About the Guest EditorsRaffaella Cagliano graduated in Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering and took a PhD in Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering at Politecnico di Milano. She is Associate Professor in the Area of Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering at Politecnico di Milano and part of the Faculty of MIP-Politecnico di Milano in the area of Organisation and Manufacturing and Logistics Management. She is co-director of the Executive Master in Business Administration of MIP-Poilitecnico di Milano. From 1995 to date Raffaella Cagliano has been performing research activities in the area of Innovation and business processes management. Her research interests include: manufacturing strategy, emerging manufacturing paradigms, operations management within networks of companies, supply and purchasing management. Her research was published in relevant international journals in the field. Raffaella Cagliano has held important roles in the co-ordination and execution of a number of research projects at national and international level.

Matteo Kalchschmidt earned a Master and a PhD degree in Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering from Politecnico di Milano, Italy. He is currently working at Università di Bergamo as Assistant Professor of Business Administration and Operations Management. His research interests focus on Demand Management and Forecasting, Supply Chain Planning and Organization. On these topics he published several papers in international journals and conferences. He is member of the Global Manufacturing Research Group and contributes to the world data gathering of the association.

Pietro Romano is Associate Professor of Supply Chain Management and Business Marketing at University of Udine, Italy. He graduated in management and engineering and completed his PhD in Operations Management at the University of Padova, Italy, with a doctoral dissertation on supply chain management. He works within the Operations Management research group at the Department of Electrical, Managerial and Mechanical Engineering (University of Udine). His principal research interests concern supply chain management and production planning. He is member of EUROMA and his publications have appeared in Sloan Management Review, International Journal of Operations & Production Management, International Journal of Production Research, Journal of Manufacturing Technology Management, International Journal of Logistics: Research and Applications, Journal of Purchasing and Supply Management, International Journal of Manufacturing Technology and Management, Supply Chain Forum: An International Journal and Quality Management Journal.

Fabrizio Salvador is Professor of Operations Management at the Instituto de Empresa Business School, Madrid. He has been Faculty Research Associate at Arizona State University in the Departments of Management (2001-2002) and Supply Chain Management (2003). He holds a PhD in Management and Engineering from the Univeristà di Padova. He has been successfully publishing his research on premier academic journals, such as Journal of Operations Management, International Journal of Operations and Production Management, Production Planning and Control, Computers in Industry, International Journal of Production Economics, etc. His research is focused on in modularity, product configuration and co-ordinated product, process and supply chain design. He regularly teaches Mass Customization and Operations Management at Instituto de Empresa, both in the International MBA program and in the Executive MBA program, as well as in other institutions within companies. He has been successfully assisting multiple industrial companies in addressing product variety-related operational problems. Dr Salvador is member of the Editorial Team of Decision Sciences Journal, and Associate Editor for the International Journal of Mass Customisation. He is funding member of the International Institute for Mass Customisation and member of the European Operations Management Association, of the Decision Sciences Institute of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences.

This special issue of the Journal of Manufacturing Technology Management includes a selection of papers from the first E-UROMA-POMS Joint International Conference organized by Politecnico di Milano and Università di Padova on 16-18 June 2003. The conference was held in Como, Italy and hosted 447 participants. Among the 319 presented papers, eight have been selected for potential publication on the Journal of Manufacturing Technology Management, based on recommendations made by session chairs at the Conference, and on Guest Editors’ evaluations.

The papers that accepted the invitation underwent a double blind review process, after which five papers have been finally accepted for publication in this special issue.

The papers cover a quite broad range of different subjects within the operations management field, and represent well the different faces of the discipline. In particular, the areas covered are: performance management systems (Bourne, Kennerley and Franco-Santos), process management (Welker and de Vries), product variety management (Bramham, MacCarthy and Guinery) simultaneous product and supply chain design (Lau and Yam) and distribution channel design (Turner and Williams). The content of the papers is summarised below.

The first paper, titled “Managing through measures: a study of impact on performance” by M. Bourne, M. Kennerley and M. Franco-Santos explores the impact of contextual, process and content factors on the effectiveness of performance measurement systems. While the literature agree on the importance of performance measurement for managing companies, there is mixed evidence as to whether these systems can really improve organizational performance. The literature review suggests that the effectiveness of performance measurement systems depends on the way they are designed, implemented and used within the company. Hence, the research investigates what factors positively influence performance measurement systems’ effectiveness and under what circumstances these factors are relevant. The empirical evidence is drawn from a multiple case study concerning different business units within the same organisation. This choice allowed the authors to control for a number of contingent aspects, thus focusing on the differences in implementation and use of performance measurement systems. The results show that high performing business units have more sophisticated and interactive systems, higher alignment with organisational objectives, and wider areas on which to take action after measuring performance. To conclude, the authors try to synthesize the characteristics of effective performance measurement systems with the concept of “interactive control” proposed by Simons (1991), and they suggest an extension of this definition in order to include the aspect emerged from their research.

The second paper, titled “Formalising the ordering process to achieve responsiveness” by G. Welker and J. de Vries explores whether formalization within the ordering process reduces the trade-off between efficiency and responsiveness or not. They conceptualise formalization within the ordering process across three dimensions:

1.
logistic control;
2.
information processing; and
3.
organizational embeddedness.

Formalization takes place in the logistical control domain when managers agree before order inception on structural aspects of ordering process, such as criteria for accepting customer orders, for promising delivery dates, for allocating stocks and for prioritising customer orders. Formalization in the information processing domain refers to the definition of formal strategies to process order-related information, such as rules and programs, vertical information systems, hierarchical referral, lateral relations and self-contained tasks. Finally, formalization in the organizational embedding domain refers to the level of co-operation and interdependence across actors in the ordering process, as well as to the clarity of authority and responsibility assigned to them. The authors address their research question by means of a multiple case study research design involving five companies facing hard-to-predict customer-specific demand patterns. Their findings support the idea that formalization is simultaneously compatible with responsiveness and efficiency, so that it can be interpreted as a trade-off shifter. Furthermore, their empirical analysis suggests that to fully understand the relation among formalization, efficiency and responsiveness, the analysis should be performed at the level of the individual components of formalization, i.e. logistic control, information processing and organizational embeddedness.

The third paper, titled “Managing product variety in quotation processes” by J. Bramham, B. MacCarthy and J. Guinery investigates what activities and what mechanisms a firm may adopt to mitigate the negative impact of product customisation on its front end operations. The study builds on past research on the topic, which mostly focused on the process of translating a customer specification into a technical specification (product configuration process) considering also the case of engineering-to-order companies, where the product space can be extended in response to every customer inquiry. To do so, the authors engage into the comparison of two cases, an instrument company and an office seat company. Notwithstanding the thoroughly detailed differences between these two companies, the authors are able to identify some regularities that provide useful insights into the structure of the quotation process in the presence of customisation. Taking a decision-making perspective over the quotation process, they identify four different “decision centres”:

1.
customisation request initiation;
2.
customisation request classification;
3.
resource control; and
4.
identification of information for reuse.

They argue that such decision-centres perspective can offer important insights on how to improve the quotation process including, for example, balancing process automation and human support and promoting information re-use. Finally, the authors provide evidence of the mechanisms a company may adopt to better manage for product variety in the front-end. In doing so, following the contingency theory tradition, they propose a number of mechanisms increasing the capacity of the company to deal with product variety in the front-end (what they call variety-absorbing mechanisms) and a number of mechanisms reducing the need to deal with product variety in the front-end (what they call variety-mitigating mechanisms).

The fourth paper, titled “A case study of product modularisation on supply chain design and coordination in Hong Kong and China” by A. Lau and R. Yam investigates how product innovativeness and product architecture affect supply chain structure and coordination in new product development. They motivate their research based on the fact that extant literature provides opposite advices as to the criticality of supply chain integration to improve product development performance, when modular product architectures are implemented. They address this issue by means of a case study of a Hong-Kong-based division of a leading global producer of audio consumer electronics. The selected case involved as sub-cases the product development process of integral vs modular and innovative vs conventional products. By comparing what actors got involved in product development by the company and by observing how such involvement took place, the authors identified two main messages, which they synthesize in the form of propositions. First, product modularisation tends to increase the length of the supply chain, by adding a layer of module manufacturers. The presence of such additional layer might negatively affect supply chain performance, so that corrective actions have to be taken to maintain efficiency across the supply chain. Among these actions, the authors suggest better communication and geographical proximity are important. The second message derived from case analysis, instead, suggests that innovative products require closer supply chain coordination than conventional products.

The fifth paper, titled “Modelling complexity in the automotive industry supply chain” by K. Turner and G. Williams, analyses how the distribution side of the automotive supply chain can be adapted to handle differentiated goods without compromising service levels and efficiency. They trace this problem to the fact that the demand side of the automotive supply chain did not undergo the same improvements that took place on the supply side. Consequently, distribution chains designed for the stable and standardized environment of the past would lead to high inventory and poor service levels under present environmental turbulence. They essentially consider two possible ways to improve supply chain design:

1.
consolidation of dealers’ inventory into a distribution centre;
2.
consolidation of dealers’ inventory into a distribution centre and postponement of differentiation activities from the assembly plant to the distribution centre.

By means of discrete-event simulation they compare performance of these two distribution channel configurations with a traditional assembler-dealer distribution channel, wherein most of inventories are kept at the dealers’ site and trans-shipments across dealers are allowed. The simulation model includes a wide variety of settings, including individual customer, market demand and production characteristics. The simulator tries to match customer requirements (attributes and maximum waiting time) with pipeline inventory and production schedules, predicting also the lost sale occurring when customer’s lead time requirements cannot be satisfactorily met. The result of the simulation, based on real data collected in the UK, indicates that inventory consolidation into a distribution centre can significantly improve service levels and satisfaction of customers’ requirements. At the same time, the simulation reveals that in this case and under the model assumptions the additional improvements that can be achieved by means of form postponement are pretty limited.

Despite the differences in the subject of these papers, some common issues can be found as a fil rouge in each of them.

In the first place, all of the five studies underscore the importance of process management as a methodological tool to understand how companies create value and as a practical instrument to gain insights into performance improvement opportunities. Overall, we feel this special issue effectively renders the idea that new insights and perspectives can be brought into the academic debate by applying the well-established theoretical apparatus underlying process management and design.

Secondly, many of the problems discussed in this special issue revolve around the theme of managing complexity and variety. In this sense, this special issue informs the reader on a number of interesting advances into a contemporary theme in operations management. The transversal message emerging across the five papers is that complexity and variety are key aspects to be considered when designing and implementing operations management practices in different domains, from performance measurement systems in different business units to quotation/product development, up to supply chain or distribution processes for differentiated products.

Finally, the special issue is a showcase of the use of case-based methodology for studying complex subjects in OM: four out of five papers are, in fact, based on this methodology. Case-based research is strictly tied to the above-mentioned common themes of the papers in this special issue and, hence we believe that accurate case study research is going to become important for the growth of our discipline.

Raffaella CaglianoPolitecnico di Milano

Matteo KalchschmidtUniversità di Bergamo

Pietro RomanoUniversità di Udine

Fabrizio SalvadorInstituto de Empresa

Acknowledgements

The Guest Editors would like to thank the referees who contributed with their insightful and detailed reviews to the quality of this special issue. In addition, the Guest Editors would like to express their gratitude to Professor David Bennett, the Editor of the Journal of Manufacturing Technology Management, for the opportunity given to publish this special issue in his journal. A final acknowledgement goes to the Como conference Chairmen – Professor Gianluca Spina and Professor Andrea Vinelli – for their key role in the organisation of the conference and all the related events.

References

Simons, R. (1991), “Strategic orientation and top management attention to control systems”, Strategic Management Journal, Vol. 12, pp. 49–62

Citation

Publisher

EurOMA-POMS Joint International Conference

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