Marcello Fera

Proposal of a quali-quantitative assessment Model for Health and Safety in Small and Medium Enterprises

The identification, assessment and reduction of risks is one of the most important elements of health and safety at work. Nowadays, safety at work is becoming an Italian and a globally relevant ethical and technical problem. Risk can be assessed with different methods: qualitative, quantitative or quali-quantitative; while qualitative models are often too simplistic, in turn many times quantitative models are difficult to implement in small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The aim of this work is to present a new practical assessment model that tries to overcome the mentioned difficulties. Beyond its description, the paper also proposes an application study made in an international firm production plant to validate its results.

State of the art of additive manufacturing: Review for tolerances, mechanical resistance and production costs

Abstract The new technology named additive manufacturing (AM) is gaining significance in the industrial sector due to its capacity to define new improvements in the design, production and logistical issues related to a specific product. This new area in industrial engineering is becoming operative but is still not easily applicable to all types of production systems. Many research and practical contributions have been developed in the last few years, but a unique answer for a possibility to be applied to the industrial sector has not yet been derived. This paper aims to analyse existing research literature on AM application in the industrial sector and tries to determine the open issues related to this theme. Here the themes on the mechanical and chemical characteristics of the materials produced with AM and the management theme are examined.

Economic Evaluation of RFID Technology in the Production Environment

The aim of this paper is to present an economic evaluation framework of an RFID system implementation through a pilot project with the aim of streamlining logistic processes and compliance with higher level requirements. The company involved in the project belongs to the CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods) food industry, and in particular to the alimentary industry, whose principal scope was to comply the new norms of the sector by implementation of a better traceability system. This system, besides being very effective for the scope of the project, also had a huge impact in economic terms on logistics resources and cost reduction. For this reason, the discover of the RFID technology for the company has been greatly appreciated at management level, and today other fields of application are under evaluation. The added value of this article is contained not only in the results obtained in the economic evaluations, but also in the applied methodology, evidencing the advantages obtainable in the processes by cutting no added value operations. The economic analysis has thus been conducted on the basis of this TO-BE process streamlining.

Evaluating RFID opportunity through process analysis

Current literature agrees that one of the main results obtained by adopting RFID lies in an improved efficiency increase in material handling operations, especially regarding reductions in the time required to perform certain procedural steps. However, by evaluating only the advantages that can be easily quantified and definitely achieved may lead to limited results. This paper presents a business case of a large European Consumer Packaged Goods (FMCG) company in the cosmetics and beauty sector. Eleven processes in receiving, handling, storage and delivery procedures in one of the main distribution centres of the company were analysed and modelled using a detailed Business Process Modelling (BPM) approach. Since savings were evaluated only in terms of the reduction of resources used - achieved through process acceleration - despite the company dealing in huge volumes of high-margin products, the feasibility study turned out to be negative. Thus, the paper concludes with a brief discussion of how companies should take on this challenge if process timing benefits are insufficient. The detailed process analysis reported in this paper may be useful for operation practitioners or any manufacturing company or distribution centre about to start an as-is versus to-be comparison of their material handling procedures for RFID implementation.

Application of a business process model (BPM) method for a warehouse RFID system implementation

In recent years, the importance of the RFId technology within the operations management environment has become more evident. In particular, the RFId technology is recognised as an accelerator of the change towards a more efficient way to manage operations in an industrial context. The aim of this paper is to present a case study for the application of a pre-existing model (based on the Business Process Modelling method) for the technical, economic and financial evaluation of an RFId technology application in the area of industrial logistics for a bike manufacturer. The paper will face this issue preliminarily analysing the RFId utilization in the industrial context, afterwards analysing the existing literature on the BPM use for the evaluation of the applicability of RFId to the industrial context and lastly illustrating the case study and the results of the application of the BPM to the specific firm. The results demonstrate the improvement that it is possible to achieve in terms of financial returns and in terms of bikes worked in the warehouse per year.

Project management for small wind turbines: An experimental survey on activities, lead times and risks

In the last years, among the several available renewable Distributed Energy Resources (DER), a growing attention has been paid to small wind turbines (i.e., < 200 kWp). In particular, during the last years the Italian market has been growing up very rapidly (since only 7–10 years ago it simply was not existing while nowadays the total installed power has reached 8 MWp). In such a new market often operations related to commissioning and installing a small wind turbine have to be faced and validated for the first time. The objective of this paper is to summarize the experience of the authors in the application of traditional project management tools in this field to facilitate investors, project managers and stakeholders facing this market for the first time and to offer them a reference timeline in order to plan all financial and field activities

Hybrid Genetic Bees Algorithm applied to single machine scheduling with earliness and tardiness penalties

Abstract This paper presents a hybrid Genetic-Bees Algorithm based optimised solution for the single machine scheduling problem. The enhancement of the Bees Algorithm (BA) is conducted using the Genetic Algorithm’s (GA’s) operators during the global search stage. The proposed enhancement aims to increase the global search capability of the BA gradually with new additions. Although the BA has very successful implementations on various type of optimisation problems, it has found that the algorithm suffers from weak global search ability which increases the computational complexities on NP-hard type optimisation problems e.g. combinatorial/permutational type optimisation problems. This weakness occurs due to using a simple global random search operation during the search process. To reinforce the global search process in the BA, the proposed enhancement is utilised to increase exploration capability by expanding the number of fittest solutions through the genetical variations of promising solutions. The hybridisation process is realised by including two strategies into the basic BA, named as “reinforced global search” and “jumping function” strategies. The reinforced global search strategy is the first stage of the hybridisation process and contains the mutation operator of the GA. The second strategy, jumping function strategy, consists of four GA operators as single point crossover, multipoint crossover, mutation and randomisation. To demonstrate the strength of the proposed solution, several experiments were carried out on 280 well-known single machine benchmark instances, and the results are presented by comparing to other well-known heuristic algorithms. According to the experiments, the proposed enhancements provides better capability to basic BA to jump from local minima, and GBA performed better compared to BA in terms of convergence and the quality of results. The convergence time reduced about 60% with about 30% better results for highly constrained jobs.

Production Scheduling Approaches for Operations Management

Scheduling is essentially the short-term execution plan of a production planning model. Production scheduling consists of the activities performed in a manufacturing company in order to manage and control the execution of a production process. A schedule is an assignment problem that describes into details (in terms of minutes or seconds) which activities must be performed and how the factory’s resources should be utilized to satisfy the plan. Detailed scheduling is essentially the problem of allocating machines to competing jobs over time, subject to the constraints. Each work center can process one job at a time and each machine can handle at most one task at a time. A scheduling problem, typically, assumes a fixed number of jobs and each job has its own parameters (i.e., tasks, the necessary sequential constraints, the time estimates for each operation and the required resources, no cancellations). All scheduling approaches require some estimate of how long it takes to perform the work. Scheduling affects, and is affected by, the shop floor organization. All scheduling changes can be projected over time enabling the identification and analysis of starting time, completion times, idle time of resources, lateness, etc....

Proposal of a Multi-method Decision Support System for the Fashion Retail Industry

Fashion and Apparel (F&A) market, characterized by fast changes in trends and demand, by short product life-cycles and by broad assortments, requires a responsive/demand driven Supply Chain (SC) focused on products availability, real-time information sharing and speed in matching customers requests (Iannone et al. 2013). In this context, the presented paper shows the results of a three-year research project by firstly analysing the overall structure and characteristics of a traditional SC in this sector Iannone et al. (2015) in order to identify the most critical aspects and processes. From a risk analysis it emerged that the correct Time Management, intended as the ability of being responsive to market fluctuation, is the most critical target for fashion business. In this context, the presented work proposes a reference framework for the definition and subsequent optimisation of the physical and informative flows, which is based on a deviation analysis of demand and an adjusting feedback loop. In last years, the wide spread of e-commerce and mobile purchasing is deeply changing the retailing industry leading companied to adopt a new integrated strategy, called Omni-Channel Retailing. The management of both physical and mobile channels not simply means managing an additional on-line demand but requires the actual integration of all the processes of planning and execution in order to optimize performances. With these perspectives, the proposed framework has been revised and extended in order to represent a company implementing this new strategy and, after the definition of a suitable set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), allowed us to evaluate how it may impact on the performances of a traditional SC. The integration of all these analysis and the correct evaluation of the defined set of KPIs may represent a useful system for supporting fashion companies in the strategic decision making process.