Andrea Bacchetti

• Doctor of Engineering, PhD
• Researcher at University of Brescia

This paper proposes a general model to evaluate the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of durable consumer goods (e.g. cars, household appliances). The TCO approach has been developed to support purchasing decisions in the business-to-business domain: here we use similar principles to consider the business-to-consumer context. The new customer-oriented...

This paper stems from an improvement project carried out at a men’s outwear manufacturer, aimed at reducing and stabilising the production lead time (LT). A method has been developed that builds on three well-established operations management theories: Little’s law, the workload control method and the logistic operating curves. In the action resear...

This paper illustrates the results of an empirical study involving 21 engineer-to-order (ETO) companies, operating in the machinery-building industry. The study investigates the needs and requirements of such companies in terms of software support for governing the businesses, with particular emphasis on production planning and control (PPC) proces...

This paper proposes a hierarchical multi-criteria classification method developed for inventory management purposes and applied in a case study of the spare parts business of a household appliance manufacturer. The classification method is built on the basis of SIX dimensions, resulting in 12 different classes of spare parts, for which differentiat...

This paper investigates the gap between research and practice in spare parts management, with specific reference to durable goods addressed to private or professional customers. The paper provides a critical literature review of theoretical contributions about spare parts classification and demand forecasting for stock control. The discussion of te...

In the rapidly changing digital economy, manufacturing companies are under growing pressure to adopt new approaches to business management by developing digital capabilities. This research explores the role of digital technologies in enabling these capabilities, using the Digital Capability Model (DCM) as a guiding framework. While previous researc...

The COVID-19 pandemic’s impacts have been devastating for the global economy, and particularly for manufacturing companies. Many firms were unprepared for a crisis of this magnitude and adapted their operations in an ad-hoc manner. Some of these adaptations were facilitated by digital technologies (DTs). This article examines extant literature usin...

Purpose This paper aims to provide and empirically test a conceptual model in which artificial intelligence (AI), knowledge management processes (KMPs) and supply chain resilience (SCR) are simultaneously considered in terms of their reciprocal relationships and impact on manufacturing firm performance (MFP). Design/Methodology/Approach In the stud...

This paper investigates how much Italian farms are involved in the so-called “Agriculture 4.0” (Agri 4.0) journey. The paper focuses on analyzing the knowledge and adoption levels of specific 4.0-enabling technologies while also considering the main benefits and obstacles. A descriptive survey was carried out on a total of 670 respondents related t...

Demographics will increase the demand for food and reduce the availability of labour in many countries all over the world. Moreover, scarcity of natural resources, climate change and food waste these are issues that are strongly impacting the agricultural sector and undermining sustainability. Digitalisation is expected to be a driving force in tac...

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected manufacturing companies and necessitated adaptations of firms’ operations. Despite the increasing interest in this subject, a scarcity of systematic analysis can be observed. The present study systematically reviews the existing research on the COVID-19 pandemic concerning the manufacturing industry. This paper ai...

This article focuses on manufacturing logistics, exploring how Italian companies are approaching Logistics 4.0. The purpose is to evaluate the state of the art of technology adoption, highlighting the main influencing factors, and showing the related benefits and obstacles. An exploratory survey was carried out on 91 Italian manufacturing companies...

Purpose This paper has two objectives: first, to investigate the state-of-the-art of Industry 4.0 (I4.0) adoption in Italian manufacturing firms and, second, to understand variations in technologies implemented and business functions involved, benefits perceived, and obstacles encountered in I4.0 implementation over a three-year period. Design/met...

Industry 4.0 (I4.0) encompasses a plethora of digital technologies effecting on manufacturing enterprises. Most research on this topic examines the effects in the smart factory domain, focusing on production scheduling. However, there is still a lack of comprehensive research on the applications of I4.0 enabling technologies in manufacturing life-c...

Dear colleagues, this Special Issue, of which I have the honour of being editor, together with colleagues Marco Ardolino, Marco Perona and Jan Ola Strandhagen, aims to promote research concerning the applications and impacts on Industry 4.0, beyond the effects on the production department. In particular, we are seeking studies investigating the rol...

This paper studies the optimization of the distribution planning process in a supply chain composed of set of production plants, a set of regional warehouses and a set of retail customers. There are several available distribution strategies, based on direct shipping from the production plants and indirect shipping through the regional warehouses. A...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate how much the Italian manufacturing companies are ready to be concretely involved in the so-called “Industry 4.0” (I4.0) journey. In particular, this paper focuses on analyzing the knowledge and adoption levels of specific I4.0 enabling technologies, also considering how organizations are involve...

The initiative of Industry 4.0 (I4.0) has been proposed in Germany in 2011. From that moment, both academical and industrial communities started to be interested in this new paradigm due to its potential capability of transforming traditional manufacturing systems into flexible, customizable and autonomous ones. Indeed, scholars have provided contr...

To carry out a comprehensive analysis of additive manufacturing (AM) technologies, two major aspects need to be considered. Firstly, identification of AM’s capabilities in manufacturing final products in industry requires an accurate evaluation of their impacts across all supply chain stages. Secondly, making products additively entails potential c...

Higher global competition and more complex customer demands pushes manufacturers to provide value-added products to the market in a faster and more reliable way. Companies can exploit the outstanding improvements in digital technologies whose adoption has brought to the so-called “Industry 4.0” (I4.0) revolution. Indeed, technologies such as Additi...

The well-established Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) concept has been applied to several durable goods industries, including machinery. However, none of the existing TCO models explicitly focus on such highly energy-intensive equipment as metal melting furnaces. In this paper, an application of the TCO concept to aluminium melting furnaces is explore...

New trends for capital goods manufacturers push towards selling the products usage or performance rather than the product itself. This evolution from traditional business models, based on the product sales, to new service-oriented business models (BMs), has received increasingly attention both in the academic and managerial community. Despite this,...

Additive Manufacturing (AM) is a recent and rapidly developing technology, which has brought about significant disruptions in manufacturing arena. To capture the full spectrum of changes resulting from AM’s introduction into industry, it is not sufficient to look at it just as a disruptive set of technologies but, rather, take a system’s approach....

Servitization in the manufacturing industry implies a shift from an offer based mainly on standard goods, to a wider value proposition composed of solutions aimed at solving specific customers’ problems, obtained by integrating tangible and intangible elements. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the servitization strategies of manufacturin...

Questa mini-serie di articoli si pone l’obiettivo di sintetizzare un lavoro più ampio di ricerca, sviluppato con e per la Confederazione Generale Italiana dei Trasporti e della Logistica (CONFETRA), finalizzato a stimare quali potranno essere gli impatti legati alla diffusione delle nuove tecnologie sulle attività produttive del nostro paese, e di...

Le domande alle quali si cercherà di dare una risposta sono le seguenti: Quali tecnologie digitali avranno un impatto sostanziale sui volumi della produzione industriale, e quindi, più o meno direttamente, sulle attività degli operatori logistici? Ha senso che tali operatori inizino sin da subito ad acquisire una maggiore consapevolezza circa le c...

This paper is a focus study to introduce an alternative approach to the existing ones, which could be taken to implement Additive Manufacturing (AM) systems for industrial applications. This approach is mainly based on the use of Product Service Systems (PSS) concept in order to turn AM into a more relevant field for service-based purposes within i...

Quali tecnologie digitali avranno un impatto sostanziale sui volumi della produzione industriale, e quindi, più o meno direttamente, sulle attività degli operatori logistici? Ha senso che tali operatori inizino sin da subito ad acquisire una maggiore consapevolezza circa le conseguenze di questa rivoluzione digitale? Basandosi su fonti comprovate,...

Additive Manufacturing (AM) refers to a set of production methods which comprises not only the technologies and their corresponding manufacturing processes, it also includes the supportive underlying platforms and infrastructures such as automation and CAD interfaces whose proper implementation would sometimes necessitate drastic changes to take pl...

Sono tante le variabili da prendere in considerazione per definire in quali casi è utile ed economicamente conveniente l’utilizzo di questa tecnologia – complessità del prodotto, livello di personalizzazione richiesto dai clienti e volumi da generare –. Il Laboratorio Rise dell’Università di Brescia, in collaborazione con CSMT, ha messo a punto un...

With an ever growing diffusion of additive manufacturing (AM) system in industrial and consumer level, as well as the direct and indirect dynamics which are being introduced resulting from its inclusion as a viable production system on companies' portfolio, the need to reconfigure production system and adapt the production line becomes even more re...

With an ever growing diffusion of Additive Manufacturing (AM) system in industrial and commercial level, as well as the direct and indirect dynamics which are being introduced resulting from its inclusion as a possible production technology on companies’ portfolio, the need to reconfigure production system and adapt the production strategy becomes...

With an ever growing diffusion of Additive Manufacturing (AM) system in industrial and commercial level, as well as the direct and indirect dynamics which are being introduced resulting from its inclusion as a possible production technology on companies' portfolio, the need to reconfigure produc‐ tion system and adapt the production strategy become...

Come adeguare le nuove esigenze operative alla strategia aziendale? Le risposte possono giungere da un'attenta analisi e dall'elaborazione di ipotesi e simulazioni di scenario, come illustra il caso trattato in queste pagine.

Lo scenario competitivo globale sta subendo profondi cambiamenti. In primo luogo, la domanda commerciale è/sarà sempre più frammentata, in relazione alle crescenti esigenze di personalizzazione da parte dei clienti: il business del futuro non consisterà tanto nel produrre pochi prodotti in elevate quantità, bensì nella capacità di produrre e commer...

Un numero sempre maggiore di aziende manifatturiere sta approfondendo le possibili applicazioni industriali della stampa tridimensionale all'interno delle proprie attività produttive. Le applicazioni di tecnologia additiva possono stravolgere anche le attività logistiche, ma molte aziende non ne sono ancora consapevoli.

The distribution planning process is one of the phases of the broader logistics and production planning process for almost every company, and plays a pivotal role in the overall performances (Lee and Kim, 2002; Bard and Nananukul, 2008). According to Chandra and Fisher (1994), companies can treat this stage in a dual approach. In the first one the...

Nowadays, services are increasingly taking the lead in global economy, in terms of both wealth produced and value added (Wölfl, 2005); at the same time the economic downturn has led in the last years, to demand stagnation on European markets. Thus, services, that are much more difficult to imitate by being less visible and more labor dependent, are...

The distribution planning process is one of the phases of the broader logistics and production planning process for almost every company, and plays a pivotal role in the overall performances (Lee and Kim, 2002; Bard and Nananukul, 2008). According to Chandra and Fisher (1994), companies can treat this stage in a dual approach. In the first one the...

The provision of information-based immaterial goods as opposed to the manufacture of material ones has taken the lead in global economy, in what is known as the servitization process. Manufacturing companies’ interest in extending their value proposition has been increasing in the last decades, and the traditional boundary between manufacturing and...

Ottimizzare la distribuzione dei prodotti surgelati lungo la filiera, al fine di ottenere vantaggi di tipo economico e non solo: questo l’obiettivo dell’analisi che vi presentiamo in queste pagine. Nel dettaglio, l’azienda, oggetto dello studio, produce in Nord Europa, stocca in Italia e serve quindi svariati punti della GDO sparsi nella Penisola.

GENNAIO 2015 innovazione 3 GENNAIO 2015 N el mercato attuale per eccellere rispetto alla concorrenza spesso è necessario garantire prodotti di alta qualità, con costi (e quindi prezzi) ridotti, in tempi brevi. Molte aziende hanno compreso che per ottenere questi miglioramenti (qualità, costi, tempi) non è più suffi ciente acquistare macchinari più...

Our study focuses on companies operating according to an Engineer-To-Order (ETO) strategy, where each product has a distinctive degree of customization according to specific customer requirements. Due to the main features of ETO context (low level of repetitiveness and high responsiveness to customers' requirements changes), companies need differen...

Nowadays, services are increasingly taking the lead in global economy, in terms of both wealth produced and value added (Wölfl, 2005). Evidences from OM literature show that in such a context, extending the service business through what has been defined as servitization (Vandermerwe and Rada, 1988), can lead to generate new and less imitable compet...

Il presente articolo illustra come misurare e controllare i costi secondo la logica dell'activity based costing, prendendo come esempio il progetto realizzato per Selpro, piccola azienda produttrice di dispositivi elettronici per applicazioni industriali.

Stock e vendite checkup empirico O rmai è risaputo: con l'inizio di questo millennio l'ambiente esterno in cui operano le aziende non è stabile, al contrario è caratterizzato da imprevisti e continue evoluzioni, costringendo così le imprese ad adattarsi rimettendo in discussione persino la modalità operative adottate da sempre. Condizioni chiave pe...

Il presente articolo descrive le attività svolte (e in corso di svolgimento) nell’ambito del progetto SIGI-X (www.sigi-x.it), un progetto pluriennale finanziato dal Ministero dello Sviluppo Economico nell’ambito del bando Industria 2015 – Made in Italy, con un budget complessivo di più di 6 milioni di euro.

In this paper, we focus on the One-of-a-Kind Production (OKP) in-dustry, where each product is designed and manufactured based on specific cus-tomer requirements to a large extent, according to an Engineer To Order (ETO) approach. This research has been carried out among the "SIGI-X" project, funded by the Italian Ministry of Economic Development (...

Nowadays, global competition pushes manufacturing companies to continuously increase the customization of their products up to reach the One-of-a-Kind Production (OKP), where each product is designed and manufactured based on customer requirements (Hong et al. 2010). These companies supply high value and customised products, with deep and complex p...

The increasing importance of after sale services and service parts provision generated increased attention by OEMs that need supporting the products they sell. An efficient and effective service parts management is, indeed, a lever for improving customer satisfaction and profits. Inventory management plays a central role in achieving these goals. H...

Rioganizzare il magazzino per un picking più produttivo R ipensare globalmente il proprio magazzino in ottica di riduzione degli sprechi e massimizzazione della produttività, anche alla luce di un previsto aumento del numero dei codici da gestire e del relativo fl usso di prodotti. Questa l'es igenza di base manifestata da Astelav, PMI torinese att...

Nowadays, global competition pushes manufacturing companies to continuously increase the customization of their products up to reach the One-of-a-Kind Production (OKP), where each product is designed and manufactured based on customer requirements (Hong et al. 2010). At the same time, high quality level and competitive price represent the main driv...

Il progetto esposto in questo articolo, frutto di un lavoro dell’Università degli Studi di Brescia e condotto all’interno dell’azienda bresciana Industrie Saleri Italo S.p.A., si pone l’obiettivo primario di ottimizzare i costi delle attività logistiche, agendo in particolare su due parametri di pianificazione: il lotto economico e le scorte di sic...

Many companies have shifted their focus from improving their product manufacturing and product delivery processes to improving after-sales service and customer support (Vigoroso 2005). Spare parts management today is an integral component of the strategic service chain; three-quarters of supply and operations managers rated service parts management...

In industrial contexts the proportion of the stock range that is devoted to spare parts is often considerable (e.g. Vereecke and Verstraeten, 1994) and small improvements in spare parts management may be translated to substantial cost savings (Eaves and Kingsman, 2004). Many research projects have considered issues related to the management of spar...

Il presente articolo descrive un progetto di analisi e di ristrutturazione del processo di gestione delle parti di ricambio svolto, con l’utilizzo di uno strumento IT specifico presso un gruppo multinazionale leader della fascia media di mercato del settore dell’apparecchio domestico, dal Supply Chain and Service Management Group (SCSM) dell’Univer...

Affrontare in modo coordinato e sistematico i processi di pianificazione della filiera logistico - produttiva, adottando adeguati modelli di gestione, può portare ad un miglioramento sensibile delle prestazioni aziendali. Con gli strumenti già a disposizione e quindi un costo limitato.

Purpose The objective of the paper is to point out challenges and opportunities in spare parts management practice in durable goods industries addressing private or professional customers. Design/methodology/approach A multiple case study of ten manufacturing companies operating in the white goods, heating, air conditioning, automotive and printin...

Il presente articolo descrive un progetto di analisi e ristrutturazione del processo di gestione delle parti di ricambio in Candy-Hoover (Gias Service), gruppo multinazionale leader della fascia media di mercato del settore dell’apparecchio domestico.

The aim of this paper is to propose and discuss a hierarchical multi-criteria spare parts classification method developed for inventory management purposes and tested through an intensive case study in an Italian household appliances manufacturing company. In particular, the classification scheme under concern is built on the basis of several key d...

Il presente lavoro si inserisce all’interno di un ampio progetto di ricerca relativo al tema della logistica del post-vendita e si focalizza sullo studio della gestione delle parti di ricambio in alcune importanti aziende operanti nel settore dei beni di consumo durevole (apparecchio domestico, termotecnica, macchine per la stampa professionale, au...

The objective of the study is to point out challenges and opportunities in spare parts management practice in durable goods industries, through a case based research carried out in 10 manufacturing companies. The empirical evidence from the cases and the scientific literature, point out challenges and criticalities on three different dimensions: me...

Il progetto in questione ha avuto come obiettivo l’ottimizzazione della produttività degli operatori addetti all’attività di picking all’interno del polo logistico italiano di Ideal Standard e Ceramica Dolomite (Figura 1) con la conseguente minimizzazione dei costi logistici annessi. Tale magazzino è di nuovissima generazione e quindi necessitava d...

In the last 30 years the technology evolution has grown firms' interests in increasing their performance through scheduling systems, requiring at the same time more automation and flexibility. This need of robust methodologies for shop floor planning, being possible by actual powerful information systems and high– performance hardware devices, is r...

Demand and inventory management for spare parts are different than for components used in assembly of finished products, in reason of lumpy demand, larger variety and risk of stock obsolescence. The paper deals with three aspects: 1) a description of the elements of complexity peculiar to the spare parts supply chain; 2) a framework and a literatur...

Il presente lavoro si inserisce all’interno del tema della logistica del post-vendita e si focalizza sugli aspetti legati alla gestione dei ricambi nel settore dell’apparecchio domestico, focalizzandosi sul confronto tra approcci teorici e pratiche industriali.

Product-related services play a key role in manufacturing contexts as a long-term potential revenue source, a mean to uncover customer needs, and a strategic driver for customer retention. In durable goods industries, however, the provision of after-sales services is often outsourced by manufacturing companies. This paper develops a methodology for...

Product-related services, in particular the ones offered together with or after the product's sale, play a key role in manufacturing contexts as a long-term potential revenue source, a mean to uncover customer needs, a strategic driver for customer retention, and a way to allow a continuous improvement of product and service quality. In durable goo...

Il rapporto presenta un’analisi empirica degli attori, delle attività e dei processi relativi al post-vendita, sviluppata presso numerose aziende Italiane nell’ambito dell’apparecchio domestico e professionale (nei comparti dell’elettrodomestico bianco, piccolo elettrodomestico e termotecnica) svolte tra il 2003 e la prima metà del 2007. Obiettivo...

L'obiettivo principale del presente lavoro è la progettazione e la realizzazione di uno strumento informatico dinamico in grado di supportare l'ottimizzazione della programmazione di breve periodo della produzione all'interno di una PMI manifatturiera. La realtà industriale oggetto di studio è stata modellizzata come un ambiente a N macchine singol...