Maria Elena Nenni

Demand Forecasting in the Fashion Industry: A Review

Forecasting demand is a crucial issue for driving efficient operations management plans. This is especially the case in the fashion industry, where demand uncertainty, lack of historical data and seasonal trends usually coexist. Many approaches to this issue have been proposed in the literature over the past few decades. In this paper, forecasting methods are compared with the aim of linking approaches to the market features.

Product Lifecycle Management as a Tool to Create Value in the Fashion System

The aim of this paper is to present the fashion system as a “cluster” and to evaluate the characteristics of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) taking into account various factors, in particular the different approaches to dealing with market needs. More specifically, the “ready-to-wear fashion” and “fast fashion” models will be presented and compared. The paper takes the Italian fashion system as the unit of analysis and assumes that consumer behavioural factors act in a non-predictable (i.e., random) way in the constantly changing social and cultural environment. Considering the internal complexity of a whole market system, a simplified system dynamics model is proposed.

Managing OEE to Optimize Factory Performance

It is a common opinion that productivity improvement is nowadays the biggest challenge for companies in order to remain competitive in a global market [1, 2]. A well-known way of measuring the effectiveness is the Overall Equipment Efficiency (OEE) index. It has been firstly developed by the Japan Institute for Plant Maintenance (JIPM) and it is widely used in many industries. Moreover it is the backbone of methodologies for quality improvement as TQM and Lean Production.

Improvement of Manufacturing Operations through a Lean Management Approach: A Case Study in the Pharmaceutical Industry

This paper aims to demonstrate the positive effect of a Lean Management (LM) approach to increasing efficiency, even in a company which is subject to critical market issues. The pharmaceutical industry is a well-known example of a crisis-affected context and companies have directed attention to Lean Management for a long time, but they are stable in increasing effectiveness. This research uses a case study to move the attention to efficiency as an attractive LM goal. The result of this study provides a reference for academia as well as the business field.

How to Increase the Value of the Project Management Maturity Model as a Business-Oriented Framework

An organizations effectiveness partly depends on the success of its projects. With this in mind, many efforts have been spent in recent decades to enhance the project management culture, but results are still highly unsatisfactory. Project Management Maturity Models (PMMMs) are seen by both the academic and the industrial communities as a solid instrument to achieve this goal. The point at issue is that surveys and researches show PMMMs must be better linked to business and financial performance. The aim of this paper is to explore the scope for improvement to evolve PMMMs as business-oriented frameworks.

The Italian Footwear Industry: an Empirical Analysis

This paper aims to provide readers with a deep empirical analysis on the Italian footwear industry in order to investigate the evolution of its structure (trends in sales and production, number of firms and employees, main markets, etc.), together with the identification of the main drivers of competitiveness in order to explain the strategies implemented by local actors.

Validating Virtual Safety Stock Effectiveness through Simulation

As a means of avoiding stock-outs, safety stocks play an important role in achieving customer satisfaction and retention. However, traditional safety stock theory is based on the assumption of the immediate delivery of the ordered products, which is not a common condition in business-to-business contexts. Virtual safety stock theory was conceived to raise the service level by exploiting the potential time interval in the order-to-delivery process. Nevertheless, its mathematical complexity prevented this technique from being widely adopted in the industrial world. In this paper, we present a simple method to test virtual safety stock effectiveness through simulation in an inventory system using a base stock policy with periodic reviews and backorders. This approach can be useful for researchers as well as practitioners who want to model the behaviour of an inventory system under uncertain conditions and verify the opportunity for setting up a virtual safety stock on top of, or instead of, the traditional physical safety stock.

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....

Spin-off and Innovation in the Pharmaceutical Industry

Parent companies usually undertake corporate spin-offs to cope with higher competitive environments or when, in high technology industries, the differences between R&D investments and intangible assets are larger. Consistent with the recent “positive view“, spin-offs can be considered as a “proactive strategic choice” to foster innovation, develop new activities, being different from past strategic initiatives and, more generally, not being strictly connected to the corporate strategy of the firm. In order to investigate the relation between divestiture decisions and innovation, we conduct an explorative case study in the pharmaceutical industry to show how spin-offs can help firms to explore new opportunities for innovation, search for new funding and push to create the basis for future development.

Product lifecycle management and compliance with international standards: a case study analysis in the footwear industry

As the globalisation of markets in the footwear industry became more evident, several restrictions have been imposed by international directives, standards and regulations, as well as by market requirements. Such external needs are progressively pushing the footwear manufacturers to introduce continuous improvements in their production processes and in the firm management in general. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the awareness of the adoption of product lifecycle management (PLM) in the fashion industry, in order to describe the state of the art in the Italian context. To this extent, we investigated the conformity to industry-related technical regulations as a first step towards the international development of companies. The paper presents the preliminary results of a survey conducted in the Riviera del Brenta industrial district in the Veneto Region of Italy.