Maria Caridi

• MSc, PhD
• Professor (Associate) at Politecnico di Milano

This study investigates how to implement a sustainable supply chain strategy by choosing a set of sustainable practices while considering the strategic priority assigned to sustainability within a company’s competitive strategy (i.e., an order winner (OW), market qualifier (MQ) or desirable attribute (DA)). Therefore, two research questions arise:...

The assessment of sustainability practices in the supply chain involves not only defining the measures or indicators, but also implementing, using and updating them according to driving elements that motivate companies to opt for sustainability. The aims in this study are to investigate if, how and why firms in different stages of the food supply c...

This study’s purposes are threefold. First, to identify the sustainability practices and the motivation behind their implementation across different stages in the chain. Second, to understand the relationship between the sustainability practices in a particular supply chain stage with its operational performances, in the same stage and in other sta...

This mini-paper serves as a sample and example of an evaluation of published work. There are standard steps that can be applied to any paper that aims to critique or evaluate any research work or published work. Feel free o refer to it.

Established supply chain management paradigms such as leanness, agility, and sustainability have received increased attention in the literature, but mainly as separate topics. However, while the importance of sustainability as a competitive priority has grown significantly in recent years, companies still try to reconcile the pressures of enhancing...

Today, the sustainability challenge has become a relevant issue in the fashion industry. However, given that the request for sustainability is relatively new in this industry, empirical research that could guide companies towards supply chain sustainability is lacking. This study aims to deepen the understanding of the main strategic approaches to...

The objective of this study is twofold. Firstly, to analyze sustainability practices adopted in collaboration, including vertical collaboration i.e., with other actors or stages upstream or downstream in the supply chain, and horizontal collaboration i.e., with actors such as non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Secondly, to identify the sustaina...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyse whether the adoption of e-commerce improves company business, innovation and operational performance and whether sales internationalisation might moderate this relationship. Design/methodology/approach The research is based on a survey within the fashion industry and a multi-step linear regression mo...

Purpose Researchers ascertain that the more the activities of new product development (NPD) process are outsourced to partners, the higher the need for integration. The purpose of this paper is to study: the extent to which the amount of information shared with the partners during NPD projects (DC visibility) depends on the degree of outsourcing (D...

Although it is well known that product design affects supply chain management, much less has been written about whether and how product design affects supply chain risk management. This research gap brought us to study the following research questions: which new product development (NPD) practices can mitigate supply chain risk? And how? Based on s...

In recent years, the scientific literature on supply chain management has increasingly debated on environmental sustainability as well as collaboration, presenting these issues as an important source of innovation along the supply chain. By combining literature streams on environmental sustainability, supply chain collaboration and innovation at th...

Although sustainable supply chain (SC) management has been widely investigated in recent years, the focus has mainly been on the practices adopted by a single company, so missing the big picture at SC level. This study of the Italian meat industry considers the SC as a whole, identifying the critical points for each stage in terms of economic, envi...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine which environmental and social sustainability practices companies in the Italian fashion industry adopt and how these companies communicate their sustainability commitment through their corporate websites. Design/methodology/approach – The multiple case studies approach was selected and the practic...

Sustainability has become a critical issue for the fashion industry globally. The question of how sustainability-related issues are regarded and implemented within this industry has been covered in recent studies, but there is still no overall perspective on the way these matters are being introduced throughout the entire supply network. This study...

This paper aims to investigate the alignment between fashion companies' CSR policy, as communicated through company website, and CSR retail practices customers can actually observe or get information about when visiting company's retail stores. The case study analysis is carried out using the Mystery Shopping technique. The sample is made up of com...

Literature has increasingly highlighted the importance of sustainable development. By considering literature streams on environmental and social sustainability at the supply chain level, this paper aims to analyse which are the main drivers that are pushing fashion companies towards these new goals and which supply chain sustainability practices ar...

In recent years, much attention has been devoted to the topic of supply chain visibility in the scientific literature. However, a thorough assessment of the benefits enabled by supply chain visibility has not yet been undertaken. This paper aims to provide a structured method and a set of assessment tools for quantifying the benefits that can be ac...

Purpose – This paper aims at developing a conceptual framework to identify the main features of supply chain innovation and to analyse the role of dynamic capabilities in implementing such innovations in the context of the fashion-luxury industry. Design/methodology/approach – The paper follows an exploratory approach based on one in-depth case st...

Purpose The aim of this paper is to propose an innovative quantitative approach to measure visibility in outbound supply chains and to implement it in order to evaluate the current degree of visibility that focal companies operating in the apparel industry have on their supply chains. Design/methodology/approach The study is based on an in‐depth l...

The integration of New Product Development (NPD) and the supply chain (SC) has been extensively analysed by researchers as a critical means to achieve success. However, most studies have focused on the integration of NPD and upstream SC, mostly from a local perspective. This paper aims to develop a comprehensive framework to investigate the integra...

Much of the literature on modularity assumes that firms with modular products adopt modular organization. In the realm of supply chain management, no consensus has been reached on the effects of product modularity on supply chains (SC). This paper investigates whether SC choices depend on product modularity and innovativeness, and how SC choices ca...

Efficient operations are essential for the survival of courier companies in their respective markets. In order to support efficient operations of the courier companies, a methodology for improving the dispatch process is proposed in this paper that incorporates both unitarian and pluralistic approach. In most of the actual operations research (OR),...

This paper is aimed at filling the gap between theory and practice in the area of safety stocks under MRP environments. It is focused on providing a new methodology for dimensioning an overall buffer against uncertainty in market demand, which often plagues SMEs – that act as sub-contractors or suppliers within large projects or they have a reduced...

This paper aims at analysing the supply management strategies in the luxury industry in order to find out (1) whether different clusters of companies could be identified within the luxury industry, on the base of a set of contingent variables derived from previous research, and (2) which supply chain strategy is currently applied within each cluste...

In recent years, scientific literature has devoted much attention to the topic of supply chain visibility. Nevertheless, further research is needed regarding the variables affecting the level of visibility that a company has within its supply chain. In accordance with Contingency Theory, this paper aims to study whether and to what extent the suppl...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to describe a quantitative approach to assess the degree of visibility that a focal company has of its supply chain, addressing specifically complex networks and ecosystems. Design/methodology/approach The study is based on an in‐depth literature review concerning the measurement of supply chain visibility and...

This paper highlights the effective design of production capacity as a means to improve productivity of paced lines and ultimately to gain a better competitive position. After a literature review, a model focused on the role of imbalance at the paced line design stage is introduced; then the performances of the model are tested via simulation and r...

The industry of luxury goods is worth investigating from the point of view of operations and supply chain (SC) strategy. Several authors expressed the need to focus SC strategy and align it towards the critical success factors (CSF) of the product/market. Despite this is a relevant topic also for the luxury industry, very few specific contributions...

Supply chain managers redesign their supply chain as a response to the introduction of new products. In highly innovative contexts, this ability is critical to ensure the success of the innovations on the market. However, little is known about what supply chains areas are more impacted by innovation, and therefore what actions supply chain managers...

The Italian industry of fashion goods is a business worth 67.6€ billion in 2006 (Il Sole 24ore, January 10, 2007), of which about 26€ billion is due to the luxury segment. Marketing gurus state that “consumers everywhere at every income level want more luxury” [Danziger, P.N., 2005. Let them Eat the Cake: Marketing Luxury to the Masses as well as t...

Supply chain management is a critical issue when dealing with the fashion industry. When managing retail, Demand Management is an area that requires investigation because retail is usually the only contact point between the company and its customers. This paper focuses on two luxury fashion industries; fashion apparel and shoes, watches and jewelle...

This paper presents the results of a project aimed at reducing loan applications lead time within the loan granting process of an Italian bank. The loan granting process has been modelled by means of a simulation model and the impact of five factors has been studied: i.e. first, the dispatching rule adopted to manage the queues of loan applications...

Over the last 5 years, the model has been applied to more than a dozen manufacturing and service organizations belonging to different sectors. The cases were useful to identify strengths and weaknesses of the methodology. The objectives of completeness and objectivity are reached and many of the hypotheses of relations between management activities...

Purpose The standpoint of this research lies in the study of the CPFR process for trading partners (belonging to the same supply chain) who are willing to collaborate in exchanging sales and order forecast. This points out the need for providing a collaboration process with an intelligent tool to optimise negotiation. Design/methodology/approach A...

This study aims to provide a new approach to the effective design of paced lines by focusing on protective capacity. The paper investigates—through an analytical model—the required level of protective capacity and its location along the line; then the proposed model is tested via simulation, by considering a four-station production (or assembly) pa...

In this paper the decisional process of the introduction of a new information system for advanced planning and scheduling and supply chain management (APS/SCM) is discussed, with particular care given to the value assessment stage. In a research programme recently carried out at Politecnico di Milano a new methodology has been developed and tested...

This paper presents an original approach to load-oriented manufacturing control for job-shop scheduling, based on fuzzy theory. The model allows to cope with the pitfalls encountered by traditional approaches to job-shop scheduling in the definition of system parameters. In fact, traditional approaches to job-shop scheduling assume that system para...

The standpoint of this research lies in the study of the Collaborative Planning Forecasting and Replenishment (CPFR) process for trading partners (belonging to the same supply chain) who are willing to collaborate in exchanging sales and order forecasts. The hurdles that arose in implementing CPFR in field applications indicate the need for providi...

In the last years, a strong disillusion has heavily affected many companies in the implementation of business to business (B2B) applications. These drawbacks are mainly due to the rushing adoption and acquisition of these new systems, believing that they would have acted as tools for automating processes, rather than real opportunities for modifyin...

The ever fast changes of customers’ needs and demands ask for reconfigurable and adaptive production systems, which can provide companies with the proper level of agility and effectiveness, without disregarding at the same time cost factors. In the last decade, a large amount of research works on the adoption of multi-agent systems (MAS) in several...

This research provides a literature review in the field of uncertainty dampening methods for manufacturing systems, and proposes a new model to improve materials management effectiveness in materials requirements planning environments. The literature review gives rise to a classification framework of the models along nine structural dimensions that...

This paper provides a methodology for managing safety and strategic stocks in materials requirements planning (MRP) environments to face uncertainty in market demand. A set of recommended guidelines suggest where to position, how to dimension and when to replenish both safety and strategic stocks. Trade-offs between stock positioning and dimensioni...

The competitive playground where nowadays firms struggle to survive has rapidly become unforeseeable: product life cycle has shrunk, becoming even shorter than in the past, and world-wide market is suffering for a strong customer differentiation which led to an increasingly wide product mix. In this industrial environment, the engineering change pr...

This work deals with production smoothing, one of the keys of success of Just In Time and Lean Production. By levelling the load of the workstations, production smoothing allows a regular material flow, shorter manufacturing lead times, and lower work in process. Different solutions to the mixed-model assembly lines sequencing problem have been pro...

This paper focuses on the evolution of planning systems in the recent years. In particular it deals with APS (Advanced Planning Systems), showing which limitations of traditional information systems for production planning APS overcome and highlighting their technical potential. Moreover, the issue of the integration between APS and ERP (Enterprise...

This paper presents a multi-agent model, ECAS, for sequencing a mixed-model assembly line. ECAS implements the concept of deliberative and co-operative agents: the agents contract in order to find a solution which overcomes the objectives of the single agents in order to pursue the global optimum of the system. ECAS represents the extension of a pr...