Advances in customer-oriented manufacturing and value chain management

Recent years have stressed the need of re-inventing the manufacturing business concepts in order to achieve new competitive advantages. Low-cost countries are making a big effort to emerge, proposing products to mass market which force companies to dramatically change the way they perform their business. To differentiate the offer, enterprises need to address individual customer expectations by putting in place innovative strategies to target specific market niches, tackling needs directly from the customer, increasing the level of service and reducing response times.

This confluence of trends has led managers moving from a traditional functional focus to conduct business into a more holistic approach in addressing the customer needs where manufacturing and value chain need to be based on strategic collaborations with partners both at horizontal and vertical levels to enlarge capability to enter also into new markets. Hence, customer-oriented manufacturing is based on the capability of companies to produce with a market-push approach involving customers from the product definition phase and producing only what customers really want implementing innovative technologies. In this context companies are asked to supply personalised products without compromising high-quality, affordable price and eco-compatibility, while guaranteeing short time and high service levels.

Bearing all these challenges in mind, some strategies to be applied to assure full implementation of this paradigm are:

• closing the loop between design and production to enable customer-driven manufacturing;

• supporting product customisation to include consumer tastes and needs for functionalisation aspects in design and production;

• changing manufacturing technologies for small series and customised production;

• increasing vertical and horizontal integration at factory and value chain levels;

• integrating companies along sustainable supply networks to ensure agile value chains; and

• aligning innovation at product, process and network levels to assure easy reconfiguration of production systems and value chains.

The main objective of this special issue is to describe innovative models for customer-oriented manufacturing to support the production and value chain management for specific needs of consumers. This special issue collects contributions on methods and tools to support and guide networks in modelling, designing and configuring the combination of technologies, processes, functions, activities, relationships to pave the way to innovation in real contexts, including all related product life cycles aspects.

The guest editors aimed at generating a picture of some of the most relevant problems that the research community is presently addressing through valuable insights from research projects, as well as from case studies along the various dimensions like product configuration, product design, process design and management, network design and management. The papers represent an advancement to the theory as well as real-world application cases. The high level of industrial applicability of the contributions is shown by the several case studies in different sectors presented to validate the proposed approaches. Another important feature of the selected papers is given by the fact that most them do not focus only on one specific process area but address more than one as shown in Table 1.

Table 1. Most important research area per paper.

Particularly, the paper ‘Virtual development and production framework for textile orthotics’ by C. Kaiser, S. Vogt and M. Tilebein analyses the management of customer-driven manufacturing in the field of medical products, that is, textile orthotics to enable customer-specific, individualised healthcare. The authors state that it emerges clearly that an efficient development and production of customer-specific textile orthotics is not yet established, and many process steps are currently characterised by manual labour increasing expense of the healthcare sector. The paper proposes a system for virtual development and production framework for the individualisation of textile orthotics with respect to the diversity of customers’ characteristics. The innovative design approach allows to adapt dimensions of orthotics and virtually assess fitting properties before production. Moreover, digital functionalisation is a flexible module for enabling the production of individualised orthotics. The reduction of time consumption, the improvement of process flexibility and process performance for the CAD approaches, and the digital functionalisation is qualitatively described according to a specific case study.

The paper ‘Smart mobile apps for supporting product design and decision-making in the era of mass customisation’ by D. Mourtzis, M. Doukas, and C. Vandera starts from the fact that rigid centralised decision-making and infrastructures are no longer viable solutions for companies to withstand the globalised market pressure and to support customisation. Mobility and remote decision-making is steadily gaining ground as the standard practice in the inter-connected business world, and product personalisation tailored to the individual needs and preferences of the customers can now be supported through mobile applications. The work presents a set of mobile applications developed to support both product and process configuration by means of customer integration in the product design phase and subsequently the design of the manufacturing network. The applicability of the developed mobile applications is demonstrated through a pilot case in the automotive sector, and specifically, for the customisation of accessories and car aesthetics.

Providing new design environments to assist manufacturing engineers is essential to decrease products’ lead time. The paper ‘Integrated products–systems design environment using Bayesian networks’, by M. Hanafy and H. ElMaraghy, proposes a design environment using a Bayesian network starting from the assumption that complex systems can be better designed and utilised to manufacture more products efficiently if systems–products’ relationships are retrieved automatically and effectively.

Accordingly, this inducts the relationships within product and machine domains and maps the relationships between the two domains. The results from the two case studies show that, unlike other design methodologies, the Bayesian networks can provide adaptable design environment by analysing the interactions between existing manufacturing entities such as machines/products and fixtures/inserts’ specifications in a reverse engineering manner, without clearly identifying all the relationships between them a priori. The Bayesian network’s inference capabilities are used to determine the most suitable machines/fixtures for new parts and deduce the composite part/product that can be manufactured using newly acquired machines.

‘New technologies for customising products for people with special necessities’, by J.V. Durá-Gil, A. Ballester-Fernández, M. Cavallaro, A. Chiodi, A. Ballarino, C. Brondi, V. von Arnim, and D. Stellmach, proposes a set of technological improvements to support design and production of customised wearable products for elderly, disabled, diabetic and obese population groups. In particular, the paper is based on a comprehensive vision integrating design and configuration tools where sustainability criteria are taken into consideration and dedicated machines to enable product customisation during finishing phase. These production equipment and machinery can be used by small- and medium-sized enterprises operating in traditional industries like footwear and clothing (even those that already offer made-to-measure products to the mass public) to respond to the individual needs among such heterogeneous groups.

In the paper ‘Product-service supplier pre-evaluation with modified fuzzy ANP reducing decision information distortion’, by Z. Xu, A. Elomri, S. Pokharel and X.G. Ming, the research starts from the assumption that the challenge of new product-service supplier (PSS) selection is the lack of historical information on supplier performance. As one of the most popular techniques in supplier evaluation, the analytic network process (ANP) has an advantage in organising and analysing PSS pre-evaluation problems. A modified fuzzy ANP is proposed with the purpose of reducing decision information distortion in the pre-evaluation, where the geometric scale is employed to improve the consistency of the judgment matrices and a linear approach is proposed for the unqualified judgment matrix revision. Compared with other approaches in the literature, this approach shows advantages in retaining original decision information and the improved method assure to reach a stable rank of suppliers and distinguishing the importance of the criteria.

In the paper ‘Buyer–supplier relationship and optimisation model in a dynamic collaborative network with shortages allowed’ by Liang-Tu Chen the research problem of dynamically combined decisions is taken into consideration based on variables like retail price, stock depletion time/service level and replenishment schedule/quantity in a decentralised two-echelon perishable product collaborative network. Analytical solutions are derived using dynamic programming under two different trading policies, namely retailer-managed inventory with price-only mode (RMIPO) and vendor-managed inventory with consignment contract mode (VMICC). The use case developed in the paper shows that the VMICC policy yields lower retail price, larger replenishment quantity, higher service level and greater channel-wide profit than the RMIPO policy and achieves a win-win situation for both parties in the supply chain. Additionally, consumers benefit from lower retail price and higher service level in the VMICC policy.

Finally in ‘Proposing an integrated LCA-supply chain management (SCM) model to evaluate the sustainability of customisation strategies’, Brondi C., Fornasiero R. and Collatina D. start from the assumption that the increasing customisation level required by the market introduces a further degree of complexity in assessing the environmental impact effects on the customer-driven value chains. The paper proposes a new assessment method combing life cycle assessment (LCA) with discrete simulation to evaluate the supply chain strategies. Such integrated model can be applied to evaluate sustainability of a company aiming to integrate different customisation policies in a networked context. Such a model has been applied for the case of customisation in a fashion company. The modular LCA method aimed to identify the separate contribution of three macro-categories for the environmental impact calculation and then what-if scenarios have been created to compare different customisation strategies. The preliminary results of the LCA-SCM model applied highlights that specific decisional areas under the control of supply managers (e.g. supplier selection and manufacturing defects management) can significantly affect the environmental impact of the whole supply chain.