Pamela Danese

• University of Padua

Purpose This paper investigates how a firm’s organizational culture profile (configuration of organizational culture types) influences the effectiveness of operations management (OM) practices in improving their targeted outcomes. Design/methodology/approach We developed alternative hypotheses based on contingency and paradox perspectives to predi...

Scientific literature recognizes that Lean Six Sigma (LSS), Industry 4.0 (I4.0) and Circular Economy (CE) offer significant opportunities to improve operational performance and decrease the environmental impact. Wine supply chains represent a strategic asset for the world economy and an ideal setting for the implementation of LSS, I4.0 and CE, but...

In the context of global concern for the environment and considering the observation that very few manufacturing companies have taken a more proactive position on sustainability, it has been suggested that the stakeholder approach can contribute to the study of sustainability management. Hence, this paper analyzes the relationship between a set of...

Companies are recently facing increasing supply chain disruptions that may influence their supply base design choices. However, studies investigating how these choices affect the effectiveness of other supplier management practices, such as supplier integration, are scarce. The aim of this paper is to explore the impact of various types of supplier...

The fresh food cold supply chain industry needs to balance environmental, social, and economic aspects to maintain the market existence. Sustainable fresh food cold supply chain is one of the recent beneficial fields that can balance environmental, social, and economic aspects. To better understand the sustainable fresh food cold supply chain, it i...

Purpose Lean remains popular in a wide range of private and public sectors and continues to attract a significant amount of research. However, most of this research is not grounded in theory. This paper presents and discusses different expert viewpoints on the role of theory in lean research and practice and provides guidelines for future research....

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the debate on blockchain (BC) adoption for preventing counterfeiting by investigating BC systems where different options for BC feeding and reading complement the use of BC technology. By grounding on the situational crime prevention, this study analyses how BC systems can be designed to effecti...

A debated issue in the literature regards whether the effect of employee involvement for continuous improvement on organisational outcomes differs in contexts with different degrees of production repetitiveness. Divergent positions can be found both in the OM and HRM field. This paper aims at investigating the direct and indirect effect (through Ju...

The issue of sustainability is receiving increasing attention, and this debate now needs to be extended to consider the perspective of the supply chain. This article aims to investigate sustainability choices made along the supply chain (SC) by considering the static complexity of the SC. It investigates the different perspectives and tensions that...

This paper offers a systematic literature review on the fit among context, supply chain integration (SCI) and performance based on the analysis of 116 articles published in 28 peer-reviewed journals. By using Venkatraman’s (1989) model, which distinguishes fit into different forms, to frame previous literature, and Hakansson’s (1982) interaction mo...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate how just-in-time (JIT)-related job demands, problem-solving job demands and soft lean practices (SLPs) jointly influence employee well-being in terms of work engagement and exhaustion. Design/methodology/approach Based on the job demands-resources model, lean-related job characteristics were clas...

A rich research stream investigates the drivers and enablers of supplier sustainability practices, usually classified into suppliers’ monitoring and collaboration with suppliers. Differently from previous works analysing relationships between supplier sustainability practices and drivers or enablers, this research investigates how well-defined conf...

Fashion companies are extremely sensitive to the new challenge emerging from recent sustainability scandals. Existing literature has debated sustainability extensively by considering practices of sustainability that companies should apply. However, little research has focused on the design of a proper sustainability roadmap from a supply chain (SC)...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to identify the most influential determinants of healthcare employees’ problem-solving capabilities and attitudes towards kaizen initiatives, and clarify how these determinants are related to social outcomes. Design/methodology/approach – Drawing on the input-process-outcome framework, applied to kaizen initia...

Lean management (LM) has attracted the interest of scientists and practitioners since 1990, when Womack et al. (Womack, J.P., Jones, D.T. and Roos, D. (1990). The Machine that Changed the World. New York, NY: Rawson Associates) popularized the Japanese manufacturing approach aimed at eliminating waste to improve operational performance and customer...

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...

Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) is a key process that improves integration and communication between business functions and aligns the plans of a company into one integrated set of plans. This article focuses on the so-called S&OP ‘maturity models’, which describe the successive stages in the advancement of S&OP process according to a precise...

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 –This paper deals with lean transfer between different units in multi-plant organizations with different levels of adoption of lean practices. It investigates how certain influential contextual variables – i.e. lean standards development, lean transfer team composition, source characteristics, recipient national environment and corporate le...

Personalisation is a growing challenge, particularly for footwear companies strongly influenced by customer preferences. Previous research showed significant differences between footwear supply networks that provide personalised products, especially regarding key variables, such as the level of demand uncertainty, type of productive capacity, type...

This paper focuses on the identification of proper localization for collaborative production networks for personalized products. By the analysis of five case studies of the Italian footwear industry, the research provides the relationship between the type of personalization and the required supply network configurations by considering the productio...

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...

The original paper investigated which is the role of operations and supply chain management in luxury fashion companies’ success. It presented the results of the exploratory stage of a research project carried out at Politecnico di Milano and dealing with supply chain management in the luxury fashion industry. In total, 12 Italian luxury fashion re...

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...

Several multinational corporations are launching multi-plant lean programmes to increase the coordination of dispersed and heterogeneous plants and promote the growth of the organisation as a whole. Such programmes represent an emerging field of research that seeks to understand the most important mechanisms to transfer lean concepts and practices...

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...

This research intends to offer an original contribution by studying how fashion and luxury companies have redefined both their marketing (in terms of price, product, promotion and placement) and operations actions (in terms of the relationship between supply network partners, types of integration, location of production, outsourcing and network obj...

Though most scholars recognise that supply chain integration (SCI) can contribute to improving operational performance, previous studies on the SCI-performance link showed mixed results and several questions on this issue remain still open. In line with a configurational perspective, this study investigates whether plants adopting multiple integrat...

Lean management (LM) is a managerial approach for improving processes based on a complex system of interrelated socio-technical practices. Recently, debate has centered on the role of organizational culture (OC) in LM. This paper aims to contribute to this debate by examining whether plants that successfully implement LM are characterized by a spec...

This study examines the relationship between bundles of lean practices and cumulative performance, as described by the sand cone model. Based on the literature, hypotheses relating lean bundles to cumulative performance are proposed. They are tested using a sample of 317 plants in three industries and ten countries, based on structural equation mod...

Several multinational corporations (MNCs) have faced the challenge of transferring lean knowledge across manufacturing units in past years. This paper focuses on early stages of lean knowledge transfer (LKT) projects, considering initiatives carried out by lean knowledge owners to instill the lean philosophy to non-lean plants. Seven cases were ana...

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...

Several multinational corporations have been engaged in transferring lean knowledge across manufac-turing units while seeking competitive advantage. However, transform a subsidiary in a lean organization it is not a simple task to fulfill. This paper reports on a recent transfer project successfully conducted by an Italian company in its non-lean s...

Supplier integration is considered a key managerial strategy for improving buyer performance. This study adopts a configurational approach to supplier integration, based on the interaction and complementarity between supply chain management practices. In this perspective, this study explores the impact of supplier integration and measures aimed at...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to study whether a fast supply network structure interacts with customer integration (CI) by positively moderating the relationship between CI and efficiency performance. Design/methodology/approach The authors developed two hypotheses, incorporating dimensions of CI, fast supply network structure and efficienc...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to study whether just in time (JIT) supply practices interact with JIT production practices by positively moderating the relationship between JIT production and efficiency/delivery performance. Design/methodology/approach In total, six hypotheses are developed on the relationships between JIT production, JIT su...

This study reveals that in supply networks both external and internal integration practices have a significant and positive impact on responsiveness. The use of an international supplier network acts as a contingency factor on the relationship between external integration practices and responsiveness, as in an international context the effect on pe...

Just-in-time (JIT) practices are very useful to improve operational performance. These practices, that represent the core of Lean management methodology, were firstly developed in Toyota, where the production is highly repetitive, and for many years researchers have thought that this methodology could be applied in contexts characterised by repetit...

Over the years, practitioners and researchers have devoted their attention to forecasting techniques and methods that can be adopted to improve companies' performance. However, forecasting techniques alone are not enough since companies should also consider several other issues associated with forecasting process management, e.g. how companies coll...

Downstream integration is a key managerial area to improve performance in supply networks. Though most studies agree that downstream integration positively influences performances, the literature also reports cases of failures in achieving significant improvements. This evidence suggests that some factors may act as moderators on the downstream int...

Purpose This research intends to investigate whether there are synergies that a firm could or should exploit by simultaneously implementing customer and supplier integration. In particular, the aim is to analyze the impact of customer integration on efficiency, and the moderating role of supplier integration. Design/methodology/approach This study...

Several operations decisions are based on proper forecast of future demand. For this reason, manufacturing companies consider forecasting a crucial process for effectively guiding several activities and research has devoted particular attention to this issue. This paper investigates the impact of how forecasting is conducted on forecast accuracy an...

In recent years there has been increased interest in supply chain (SC) collaboration, as a process that promotes inter-company co-operation in different business areas. This paper focuses on collaborative planning initiatives adopted to support demand and supply planning in supply networks. Since companies implement several different forms of colla...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact of product modularity on new product development (NPD) time performance, and the moderating effects of interfunctional integration and supplier involvement on the product modularity‐time performance relationship. Design/methodology/approach The paper analyzes data from a sample of 186 manu...

Product modularity is considered a crucial driver for the improvement of new product development (NPD) performance, in terms of NPD time and product performance. However, quantitative studies demonstrating these links are scant, and some authors have expressed various doubts on whether a clear relationship between NPD time or product performance an...

Lean manufacturing impacts several operational performances. The usefulness of JIT links with suppliers is also well known. However, literature lacks strong empirical evidences to exhibit the relationship between lean manufacturing, operational performances and JIT linkages with suppliers. This paper aims to investigate this relationship. A questio...

The problem of delocalisation has assumed enormous importance over the last years, given the ever increasing number of firms who turn to it in order to improve their competitive performance. This type of intervention has an impact that extends throughout the whole supplier network of those firms that delocalise. The originality of this research in...

The radical changes that are affecting world economy have highlighted new structures and ways of competing for firms and networks of firms. A possible and robust way to increase a firm's competitiveness and cope with globalisation challenges is to implement and act as firm clusters. The term cluster traditionally refers to an industrial model that...

Purpose To comprehend the rationale behind managerial choices that lead companies to implement different types of collaborative planning, forecasting and replenishment (CPFR) collaborations. Design/methodology/approach Seven case studies of supply networks whose central firms operate in different sectors have been analysed. Findings Identifies si...

Purpose The aim of the current study is to develop an understanding of the decisional process that leads a company, at a given point in time, to choose the subsequent supply chain management (SCM) initiative to be implemented. Design/methodology/approach This research adopts the descriptive case study research design, as defined by Yin and McCutch...

Purpose – To highlight how vendor managed inventory (VMI) can be extended both upstream and downstream in the supply network to co-ordinate the material and information flows among a number of different suppliers, manufacturing and distribution plants (“extended VMI”). Design/methodology/approach – The research is based on data and information gath...

Collaborative Planning, Forecasting, and Replenishment (CPFR) programmes seek to improve the ability to anticipate and satisfy future demand by enhancing collaboration among companies within the supply network. Despite the existence of a detailed and comprehensive process model—published by the Voluntary Interindustry Commerce Standards Committee—i...

Finn-Power Italia produces automated machines for sheet metal bending, which it sells in more than 60,000 configurations, obtained by combining several options. Furthermore, designers often modify the product. Bending machines can produce very different products, from baking ovens to panels for ventilation systems for cruise ships. We developed and...

In 1995, GlaxoSmithKline launched a project with the aim of changing the management of planning and replenishment processes within GSK's global supply network. The purpose was to implement Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) both upstream and downstream in the supply network in order to co-ordinate the flows of materials and information between a number...

In an effort to better respond to heterogeneous customer needs, an increasing number of companies in different sectors deal with the combination of high variety and frequent product changes/modifications. This entails planning, designing, purchasing and manufacturing activities and exacerbates the alignment of Sales, Production Planning and Enginee...

The theory of network coordination provides a theoretical basis to explain how companies can overcome organizational boundaries and constraints to jointly manage business processes across supply networks. In particular, this paper focuses on Collaborative Planning, Forecasting and Replenishment (CPFR), a collaboration process whereby supply chain t...

Versatile manufacturing companies typically manufacture high variety, mainly customized products in relatively low volumes, competing for each order with other supplier companies on the basis of price, technical expertise, delivery time and punctuality. In this environment, the combination of high variety and frequent product changes/modifications...

Within the pharmaceutical industry, several recent environmental changes have led companies to put into practice SCM initiatives. This article investigates the implementation of improvement initiatives that pharmaceutical companies undertake to obtain better supply network performance. It reports on four networks whose central firms are leading pha...