The layout re‐arrangement of fashion production lines realizing many small batches is rarely deployed according to well‐known engineering procedures. In fact, it would often appear too complex to call a plant engineer for the proper layout design of such small production lines. Rather, it is preferred to apply empirical methodologies when considering, generally, factory know‐how, general business needs, safety requirements, and so on. In the present work, the results of a fashion manufacturing line re‐layout were compared by analysing the current situation with the solutions provided by a ʺhomemadeʺ company design, both through a systematic layout planning approach and a broader lean reengineering activity. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of each solution, the different alternatives were compared with the help of a discrete event simulator, analysing productivity, transportation times and costs. The result of the case study showed a slight advantage with the lean approach in considering such efficiency indicators. In addition, the lean production methods allowed the designers to identify some inefficiencies that other approaches could not see, since the latter did not focus on production in a holistic way

Abstract:In recent years companies are paying more attention on Business Continuity Management. BCM focuses both on potential threats identification and on management of unexpected block process. These two aspects are the basis of High Reliability Organization. The HRO paradigm was developed several years ago in high-risk organizations. It integrates two relevant approaches: preventing unexpected events and resilient organizations. The aim of this study is to define a rough but effective approach to support HROs in evaluating their most "compliant" maintenance approaches. The main phases of the study are: the identification of the main HRO features (both prevention and resilient ones), the identification of the main maintenance approaches used to date and finally the evaluation of their compliance according to HRO features. The paper presents a new method to evaluate the different maintenance approaches: in addition to productivity, it's also considered the necessity to guarantee production continuity following unpredictable events.

Modern production systems must guarantee high performance. Increasingly challenging international competition, budget reductions for the health sector and constant technological evolution are just three of the many aspects that drive pharmaceutical companies to continuously improve the productivity of their lines. The scientific literature has for many years been proposing calculation models for estimating the productivity of a machine. One of the most famous, and still used, is overall equipment effectiveness (OEE). This allows the calculation the valuable output considering the six ‘big losses’. The limitations of this approach are noticeable when considering a production line instead of a single machine. Numerous researchers have proposed alternative methods or changes in OEE, to be able to cover the widest spectrum of possible cases. In this study, we wanted to evaluate how such theoretical models related to OEE are actually able to represent the world of tight production flows or whether, in these cases, a more complex type of simulation should be preferred. To do this, we carried out a case study of a production line in the pharmaceutical industry, and the results showed that the simulation approach gives better results because of the peculiarities not considered by the theoretical models.

The role of maintenance in the industrial environment changed a lot in recent years, and today, it is a key function for long-term profitability in an organization. Many contributions were recently written by researchers on this topic. A lot of models were proposed to optimize maintenance activities while ensuring availability and high-quality requirements. In addition to the well-known classification of maintenance activities-preventive and corrective-in the last decades, a new classification emerged in the literature regarding the degree of system restoration after maintenance actions. Among them, the imperfect maintenance is one of the most studied maintenance types: it is defined as an action after which the system lies in a state somewhere between an "as good as new" state and its pre-maintenance condition "as bad as old." Most of the industrial companies usually operate with imperfect maintenance actions, even if the awareness in actual industrial context is limited. On the practical definition side, in particular, there are some real situations of imperfect maintenance: three main specific cases were identified, both from literature analysis and from experience. Considering these three implementations of imperfect maintenance actions and the main models proposed in the literature, we illustrate how to identify the most suitable model for each real case.

Thymoma is an uncommon slowly growing neoplasm. It usually presents with paraneoplastic syndromes including the immunodeficiency syndrome called Good syndrome and hematological disorders. Pure red cell aplasia is a well-recognized complication of thymoma, and aplastic anemia is very rare in association with GS. We report a case of GS in a heavily treated patient with stage IV thymoma associated with a pure red cell aplasia and an amegakaryocytic thrombocytopenia that evolved into an AA and provide an up-to-date review of the relevant literature. This is the first case of the association of GS and AA with the coexistence of a heavily treated stage IV thymoma. The fatal outcome was not related to the progression of the thymoma, but rather to the severe infectious complications. The combination of lymphopenia and hypogammaglobulinemia typical of GS, coupled to the neutropenia, caused by bone marrow failure, was the main predisposing factor for the unfavourable outcome.