Purpose Globalization and advanced manufacturing capabilities changed industrial dynamics. To this end, not only were new retail concepts developed to broaden the distribution toward larger consumer bases, but alternative ways were also sought to reorganize supply networks for a balance between...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to identify the organisation of the quality department and the management of the supply chain (SC) used by luxury companies to achieve quality requirements. Design/methodology/approach – The paper follows an exploratory approach using a case-based...

Multi-business corporations are used to face complex decision-making problems. Among these, one of the most complex one is that of managing their Sales Force so as to balance and exploit their multi-business portfolio. The case outlined in this paper explores the cross-selling approach to sales...

The objective of this paper is to bring a new element to the academic (and industrial) debate concerning the optimum level of variety in component design in mass production companies. Many authors have explored the trade-off between functional and variety costs, and this could be considered as a...

The paper presents the results of a research project focused on supply chain (SC) strategy in the fashion/apparel industry ongoing at Politecnico di Milano, aiming at assessing the relevance of Supply Chain Management (SCM) approach in a context, i.e. fashion, where operations and manufacturing...

Failure mode effects and criticality analysis (FMECA) is a widely used technique to improve products and processes safety and reliability in different contexts, such as automotive, aviation, computer science, etc. FMECA approach is based on a qualitative/quantitative analysis of a system...

The purpose of the paper is to provide a framework for the selection of the right Performance Measurement System (PMS) for different Supply Chain (SC) typologies. The literature on PMSs belonging to the class of 'nonfinancial and SC-oriented frameworks' is critically reviewed. Frameworks are...

The present paper discusses the results of a research project going on at Politecnico di Milano, aiming at analysing the idiosyncrasies of Six Sigma implementations in Italian companies. In particular, the project addresses the following research questions, regarding the approach of Italian...