From the Special Issue Editors

We are pleased to introduce you to the 2^nd Issue of Volume 31. This is a special issue that covers papers selected from the 8^th International Conference on Production Research (ICPR) AMERICAS 2016 that took place at the Pontifical Catholic University of Valparaíso (PUCV) in Valparaiso, Chile from October 27–28, 2016. This ICPR Americas Special Issue provides the Engineering Management community with an up-to-date vision of some research topics of interest to this group of Latin American scholars. Conference topics covered Energy Management, Environmental and Social Issues, Healthcare Systems and Management, Lean Manufacturing, Production Quality and Standards, Production Technology, Systems and Management, Resource Efficiency and Sustainability, Service Engineering and Management, Supply Chain Management, Technology and Innovation Management, Work Design, and Human Factors and Ergonomics. The selected articles published in this special issue are related to Energy Management, Green Supply Chain Management, Enterprise Engineering, and Production Scheduling.

The first article is “Energy-Aware Production Scheduling in Flow Shop and Job Shop Environments Using a Multi-Objective Genetic Algorithm” by Vallejos-Cifuentes, Ramirez-Gomez, Escudero-Atehortua, and Rodriguez Velasquez. It presents the results of a research cooperation project between the Management Engineering Department from Universidad Nacional de Colombia and the Mechanical Engineering Department of Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana. Results show that it is possible to smooth the energy demand profile and obtain reductions close to 20% in energy consumption. It also indicates that it is possible to reduce peak loads and drops on applied energy sources demand, thus stabilizing the conversion process across the entire operational time with a minimum effect on the maximum production completion time.

The second article “Influence of Green Practices on Organizational Competitiveness: A Study of the Electrical and Electronics Industry” is authored by Sellitto and Herman from the Industrial and Systems Engineering of the Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos (UNISINOS). Based on a survey applied to companies in the electrical and electronics industry, a model is proposed to integrate green strategy, green innovation, externalities management in green operations, and information management in green operations. Results show the influence of factors such as compliance, strategic drivers, and corporate image and suggest that green strategy and green innovation are more likely to influence industry competitiveness and information management only partially influences competitiveness, while externalities management appears to have no influence.

The third article that forms this special issue is “Lot Streaming Flow Shop with a Heterogeneous Machine” by Ferraro, Rossit, Toncovich, and Frutos from the Engineering Department of Universidad Nacional del Sur (UNS). The article demonstrates the application of lot streaming for production scheduling. The results show that addressing the problem with a common sublot size throughout the entire process is inefficient, while addressing production scheduling with variable sublots greatly improves the quality of the solution but is computationally-intensive limiting the size of problem that can be solved. A decomposition procedure is developed to improve the solution obtained using consistent sublots and achieves lower computational requirements than the variable sublots approach.

Finally, the article “Integration of Business Process Architectures within Enterprise Architecture Approaches: A Literature Review” by Gonzalez-Lopez and Bustos from the Industrial Engineering Department of Pontifical Catholic University of Valparaíso (PUCV) is a review article. The literature review shows that most research that analyzes Enterprise Architecture (EA) approaches recognizes the need of integrating business processes but no research provides a Business Process Architecture (BPA) viewpoint or offers specific integration guidelines. Their review concludes by identifying criteria for adopting an EA approach and highlighting research gaps for integrating EA-BPA.

We would like to thank our peer reviewers for their invested time and expertise as well as EMJ Managing Editors Jennifer Cross and Brian Smith and EMJ Editors-in-Chief Edward Pohl and Heather Nachtmann.