Product intelligence in warehouse management: A case study

The need for more flexible, adaptable and customer-oriented warehouse operations has been increasingly identified as an important issue by today's warehouse companies due to the rapidly changing preferences of the customers that use their services. Motivated by manufacturing and other logistics operations, in this paper we argue on the potential application of product intelligence in warehouse operations as an approach that can help warehouse companies address these issues. We discuss the opportunities of such an approach using a real example of a third-party-logistics warehouse company and we present the benefits it can bring in their warehouse management systems. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.

A global assessment of manufacturing: Economic development, energy use, carbon emissions, and the potential for energy efficiency and materials recycling

We present in two parts an assessment of global manufacturing. In the first part, we review economic development, pollution, and carbon emissions from a country perspective, tracking the rise of China and other developing countries. The results show not only a rise in the economic fortunes of the newly industrializing nations, but also a significant rise in global pollution, particularly air pollution and CO2 emissions largely from coal use, which alter and even reverse previous global trends. In the second part, we change perspective and quantitatively evaluate two important technical strategies to reduce pollution and carbon emissions: energy efficiency and materials recycling. We subdivide the manufacturing sector on the basis of the five major subsectors that dominate energy use and carbon emissions: (a) iron and steel, (b) cement, (c) plastics, (d) paper, and (e) aluminum. The analysis identifies technical constraints on these strategies, but by combined and aggressive action, industry should be able to balance increases in demand with these technical improvements. The result would be high but relatively flat energy use and carbon emissions. The review closes by demonstrating the consequences of extrapolating trends in production and carbon emissions and suggesting two options for further environmental improvements, materials efficiency, and demand reduction. © 2013 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved.

Steering manufacturing firms towards service business model innovation

Increasingly, manufacturing firms are turning to services as a new way of creating and capturing value. Despite its potential benefits, many new product-service providers struggle to deploy service activities effectively, not least because they fail to refect the presence of service activities in their performance management systems. This article reports the results of an in-depth case study, which examines how manufacturers can steer the transition towards services. It shows that manufacturing firms need to emphasize two separate but related dimensions of the market performance of service activities: "service adoption," refecting the proportion of customers who purchase the manufacturer's services; and "service coverage," signaling the range of service elements or the comprehensiveness of the service contract that customers opt for. These two indicators, refecting service market performance, should be supplemented with a "complementarity index" designed to disclose whether the relationship between products and services is reinforcing or substitutive. When combined, these indicators allow manufacturing firms to deploy a service-based business model in an integrated and sustainable manner. © 2013 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.

An exploration of risk management in global industrial investment

This article explores risk management in global industrial investment by identifying linkages and gaps between theories and practices. It identifies opportunities for further development of the field. Three related bodies of literature have been reviewed: risk management, global manufacturing and investment. The review suggests that risk management in global manufacturing is overlooked in the literature; that existing theoretical risk management processes are not well developed in the global manufacturing context and that the investment literature applies mainly to financial risk assessment rather than investment risk management structures. Further, there appears to be a serious lack of systematic industrial risk management in investment decision making. This article highlights the opportunities to deploy current good practices more effectively as well as the need to develop more robust theories of industrial investment risk management. The approach adopted to investigate this multidisciplinary topic included a historical review of literature to understand the diverse background of theoretical development. A case study research approach was adopted to collect data, involving four global manufacturing companies and one risk management advisory company to observe the patterns and rationale of current practices. Supporting arguments from secondary data sources reinforced the findings. The research focuses risk management in global industrial investment. It links theories with practice to understand the existing knowledge gap and proposes key research themes for further research. © 2013 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1460-3799 Risk Management.

Manufacturing dish shaped rings on radial-axial ring rolling mills

Ring rolling is an established method to produce seamless rings of different cross-sectional geometries. For dish shaped rings, there are applications in different areas such as offshore, aeronautics or the energy sector. At the moment, dish shaped rings are produced by machining of rings with rectangular shaped cross section, by (open die) hollow forging on a conical mandrel or by using shaped ring rolling tools. These ways of manufacturing have the disadvantage of high material waste, additional costs for special tools, long process time and limited or inflexible geometries. Therefore, the manufacturing of dish shaped rings on conventional radial-axial ring rolling mills would expand the range of products for ring producers. The aim of this study is to investigate the feasibility of an alternative to the current manufacturing processes, without requiring additional tooling and material costs. Therefore, the intended formation of dish shaped rings-previously regarded as a form error-is investigated. Based on an analysis of geometrical requirements and metal flow mechanisms, a rolling strategy is presented, causing dishing and ring climbing by a large height reduction of the ring. Using this rolling strategy dish shaped rings with dishing angles up to 18° were achieved. In addition to the experiments finite element method (FEM)-simulations of the process have been successfully conducted, in order to analyze the local strain evolution. However, when the contact between ring and main roll is lost in the process the ring starts to oscillate around the mandrel and neither dishing nor ring climbing is observed. © 2013 German Academic Society for Production Engineering (WGP).

UbiDM: A new paradigm for product design and manufacturing via ubiquitous computing technology

Since ubiquitous technology was introduced in the early 1980s, it has rapidly developed, and been applied to various domains mainly for the improvement of human life. In this article, the authors propose that ubiquitous computing technology can be effectively used for the design and manufacturing of a product by proposing a new paradigm, called UbiDM (Design and Manufacture via Ubiquitous Computing Technology). The key aspect of UbiDM is the utilisation of the entire product lifecycle information obtained via ubiquitous computing technology for the design and manufacture of the product. The new paradigm can solve many of the problems that have not been properly handled by previous manufacturing paradigms. Specifically, it will address the concept of UbiDM by the following aspects: (1) why there is a need for UbiDM; (2) the essence of UbiDM; (3) enabling technologies; (4) application area; (5) worldwide RD status; and (6) the societal impacts of UbiDM.

Manufacturing excellent engineers: Skill development in a Masters programme

An MPhil programme, delivered by the Engineering Department at the University of Cambridge, claims to be excellent at preparing graduates for manufacturing industry careers. The course uses a combination of different educational experiences, including industry-based assignments, industrial visits and practical exercises. This research explores how problem solving skills are developed during the first module, Induction, which is designed to enable students to undertake their first industrial assignment. From the literature, four conditions necessary for skill development were identified: Provision of a skill description, making explicit key components A number of different experiences with a range of contextual variables A teaching process which includes regular feedback and student reflection Students motivated to learn. These were used to construct a skill development framework (SDF). Using a case study research design, multiple types of evidence were collected to test for the above conditions using both classroom observation and questionnaire methods. The results confirmed the presence of the SDF conditions at different levels, with reflection aspects considered the weakest. Conflicting results were obtained regarding the students' self-awareness of skill levels. A plausible explanation is a change in the students' frame of reference. This initial study set out to develop a better understanding of the process of skill development. Whilst the SDF appears reasonable, there is a need for further work in three broad areas of defining skills, assessing skills and developing reflection skills.

Re-engineering Manufacturing for Sustainability

This edited volume presents the proceedings of the 20th CIRP LCE Conference, which cover various areas in life cycle engineering such as life cycle design, end-of-life management, manufacturing processes, manufacturing systems, methods and ...

Modeling and optimization of semiconductor manufacturing process with neural networks

A neural network-based process model is proposed to optimize the semiconductor manufacturing process. Being different from some works in several research groups which developed neural network-based models to predict process quality with a set of process variables of only single manufacturing step, we applied this model to wafer fabrication parameters control and wafer lot yield optimization. The original data are collected from a wafer fabrication line, including technological parameters and wafer test results. The wafer lot yield is taken as the optimization target. Learning from historical technological records and wafer test results, the model can predict the wafer yield. To eliminate the "bad" or noisy samples from the sample set, an experimental method was used to determine the number of hidden units so that both good learning ability and prediction capability can be obtained.

Microspheres and microcapsules, a survey of manufacturing techniques: Part III: Solvent evaporation

A methodological survey of microsphere formation and microencapsulation techniques based on solvent extraction/evaporation techniques is presented. Thus, basic features of solvent extraction and solvent evaporation processes, including droplet formation, droplet/particle stabilization, and solvent removal, are outlined. Preparation of a wide range of microspherical and microcapsular products based on biodegradable polyesters, polysaccharides, and nonbiodegradable polymers are discussed. Dependence of microcapsule characteristics on manufacturing parameters, as well as performance evaluation of microspherical and microcapsular products, are also briefly covered.

CIM系统设计中的关键问题

虽然新的制造系统不断涌现 ,企业仍然对CIM给予很大广泛的认可。本文讨论了CIM设计中的一些关键问题。首先 ,根据业务过程重组来实施CIM至关重要 ,其次 ,必须采用CIM的功能体系结构规范和容纳各种功能系统 ,以便更好地执行业务流过程。同时 ,需要有相应的集成基础结构来支持整个企业的数据管理。