Marco Tantardini

Investigating the main problems in implementing Lean in Supply Chains of Service Companies

In order to embrace the Lean principles, supply chains of service companies (SCSCs) likely have to modify how they manage operations. In this paper, we investigate which could be the main problems that managers of SCSCs may encounter in modifying how they manage operations to be more in line with the Lean approach next to presenting a new framework for the defining characteristics of Lean in service companies. This study generates theory from observations in supply chains of service companies, exploiting the process of inductive construction of theory (Handfield and Melnyk, 1998). The methodology in this paper is the analytical conceptual research (Wacker, 1998). The study highlights four main areas of problems within the supply chains of service companies and some messages for managers willing to implement Lean in such environment.

A lean-based ORR system for non-repetitive manufacturing

Lean implementations are no longer limited to high-volume production and are becoming increasingly common in low-volume, high-variety non-repetitive companies. Such companies, usually with make-to-order or engineer-to-order production, have normally been modelled with a job shop production system, but many of them actually have a dominant flow in production. Moreover, one of the main characteristics of lean implementation is that it streamlines production flow, makes it unidirectional and reduces setup and lot size. Consequently, a significant number of production systems are better modelled as flow shops, rather than as job shops. This has an impact on production management approaches, and in particular on order review and release systems. In fact, ORR systems have been designed with job shops in mind, because they are the most complex systems to manage, and because they are considered the optimal system for non-repetitive production. We believe that job shop designed ORR systems are not the best ones for flow shop systems. We consequently propose a new ORR system designed for non-repetitive production in flow shops and based on lean principles. The simulation campaign run to test the new model shows that it yields lower lead times and increases output.

Lean implementation in non-repetitive companies: a survey and analysis

With the recent impressive growth of emerging countries, western companies have been compelled to strengthen their capability to customise products efficiently. Implementing Lean might be a solution for achieving such efficiency. In this paper, after presenting a review of the main characteristics of non-repetitive companies, we will depict the main problems and highlight several solutions for implementing Lean in the context of non-repetitive companies. This is relevant, as implementing Lean in non-repetitive companies might not be straightforward due to the notable differences between such companies and the high volume companies in which Lean has originally been proposed. The outcomes of this paper come mostly from the analysis of past literature and thus collect the advances of research in such a novel ambit of the Lean implementation.

A model for considering the impact of rescheduling planned maintenance activities in a maintenance service contract

Maintenance services are becoming increasingly relevant and both service providers and users are paying more attention to cost and service level. Nonetheless, until now very little attention has been devoted for understanding and evaluating rescheduling costs which can be quite relevant, particularly if maintenance is outsourced to external providers. This article proposes a model to measure the costs for rescheduling maintenance interventions, thus allowing to take them into consideration both when defining a service contract and when running it. The model has been developed after a wide empirical analysis deployed in two phases: a first exploratory phase aimed at identifying the variables of the rescheduling problem by interviewing the main maintenance service providers in Italy; the second, a confirmatory phase has been developed validating the model using data from real industrial setting and analysing the results with the managers who supplied the data.

Integrated maintenance and production planning: a model to include rescheduling costs

Purpose – Maintenance is a key lever for reducing costs in manufacturing companies. Researchers have focused in the past on the importance of integrating maintenance and production planning to obtain total cost savings and have proposed a number of models. Nonetheless, all such contributions take a static perspective and do not consider the dynamics of markets, e.g. when some already committed preventive maintenance (PM) interventions are to be rescheduled. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to suggest a new decision‐making process to manage the rescheduling of PM interventions and to show – through the proposal of an ad hoc planning model – the economical savings from expressly considering rescheduling costs in re‐planning PM interventions.Design/methodology/approach – In this paper the authors used six case studies to infer both the current process of production and maintenance integrated planning and the decision‐making process followed for rescheduling PM interventions. From the current practices the...