As countries interact more and more, technology gains a decisive role in facilitating today’s increased need for interconnection. At the same time, systems, becoming more advanced as technology progresses, feed each other and can produce highly complex and unpredictable results. However, with this ever-increasing need for interconnected operations, complex problems arise that need to be effectively tackled. This need extends far beyond the scientific and mechanical fields, covering every aspect of life. Systemic Thinking Philosophy and the System Dynamics methodology now seem to be more relevant than ever and their practical implementation in real-life industrial cases has started to become a trend. Companies that decide to implement such approaches can achieve significant improvements to the effectiveness of their operations and gain a competitive advantage. This research, influenced by the Systemic Thinking Philosophy, applies a System Dynamics approach in practice by improving the quality control process of a pharmaceutical company. The process is modeled, simulated, analyzed, and improvements are performed to achieve more effective and efficient operations. The results show that all these steps led to a successful identification and optimization of the critical factors, and a significant process improvement was achieved.
The events industry is a project-based industry where sustainable development has been of ever-increasing interest over the last decade. In this regard, the importance of managing risks and delivering quality outcomes in corporate events and the events industry in general cannot be overstated. This paper aims to contribute to the enhancement of project management processes and quality of corporate events, with a focus on risk management. For this purpose, a set of semi-structured interviews with event managers was conducted and thematic analysis was used to qualitatively analyse the research data gathered. Data analysis resulted in the development of a set of tools and methods that have the potential to assist corporate event managers in the project risk management process. This set comprises of a work breakdown structure (WBS) template, a risk breakdown structure (RBS), and a set of risk treatment and mitigation strategies for corporate events. These tools are innovative in the sense that they are based on and correspond to the phases of the event life-cycle rather than individual management domains, have not been developed in unison before, and can be utilized collectively for greater benefits realization.
The importance of stakeholders’ analysis for the effective management of risks in any business sector has been widely recognized and depicted in International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standards. This kind of analysis is even more necessary in businesses and organizations dealing with significant technological and market changes, such as the provision and usage of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) as a marine fuel. In the LNG bunkering industry, several methods have been proposed to support risk management. However, they all suffer from an important drawback: they guide risk management mainly to the identification, analysis, and control of potential accidental events within a health and safety or a technical reliability analysis framework, failing to structure the correlation of risks with the actual actors, i.e., the numerous stakeholders whose decisions may influence directly or indirectly the organization’s objectives. This paper presents a method to systematically analyze the role of stakeholders and their ability to pose threats and/or opportunities to an organization. The proposed approach employs the Social Network Analysis (SNA) methodology to model and analyze stakeholder interests, interactions, and relationships that are important to the organization’s objectives. The method is applied in a small-scale LNG bunkering project at a Greek port.
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