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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 jewellery. The goal is to understand how the players in these markets deal with their retail channel and the Demand Management process and to find out which are the main drivers that influence their behaviour.

Management practices are analysed using the case study methodology. The findings show that a relationship exists between the company’s features, such as ( the configuration and control of the retail stores) and the products they sell (the duration of the products lifecycle) and the use of retail and Demand Management levers which have been grouped into five main families; information management; demand forecasting; assortment planning; orders and replenishments management, and demand and supply synchronization.

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.

The study is based on an in‐depth literature review concerning the measurement of supply chain visibility and the assessment of its value. An extensive, six‐month discussion and refinement process with the supply chain managers of nine leading companies was conducted to validate the proposed approach and to conduct real case studies.

The main outcome of this paper is a model to measure the visibility level in complex supply networks. Such a measure can be used for benchmarking and as a diagnostic tool for practitioners to find more easily the areas where a visibility improvement is more urgent.

The model provides a measure of the visibility across the inbound supply chain. Further research will extend the approach to the internal and outbound supply chains. Moreover, limited empirical evidence is presented in this paper, which mainly aims to validate the proposed approach. A wider application of the model could offer interesting opportunities in terms of managerial practice and provide a more extensive basis for benchmarking.

Various authors have attempted to quantify visibility across a supply chain, but they either calculate it only for simplistic, two‐tier or linear supply chains, or they fail to provide a comprehensive visibility metric.

As sustainability concerns become increasingly influential in shaping wineries’ strategies at the production and processing stages, this study aims to investigate the anticipated benefits, incentives and constraints associated with a territorial sustainability certification in the wine industry.

Focusing on wine producers from the Romagna Consortium (Italy), the research explores the influence of firm characteristics on sustainability attitudes and explores the Consortium potential role in facilitating the ecological transition. Data are collected through an online survey and analyzed by means of factor and cluster analysis.

Findings reveal the Consortium capacity to expand its scope, incorporating elements of sustainability, resilience and territorial development. In addition, it emerges that the perception of sustainability among local producers extends beyond environmental concerns, encompassing the economic and social domains.

Acting as a cluster constituent, the Consortium can stimulate collaborative behavior and promote knowledge dissemination contributing to a mature collaborative environment. A territorial sustainability certification is thus viewed as multifunctional tool, enhancing economic performance and collective reputation, while addressing the numerous environmental challenges faced by the sector.

The study’s originality lies in its direct engagement with a considerable number of producers in a geographic area boasting a mature wine industry but with limited research focusing on coordinated efforts for improved sustainability performance.

Radio frequency identification (RFId) technology has a great potential to improve process efficiency and effectiveness. However, because of the variety of application areas and achievable benefits, structured assessment models are needed to support managers in the adoption decision. The purpose of this paper is to describe a structured method to support the evaluation of the benefits enabled by RFId technology in medical treatment support in the healthcare industry. The method, and its application to an Italian case study, are deeply illustrated so as to increase the knowledge available to decision makers.

The research underlying this paper has modelled the relationship between the technology and the performance driver of the target process, and then between the performance driver and the measurable key performance indicators of that process. This knowledge, focused on the healthcare industry but still quite general, has been formalised into 12 causal maps. Starting from these maps, a six-step procedure to prioritise the analysis, tailor the maps and adapt (or develop) analytical models to estimate the benefits is presented. The overall method and its application to an Italian case study are deeply illustrated so as to increase the open available knowledge to decision makers.

The findings are twofold: first, the knowledge represented by the causal maps; and second, the findings of the case study, which shows that efficiency benefits can cover the operative expenses of RFId adoption, but need to be integrated with effectiveness benefits in order to fully justify the investment costs.

The paper provides a contribution for both researchers and practitioners. As the former are concerned, the paper is a first attempt to fill the existing lack of structured approaches concerning the evaluation of potential benefits of RFId for product traceability within a healthcare facility. As for the latter, the presented method has been developed to practically support all those managers who are evaluating whether to adopt RFId technology in their organisation or not. This contribution has a relevant practicality, as it helps decision makers to address their decisions relying on a sound conceptual baseline, and on objective evaluations.

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.

The research is based on a survey within the fashion industry and a multi-step linear regression model investigating the relationships between e-commerce and performance.

Results reveal that e-commerce improves innovation performance but has no significant relationship with business and operational performance. Also investigating whether the sales internationalisation might moderate the relationship between e-commerce and performance, the findings reveal that the adoption of these tools might even be negative when applied at the international level in particular by considering innovation operational practices, and the research suggests for fashion companies the necessity to develop strong markets’ knowledge and brand awareness among foreign markets and customers before investing internationally.

This paper offers an original analytical approach to identifying the relationships between a company’s adoption of e-commerce, performance and internationalisation within the fashion industry.