Roberto Pinto

University of Bergamo | UNIBG · Department of Management, Information and Production Engineering

Digital servitization is a business model transformation process enabled by the use of digital technologies to create or improve industrial services and product‐service offerings by creating value and competitive advantage increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty as well as company revenue streams. 5G networks can enable digital servitization o...

The increased demand for homecare services – driven by the ageing population and the significance of homecare during the Covid-19 pandemic – has led to a need for greater rationalisation and organisation of the available resources, which must increasingly tend towards more resilient, sustainable, and human-centred approaches, collectively identifie...

The topic of human-centric design of smart production and logistics processes is increasingly debated in both academic and industrial communities. However, there is still little existing research on the integration of this concept with companies’ daily operations. The research presented in this paper aims to expand this area of research by proposin...

There is limited scientific and grey literature studying the phenomenon of how the current job profiles are being affected by Industry 4.0 technologies at the operational level. This paper aims to answer the following question: how can the evolution of Workforce 4.0 job profiles be analyzed from a job-task perspective concerning the adoption of sma...

The transition of logistics processes towards Logistics 4.0 (or Smart Logistics) – the specific application of Industry 4.0 in the logistics systems – contributes to the increasing need to establish reliable and efficient communication networks, to manage considerable amounts of data exchange between equipment, products, vehicles and workers. The c...

The Industry 4.0 paradigm is spreading in logistics processes since integrating 4.0 technologies in logistics tasks guarantees several benefits compared to traditional processes. However, there are still open questions related to impacts on the workforce, including problems related to skills, competence, and several ethical and social issues. This...

Although the benefits and advantages are emerging more clearly, the transition of traditional manufacturing and logistics systems to Industry and Logistics 4.0 paradigms is still challenging for companies. In particular, the change management strategies suggested and employed so far lack consideration of the role of human factors to support a succe...

Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) are increasingly undergoing a transition into the offering of Product-Service System (PSS) solutions. This transition has proven to be a difficult challenge characterised by inadequate contract decisions due to cost under-estimations and performance overpromises. Despite the relevance of cost estimation for t...

The shift from product to service-centric manufacturing companies has been considerably fostered by technological advancements and Smart Connected Product (SCP) adoption. In particular, the data collected at customers' locations supports the definition of innovative Product-Service System (PSS) solutions, defined as Data-Driven PSSs (DDPSSs), which...

Drone-based delivery represents a possible way of performing last-mile logistics activities with potential benefits on process efficiency, traffic congestion, and pollution emissions. However, many technological and legislative challenges still have to be overcome. From the technology perspective, the operating range of drones represents a critical...

In the aftermath of catastrophic events, problems always arise in the supply of goods in places affected by the emergency. During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, the shortage of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) created problems, especially in the healthcare sector, contributing to the uncontrolled spread of the virus. This paper prese...

Following the spread of the Industry 4.0 paradigm, the role of digital technologies in manufacturing, especially in production and industrial logistics processes, has become increasingly pivotal. Although the push towards digitalization and processes interconnection can bring substantial benefits, it may also increase the complexity of processes in...

Product proliferation has been adopted to increase sales introducing variants that may lure new customers, thus expanding the companies' reference market and potentially increasing the overall profit. However, extending the product-portfolio may imply product cannibalisation, increased costs, unproductive variety, and value-destroying complexity. I...

Many industrial companies are introducing new automation and digital technologies to improve their manufacturing and logistics processes, thereby implementing the Industry 4.0 paradigm. Nevertheless, choosing and adopting the most appropriate technologies is challenging and requires companies to consider many factors, including human and organizati...

Despite the growing availability of data retrieved by connected products and the recognition of the value that data may provide into the servitization domain, the understanding of data-driven PSS (DDPSS) remains poorly covered from both the academic and the practitioners' perspectives. Notably, a univocal definition of the characteristics of data-d...

Significant decrease in supply chain robustness can be observed in case of major supply chain disruptions. Recently, many companies experienced it with the Covid-19 pandemic, and it created big losses in companies' revenues. One of the major reasons was these companies could not be supplied by some of their suppliers across countries. In this study...

This study considers the joint pricing and sourcing decision problem for a buyer purchasing a product from a set of suppliers who offer quantity discounts. The suppliers’ supply and/or the buyer’s warehouse capacities are bounded, causing the buyer to split its order over multiple suppliers and periods. This study assumes that demand is random over...

Many industrial companies are introducing new automation and digital technologies to improve their manufacturing and logistics processes, thereby implementing the Industry 4.0 paradigm. Nevertheless, choosing and adopting the most appropriate technologies is challenging and requires companies to consider many factors, including human and organizati...

Many innovative technologies have been successfully adopted in logistics and supply chain management processes to increase efficiency, reduce costs or enhance communication. In recent years, considerable attention from both practitioners and academics has been focused on evaluating the impacts of innovative technologies adoption. However, the curre...

The spread of the Industry 4.0 paradigm introduced an increasing number of technological innovations into companies to improve logistics processes. During a transition to Logistics 4.0, it is necessary to consider all the issues that affect logistics, among which human factors (HF) are considered to be the most important. On the basis of the existi...

Data collection, analysis, and exploitation are among the most discussed topics in current researches related to Industry 4.0, especially as far as production themes are concerned. Some authors have discussed the benefits that could originate from the exploitation of product functioning data for maintenance delivery in the Product-Service System (P...

The explosion of digital technologies and data analytics capabilities are leading companies to rethink they offers and expand more than ever their business into the service domain. Specifically, considering manufacturers, the emerging possibility to connect products and create IoT architectures at the customer side, enable them to retrieve data flo...

With the consolidation of the Industry 4.0 paradigm and the constant evolution of technologies in manufacturing, logistics has undergone a profound transformation in recent years. The term Logistics 4.0 is currently used to identify supply chains characterized by higher levels of transparency, integration, dynamism, and reactivity in order to respo...

With the digital revolution, the IoT (Internet of Things) platform approach emerges as a supportive way for the implementation of IoT platform-based Product-Service System (PSS) offerings. To exploit the full potential of the platform economy and considering the complexity of the multitude of different actors in all the lifecycle stages, value crea...

The advancements and adoption of digital technologies enable manufacturers to approach intelligent production and reach a higher level of automation in the wave of Industry 4.0. Even though manufacturing is at the center of this industrial revolution, the impact of digital technologies is more far-reaching: indeed, one of the biggest growth potenti...

The online meal order and delivery business has scaled up in the last few years. The delivery process is currently performed by self-employed contractors (i.e. cyclists); however, in the future, it might be performed using drones, as some pilot tests are currently experimenting with this possibility. This paper outlines a scenario in which a fleet...

In the wake of industry 4.0, many industries have started to pivot towards digital, collaborative, and smart manufacturing systems by connecting their machinery as part of the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT has the potential to provide visibility and improve manufacturing systems through data collection, analysis, and subsequent actions based on ins...

The Urban Freight Fleet Composition (UFFC) problem addresses the need of a logistics service provider to define the optimal fleet mix in terms of types and number of vehicles to serve the demand for goods delivery in an urban area. Urban areas can be subject to access restrictions (e.g. based upon the time of the day or vehicles' characteristics) t...

With the spread of e-commerce, there has been an upsurge in the number of B2C deliveries. The limits of home delivery such as the difficulty in finding the exact addresses and the missing deliveries, exhacerbate the negative impacts of last mile logistics (i.e., congestion and pollution) To overcome these problems, solutions such as delivery to sup...

This article aims to investigate the organisational implications of adopting Industry 4.0 (I4.0) technologies, giving specific attention to operations. The paper addresses these implications in two directions: organisational prerequisites for, and consequences of, I4.0 technologies. The research is based on a multiple case study of Italian Small an...

The food and grocery retail sector is undergoing a deep transformation fuelled by customers’ changing habits and new digital technologies. The logistics in this area is often challenging, especially considering the food characteristics and regulations. However, despite the relevance of the topic, the extant body of the scientific literature regardi...

In recent years, the introduction of Industry 4.0 technologies in the manufacturing landscape promoted the development of smart factories characterised by relevant socio-technical interactions between humans and machines. In this context, understanding and modelling the role of humans turns out to be crucial to develop efficient manufacturing syste...

Purpose Given the challenges that Industry 4.0 poses, the purpose of this paper is to propose a comprehensive assessment model suitable for evaluating small- and medium-size enterprises’ (SMEs) digital readiness levels, discuss the results of an assessment of 20 manufacturing SMEs using the proposed model and highlight priorities needed to undertak...

The adoption of Internet of Things and Cloud technologies in the context of Industry 4.0 provides manufacturing industries with the opportunity to collect data from multiple sources. Analytical tools and techniques can be then applied to support decision-making processes with valuable information. Industry 4.0 technologies have been implemented in...

The offer of logistic services (e.g. transport, inventory management, customs brokerage, IT solutions and so forth) targeted and personalised to the different customers' needs is expanding thanks to the benefits foreseen from the implementation and exploitation of the Industry 4.0 technologies. However, this expansion comes at the cost of the incre...

The transition from the traditional product-centric approach to the offering of integrated product-service solutions, such as Product-Service Systems (PSS), has represented a major managerial challenge for companies. A major contributor to such challenge has been the inability of the Cost Estimation Process to deal with the novelty and complexity o...

With the advent of the 4th industrial revolution and unprecedented possibility to connect products to the internet, the capability of a firm to collect data and enhance service offering has expanded significantly. An enormous amount of data is generated from connected products and gathered from sensors; data is sent to the cloud via wireless networ...

Nowadays, we are in the middle of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, also known as Industry 4.0. A set of technologies applied to the manufacturing landscape gives birth to a new concept of factory in which every product, device, machine and process is interconnected to the others, composing Cyber-Physical Systems able to communicate with each other...

With the advent of the 4th industrial revolution and unprecedented possibility to connect products to the internet, the capability of a firm to collect data and enhance service offering has expanded significantly. An enormous amount of data is generated from connected products and gathered from sensors; data is sent to the cloud via wireless networ...

The digital transformation of the manufacturing industry is currently unlocking new possibilities in terms of automation and improvement of existing business processes. Service is currently one of the key areas that are being affected by it and, while many use cases are proposed, their operational implementation often remains a challenge. This pape...

Nowadays, the terms Smart Logistics and Logistics 4.0 are used to represent the Industry 4.0 technology-based application in the field of logistics. The introduction of technology in logistics affects significantly the work of operators, opening new evolution scenarios and offering several opportunities of change of the human role in logistics. Sta...

This paper proposes a framework that supports the collection and classification of information about the features of a city relevant to Urban Freight Transport (UFT). The information is organized in a framework of 28 different layers that are then stored in a Geographic Information System (GIS) tool to enable efficient data retrieval and effective...

Smart city initiatives can be seen as a powerful driver for exploring future scenarios of contemporary cities through the lens of emerging technologies. Yet, the translation of those visions into actual urban implementations often fails to place the citizen experience at the forefront for the sake of the efficiency and optimization of urban process...

The increasing availability of data gatherable from various sources and in several contexts, is forcing practitioners to find affordable ways to manage and exploit datasets. Within this context, machine learning (ML) - which can be described as a set of algorithms to analyse and process data to extract relevant features for clusterization, classifi...

The increasing availability of data, promised by the 4th industrial revolution wave, is challenging companies and organizations in diverse industry sectors to extract useful and actionable information. To this end, a vast array of data management strategies and new analytical methods is becoming available to the large audience of researchers and pr...

Logistics and supply chain management have always been at the forefront of industrial innovations, and numerous technologies have been tested and applied with success to increase efficiency of processes, reduce costs, or improve the relationships among different actors, such as buyers, sellers, retailers and carriers. In recent times, there is a gr...

In recent years, many companies have been forced to move their businesses from a product-centric perspective to a product-service integrated offering. This strategic transformation has been called “servitization” and represents one of the major opportunities for companies that wish to add value to their traditional product-based offerings, differen...

The lack of data is one of the most common problems when dealing with the design of solutions that optimize urban freight transport (City Logistics Projects). In fact, to be able to process an effective City Logistics Projects for a certain area of the city, it is necessary to have the data concerning the number of daily deliveries that each commer...

The issue of food waste is increasingly attracting scientific and public interest due to the magnitude of the problem (in terms of quantity and global reach) and the growing attention to healthy and sustainable food production and consumption. As a consequence, an increasing number of initiatives aim to reduce the food discarded in each stage of th...

Nowadays, we are in the middle of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, also known as Industry 4.0. A set of technologies applied to the manufacturing landscape gives birth to a new concept of factory in which every product, device, machine and process is interconnected to the others, composing Cyber-Physical Systems able to communicate with each other...

The volume of freight vehicles operating within city boundaries is steadily increasing, which contributes to road congestion, especially in urban areas with a parking deficit. The proper identification of the location and size of commercial parking lay-by areas, where delivery vehicles can park for a limited time to perform loading/unloading operat...

Objective The purpose of this study is to discuss the term ‘digital maturity’ based on the evidence emerging from an extensive longitudinal investigation. Further, this study provides evidence regarding evolutionary paths, influencing factors, and improvement potentials in hospitals. Materials and methods Based on a comprehensive multi-year (2008–...

Objective: The purpose of this study is to discuss the term 'digital maturity' based on the evidence emerging from an extensive longitudinal investigation. Further, this study provides evidence regarding evolutionary paths, influencing factors, and improvement potentials in hospitals. Materials and Methods: Based on a comprehensive multi-year (20...

The Urban Freight Fleet Composition (UFFC) problem concerns the definition of the optimal mix in terms of types and number of vehicles (fleet composition) to serve the demand for parcel delivery in an urban area. Urban areas can be subject to access restrictions that reduce the possibility to enter the area. In this paper, we consider time access r...

Collection-and-Delivery Points (CDP) have become increasingly important for couriers operating in the e-commerce sector. Through this way of delivery, it is possible to mitigate many issues related to the traditional home delivery (e.g. missing delivery, complex routing planning, and traffic delays). Despite this, there are still obstacles that pre...

This paper focuses on the reconfiguration and scheduling optimization of a complex Flexible Manufacturing System and proposes a complete methodology from problem statement to analysis and solution definition and assessment. In particular, Discrete Event Simulation (DES) has been used to support decision-making. A complex case study has been carried...

The latest economic and environmental changes together with the development of technology, fostered interest in ‘smart cities' and smart city product-service system (SCPSS): bundle of products and services aimed at fuelling sustainable economic growth with a wise management of resources. Since budget constraint prevents a massive implementation of...

The development of technology, coupled with the economic and the environmental changes, fostered interest in “smart cities” concept, that is cities where “investments in human and social capital linked with traditional and modern communication infrastructure fuel sustainable economic growth and a high quality of life, with a wise management of natu...

The remarkable developments in e-commerce offer more flexibility and alternative shopping experience to busy people, to such an extent that the best choice in the future for having a meal may be to have it delivered at home. Food ordering and delivery is not a recent business, but it scaled up in the last few years, thank to several successful “log...

Industry 4.0 is today one of the major opportunities for companies competing in the market. In last few years, more and more companies have started to define the path to move from their traditional production systems towards the Industry 4.0 paradigm; accordingly, different models have been proposed in literature to support the business transformat...

Nowadays, the introduction of digital technologies in the manufacturing industries paved the way to the Fourth Industrial Revolution, also known as Industry 4.0, fostering the evolution of traditional industrial systems to the concept of smart manufacturing. In last years, many reference models to describe the features of the smart factories have b...

Urban freight transportation plays a pivotal role in ensuring the liveability of urban areas, due to its fulfilment of citizens needs and its induced economic impact. Building upon the body of research on the topic of city logistics and its connected impacts and measures, this paper focuses on the development of a framework which is collectively ex...

Cost-determination in Product-Service Systems (PSS) presents a broad set of impacts across managerial and design decision-making processes. Most of the effort within PSS-costing literature is focused mainly on the development of techniques that address challenges regarding data availability, lifecycle representation, and uncertainty modelling. Less...

Manufacturing companies are increasingly shifting their value proposition from a product-centric perspective to Product-Service-System (PSS). This evolution allows companies to improve the customisation of their offer and to contribute to reduce material flows and consumption, thus enhancing sustainability. However, when companies introduce PSS off...

The already significant volume of freight vehicles moving within city limits is steadily growing, and is expected to continue increasing at an even faster rate. Many European cities, however, have historical urban heritages and constraints that make them a logistics nightmare, where traffic congestion can result from improperly parked vehicles. In...

Purpose The last decades have witnessed an increased interest in urban logistics originating from both the research and the practitioners’ communities. Sustainable freight transports today are on the political, social and technological agenda of many actors operating in urban contexts. Due to the extent of the covered areas and the continuous progr...

The Urban Distribution (or Consolidation) Centers (CDU) are one of the available solutions for the last mile logistics that have gained greater interest in both academic and transportation corporate fields. Despite the widespread of the projects involving CDUs, only few of them are recognized as effective over the years. In this paper, through a ca...

Many cities worldwide are struggling to reduce pollution and to maintain an effective and agile transportation system. Among the many available policies and green solutions, bike sharing programs are emerging as a cost effective and sustainable way to expand the portfolio of transit options, promoting the use of alternative transportation among cit...

The construction industry is one of the oldest industries; still many researches show its low productivity. Supply Chain Management (SCM) has been identified as a key area for increasing productivity in this industry. Therefore, in this paper we present a systematic literature review about the development of the SCM concept within the construction...

An increasing number of textile firms are adopting sustainability strategies for achieving long-term competitive advantage. In this paper, a new decision-making process for the textile sector, exploiting the Organisational Life Cycle Assessment methodology, is proposed. It provides a management system able to support companies in monitoring and eva...

Manufacturing companies whose products have become increasingly commoditized are currently striving to identify innovative value propositions allowing them to re-position themselves in the market. This is gradually leading to a business shift from delivering traditional transaction-based, product-centric offering to the provision of integrated prod...

One of the major difficulties encountered by companies nowadays is related to the engineering of service and product-service systems (PSS), including the definition of methods and techniques supporting their design and development. It is noteworthy to state that, in order to make PSS and service provision profitable in the long term, it is of utmos...

This paper addresses a rationing problem with a profit satisficing objective in a company operating many retail stores through a centralized procurement. General rationing problems arise when the available stock or capacity cannot guarantee the possibility to satisfy the demand in full, and different decisions about the allocation of the available...

The global crisis and the fierce competition of emerging countries make companies struggling to stay ahead of competition. The number of companies that are enlarging their offer portfolio looking forward to new and increased sources of revenues is always increasing but the number of companies failing in successfully implementing servitization strat...

In this paper, we propose a framework aiming to provide a preliminary assessment and comparison of cities on the most important dimensions related to city logistics, thus preparing the ground for stakeholder engagement and solution design. The framework is also designed to overcome some of most relevant issues in city logistics research, such as la...

The pursuit of sustainable solutions for moving goods in urban areas with minimum impacts on the society and the environment is nowadays a broadly discussed subject. To better frame the research interests in this area, in this paper we discuss the main evidences emerged from a systematic literature review regarding the field of city logistics, whic...

Additive manufacturing is shifting business models towards mass customisation and responsible production paradigms. Such a technology is fostering re-localisation and value-added approaches in order to increase customer involvement into a more flexible and sustainable production process. This paper provides both theoretical tools and case studies t...