Traditionally, packaging design has had a subordinate role with respect to product design and production systems design; however, its impact on supply chain costs and performances can be devastating. Only in the past few years its strategic role has been recognized both in theory and in practice. Although packaging design research attracted considerable attention in the recent past, the purpose of this article is to broaden the field even further in two main directions. First, an attempt is made to review the status of literature on packaging design: a total of 89 articles published between 1990 and 2011 are reviewed and classified by content. In this contest, related International Standards are also presented and discussed, and a conceptual framework for packaging design is presented. Second, an agenda for future research in this area is provided
Purpose
– Logisticians in the worldwide industry are frequently faced with the problem of measuring the total cost of holding inventories with simple and easy-to-use methodologies. The purpose of this paper is to look at the problem, and in particular illustrate the inventory holding cost rate computation, when different kind of warehousing systems are applied.
Design/methodology/approach
– A multiple case study analysis is here developed and supported by a methodological framework directly derived from the working group discussions and brainstorming activities. Two different field of application are considered: one related to five companies with manual warehousing systems operating with traditional fork lift trucks; the other is among five companies operating with automated storage/retrieval systems (AS/RS) to store inventories.
Findings
– The multi-case study helps to understand how the holding cost parameter is currently computed by industrial managers and how much the difference between manual and automated/automatic warehousing systems impacts on the inventory cost structure definition. The insights from the ten case studies provide evidence that the kind of storage system adopted inside the factory can impact on the holding cost rate computation and permit to derive important considerations.
Practical implications
– The final aim of this work is to help industrial engineers and logisticians in correctly understanding the inventory costs involved in their systems and their cost structure. In addition, the multi-case analysis leads to considerations, to be applied in different industrial contexts. As other industrial applications are identified, they may be analyzed by using the presented methodology, and with aid from the data from this paper.
Originality/value
– The relevance of this work is to help industrial engineers and logisticians in understanding correctly the inventory costs involved in their logistics systems and their cost structure. In addition, the multi-case analysis lead to interesting final considerations, easily to be applied in different industrial contexts. As other industrial applications are identified, they may be analyzed by using the methodology and extrapolating the data from this paper.
Purpose -The purpose of the present research is to explore the current situation and future expectations on whether to self-manage or outsource logistics operations in centralized healthcare networks, and to analyse and quantify the relationships between logistics outsourcing, costs and performance. Design/methodology/approach -The paper is based on a thorough study of a local Italian healthcare network, which evaluated the economic sustainability of logistics outsourcing. The data were collected using interviews, documentation and observations in hospital pharmacies and wards, and by referring to public information available on the internet. A system dynamic simulation followed by a sensitivity analysis was used to investigate the impact of changing key variables as well as the advice of logistics providers. Findings -The sensitivity analysis demonstrates that logistics outsourcing is often the most economical choice. Social implications -Performance-oriented concepts applied to healthcare have many pros in terms of sustainable delivery of quality healthcare at affordable costs. Originality/value -While there are numerous studies on logistics outsourcing in many industries, when it comes to the healthcare sector literature is scarce, probably due to the great changes this sector has faced in recent times: thus, the paper's quantitative findings should be seen as a first attempt to assist the "make-or-buy" decision process toward sustainable development of the healthcare sector.
The general definition of the hybrid flow shop (HFS) environment is a set of S ≥ 2 production stages where at least one of these stages includes more than one machine, which can process one job at a time. A job can be defined as several operations to be performed by none, one, or more machines at each stage. Usually, these jobs are completed in some sequence between the different production stages, and in the case of setup activities, products are grouped in batches with buffers of work in progress between different production stages. Today, flexible production systems permit in some instances to relax job precedence constrains with alternative process cycles and to group together different batches of similar products in order to reduce setup activity incidence. On the other hand, the availability of multiple parallel machines in a single production stage makes it possible to split the lot size between different resources. This paper aims to solve the HFS scheduling problem in a flexible multistage batch production system, offering a heuristic procedure, to minimize the production makespan and increase the productive capacity utilization using a batch aggregation/splitting strategy while introducing the "workload leveling function" concept. The results are compared with other important scheduling rules widely accepted in the industry and made part of an industrial application. The company used as a test sample is an Italian rotor shaft manufacturer. The final result is illustrated to validate the proposed heuristics
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