean Six Sigma (LSS) has been recognized as an effective management tool for improving healthcare performance. Here, LSS was adopted to reduce the risk of healthcare‐associated infections (HAIs), a critical quality parameter in the healthcare sector. Methods Lean Six Sigma was applied to the areas of clinical medicine (including general medicine, pulmonology, oncology, nephrology, cardiology, neurology, gastroenterology, rheumatology, and diabetology), and data regarding HAIs were collected for 28,000 patients hospitalized between January 2011 and December 2016. Following the LSS define, measure, analyse, improve, and control cycle, the factors influencing the risk of HAI were identified by using typical LSS tools (statistical analyses, brainstorming sessions, and cause‐effect diagrams). Finally, corrective measures to prevent HAIs were implemented and monitored for 1 year after implementation. Results Lean Six Sigma proved to be a useful tool for identifying variables affecting the risk of HAIs and implementing corrective actions to improve the performance of the care process. A reduction in the number of patients colonized by sentinel bacteria was achieved after the improvement phase. Conclusions The implementation of an LSS approach could significantly decrease the percentage of patients with HAIs.

A periodic review policy with quality improvement, setup cost reduction, backorder price discount, and controllable lead time

Abstract This paper explores a periodic review inventory model under stochastic demand. The setup (or ordering) cost and the lead time are controllable. The model considers an imperfect production process, whose quality can be improved by means of an investment. A backorder price discount to motivate customers to wait for backorders is included. The demand in the protection interval is first assumed Gaussian; then, the distribution-free approach is adopted. The objective is to determine the review period, the setup cost, the quality level, the backorder price discount, and the length of lead time that minimize the long-run expected total cost per time unit. A solution method for each case is presented. Numerical experiments show that substantial savings can be achieved if the quality level, the setup cost and the lead time are controlled, and if a backorder price discount is applied. A sensitivity analysis is finally carried out.

Use of the AHP methodology in system dynamics: Modelling and simulation for health technology assessments to determine the correct prosthesis choice for hernia diseases

Health technology assessments (HTAs) are often difficult to conduct because of the decisive procedures of the HTA algorithm, which are often complex and not easy to apply. Thus, their use is not always convenient or possible for the assessment of technical requests requiring a multidisciplinary approach. This paper aims to address this issue through a multi-criteria analysis focusing on the analytic hierarchy process (AHP). This methodology allows the decision maker to analyse and evaluate different alternatives and monitor their impact on different actors during the decision-making process. However, the multi-criteria analysis is implemented through a simulation model to overcome the limitations of the AHP methodology. Simulations help decision-makers to make an appropriate decision and avoid unnecessary and costly attempts. Finally, a decision problem regarding the evaluation of two health technologies, namely, the evaluation of two biological prostheses for incisional infected hernias, will be analysed to assess the effectiveness of the model.

A Simulation Approach for Agile Production Logic Implementation in a Hospital Emergency Unit

The hospitals offer sweeping views of management ideas, as focus internally complex organizational structures, which can be improved in order to reduce waste and increase the effectiveness of the services provided. An analysis of the hospital system there are two characteristics: the demand variability and the variability of lead time. As a policy of innovative management of the health system is referred to Lean even though the characteristics identified do not allow you to get the continuous flow that is the strategic goal of Lean obtainable only with demand leveling and production lead time certain and repeatable. A management system that seems to contemplate these characteristics is the Agile Manufacturing applied to service sector, even though it has never been declined in health. Thus arises the need to simulate both policies so as to determine which best represents the health facilities.

A Conceptual Model of Human Behaviour in Socio-technical Systems

The growing percentage of incidents connected with human error in several industries has led to investigate the factors influencing failures, so that many methods, the so-called Human Reliability Analysis methods, have been developed in order to quantify the human error probabilities. According to the needs of the last generation of the above mentioned methods (i.e. dynamic HRA methods), in order to overcome the lack into modelling the dynamic nature of human performance, this paper focuses on System Dynamics approach to highlight the relationships among the factors that influence human performance. Starting from a literature review on human error taxonomy, a Causal Loop Diagram is proposed to represent in a graphical fashion the interrelations between the variables which most influence and are influenced by human behaviour within a socio-technical system.