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This paper discusses a research programme in which the 3D computer aided industrial design geometry for a consumer product was translated into appearance models using the contrasting techniques of workshop‐based fabrication techniques and rapid prototyping using stereolithography. The research also examined the capacity to extend the use of the rapid prototype components for the production of a fully working prototype. The ability to combine an appearance model and a working prototype into a single “appearance prototype” was a significant advance in the application of RP within industrial design.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the problems encountered by clothing merchandisers in managing fabric sample resources, and analyses their expectations of and requirements for a desirable management solution. It then aims to consider the architectural design of an intelligent fabric sample management system prototype, and the development of a construction and implementation plan for a fashion enterprise to install the system.

A three‐stage methodological approach is adopted. The first stage is a preliminary study using in‐depth interviews with potential system users; the second involves the architectural design of a five‐component system prototype; and the third develops a multi‐phase construction and implementation plan using a case study.

Four categories of problems in the management of fabric sample resources are identified, the system architecture is designed, and a construction and implementation plan is proposed. Managerial and theoretical implications are also discussed.

The design process of the research and development (R&D) framework enables fashion enterprises to obtain a deeper understanding of their operations in managing fabric samples and to make wiser decisions in resource allocation. By taking the specific needs of system users into consideration, system solution developers are able to design tailor‐made software packages that are intelligent, user‐friendly and user‐oriented.

Through a logical and systematic process of designing the R&D framework, the paper identifies some “technological rules” which links up the practice of solving an industrial problem with the formulation of substantive theories. This adds to the application of design science research.

This study aims to identify the various economic and non-economic determinants of renewable energy consumption (REC) in Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS). Due to the adverse effect of carbon emission on the environment, every country is trying for a transition from fossil fuel towards renewable energy. Renewable energy plays a crucial role in reducing carbon emission and combating climate change. Understanding the determinants that influence REC helps to promote this transition.

The study is based on an unbalanced panel data over the period 2002–2019 for all five BRICS nations. The panel corrected standard error (PCSE) method has been adopted to examine the determinants of REC.

Industrialization, population growth and foreign direct investment (FDI) are found to be significant economic determinants of REC while patent on environmental technologies, political instability and industrial design are significant non-economic determinants of REC in the BRICS nations.

The findings imply that to increase REC in BRICS nations, policymakers should incentivize industries for investments in renewable energy, attract FDI aligned with environmental regulations, raise population awareness through training, enforce industrial design standards, establish fair technology transfer frameworks to overcome patent barriers and create stable, long-term renewable energy policies with risk mitigation instruments to address political instability.

The study captures the effect of patents on environmental technologies and industrial design on the consumption of renewable energy. Thus, the novelty lies in investigating unexplored variables in the previous literature likely to affect REC.

This chapter is devoted to the study of the standard control of the material costs of production as a factor of technical growth of an enterprise of manufacturing industries: ways of integration in a single information space of information that allows you to manage the cost and quality of products at all stages of the value creation; theoretical and methodological approaches to the implementation of control functions of material costs (technological waste and production losses) according to preestablished consumption rates in the value creation of an industrial enterprise, especially in a number of machine-building factories of Nizhny Novgorod industrial cluster; theoretical methods of synthesis and comparison data, structured description of characteristics of the object of study, system analysis, as well as empirical methods of observations and descriptions of the subject area. The necessity of further improvement of effectiveness and methodology of a control function of a standard cost accounting system in the aspect of maintaining the technical growth of an enterprise is substantiated. Current condition is analyzed, and ways of modernization of organizational, managerial, methodological, metrological, and competence types are proposed. Also, sets of conditions for implementation of standard control and procedures incorporated into instrumental information space are substantiated. It is proved that the application of standard accounting of material costs for production within the framework of a system of standard accounting effectively contributes to noticeable technical growth and meets modern criteria and parameters of an effective management. It is substantiated that conditions for the implementation of a standard control of material costs for the production of an industrial enterprise that contributes to technical growth are availability and comprehensiveness of organizational, managerial, methodological, and metrological types of security control of material resources in the production; compliance with technical standards for processing, warehousing, storage, transportation of material resources; and matching competencies of management personnel with their functions. It is expected to introduce a standard control of material costs within the framework of a standard accounting system in practices of machine-building enterprises, as a significant factor of technical growth. Scientific understanding of an essence of the standard control of material costs within the framework of a standard cost accounting system, justified and outlined by the author, ensures incorporation into practice of effective production management, contributes a noticeable technical growth of industrial enterprises of the processing industries; provides a significant improvement in a quality of accounting results in general.

The purpose of this paper is to establish the influence and discipline of process control and systems engineering theory plus engineering practices in the chemical process industry on current operations management development. Thus, part I lays the requisite groundwork for subsequent papers, part II covering the concept of a manufacturing system and part III its expansion and exploitation into the managing‐by‐projects engineering change methodology to output an integrated whole.

Extensive literature and wide ranging project review identifying relevance, mode of transference and application of process control techniques in discrete manufacture and other enterprises.

Such “technology transfer” of the systems method has visibly improved discrete production performance, often to a state of international competitiveness. Contributions are made at many levels. These range from exploiting elements of the business process systems engineering (BPSE) toolkit is used to analyse material flow right up to examples of successfully enabling of the corporate achievement plan in large organisations.

Established systems philosophy is widely relevant. However, the point at which it transforms into systems engineering is application specific.

No constraints are evident on application, but the extent of useful application is critically dependent on competence and culture of the enterprise. BPSE cannot be regarded as a “quick fix” panacea. It requires extensive and effective investment in people. For this reason a caveat emptor warning appears that applying the systems approach will fail unless taken seriously at all levels in the business.

Originality confined to the domain of bringing existing knowledge together and exploiting it in such a way that the contribution to knowledge is greater than the sum of the constituent parts.

This paper aims to present the design of a particular non-reactive test rig for combustion swirlers and first stage turbine nozzles. The test rig is required for important experimental activities aimed at the optimization of a specific class of gas turbines.

A multi-disciplinary team performed the design process by following a tailored design approach, which has been developed for the specific case. The design outcomes allowed to build a fully functional test rig to be introduced in a test cell and then to perform preliminary experiments about the fluid dynamic behaviour of the turbine elements.

The followed design approach allowed to efficiently perform the task, by supporting the information exchange among the different subjects involved in both the conceptual and the embodiment design of the test rig. Additionally, the performed experiments allowed to achieve a final configuration that makes the test rig a valuable test case for combustor-turbine interaction studies.

The study described in this paper is focused on the design of a specific test rig, used for first validation tests. However, the achieved results (both in terms of design and test) constitutes the underpinning of the in-depth investigations to be performed in the next steps of the experimental campaign.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the present paper is the first one that comprehensively describes the design activity of an experimental test rig for turbine application, also providing indications about the specific methodological procedure used to manage the process.

This paper aims to discuss a foresight study conducted in Singapore’s national R&D agency to help science and technology decision makers identify key capability areas of R&D investment to support the manufacturing industry’s growth in the country and the region.

Using horizon scanning, scenario analysis and expert opinion, nine capabilities are identified as core areas to be developed to support the country’s future growth of product-service systems.

The results of a Delphi survey involving 30 industry and academic thought leaders recommend priorities of these capabilities. This paper concludes with a discussion of the study implications for theory, research and practice in the domain of servitisation and product-service systems.

The foresight study presented here on the future of servitisation in Singapore demonstrates one of the first fully fledged applications of foresight in constructing a coherent vision of future product-service system markets. In this study, the authors applied systemic foresight methodology (SFM) comprising the first six phases: initiation (scoping), intelligence (scanning), imagination (scenarios), integration (priorities), interpretation (strategies) and implementation (action).For future research, an ideal step would be to proceed with the final phase of the SFM, impact, to develop indicators for servitisation and to monitor and evaluate the transition process.

Manufacturing and services are no longer distinct concepts with a clear divide. Manufacturing firms not only become more service dependent but also produce and provide services for their consumers. This transformation towards servitisation implies fundamental re-organisation of the production and management practices. Furthermore, through new business models, new and loyal customers will be gained, which will in turn bring additional income, while making the companies less prone to economic and business fluctuations.

The results of this study have practical implications for policymakers of public and private sectors that are interested in playing a key role in future product-service system innovation. These have implications for developing the human and intellectual capital that are required for supporting the future innovation. Institutes of higher learning and vocational institutes should also consider incorporating new curricula and modules to build the capabilities for knowledge creation and transfer.

The findings of the present study on strategic growth areas and relevant critical capabilities provide new directions for research in the field of servitisation. Among the nine capabilities identified, the top three were advanced customer intelligence capability, socio-physical service quality, traceability and maintainability and integrated strategic decision-making. From the results, it is apparent that advanced customer intelligence capability is both an area of importance to Singapore and the world.

When original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) examine whether to implement a reverse supply chain (RSC) for their products, oftentimes the motive is cost savings or regulatory compliance. However, a frequently overlooked but equally important benefit is the possibility for creating new revenue. The purpose of this paper is to examine which revenue streams the RSC enables for OEMs to utilize and how these streams are utilized in industrial practice.

First, the paper identifies the RSC-enabled revenue streams that are available to OEMs using a literature-based conceptual modeling approach. Second, using a set of eight cases the paper explores these streams’ utilization pattern and develops a set of propositions that explain the pattern.

Results show a set of 12 distinct RSC-enabled revenue streams within three categories: new revenue through sales of used items, new revenue through sales of recovered items, and new revenue through added sales of virgin products. Six of these 12 streams are utilized in industrial practice. Among the propositions that explain the utilization pattern are the degree of component customization, product life-cycle longevity, and the value gap between used and recovered products.

While extant literature concerning the relation between the RSC and the firm’s revenue is scarce, this paper contributes to the understanding of RSCs’ revenue generation potential and thus to the stream of literature that views the RSC as a value creator rather than a costly nuisance. Furthermore, the paper provides managers with a broad view of how their firm’s RSC can increase revenue from existing markets as well as create revenue from new markets.

Although the topic of span of control (SOC) has been discussed in detail in management literature and education, less focus has been placed on the decline research since the 1970s and, thus, the future relevance of the concept. By providing a historical overview of the literature on SOC through the work of key management scholars, this paper aims to explain why the literatures’ coverage of the topic has been significantly diminished in recent decades and offers suggestions as to why further research on the topic is needed.

The authors provide a historical literature review and analysis on the decline of SOC as a construct of interest.

The findings of the paper include a brief analysis of SOC. The concept was a very strong concept that declined as management became more scientific, rejecting classical management theory. This rejection occurred because SOC was impacted by multiple factors making it impossible to effectively study, making it imprecise. Likewise, SOC is too applied and lacked theoretical relevance. However, SOC still has value, especially when paired with a theory such as leader-member-exchange (LMX).

The authors argue that SOC is still relevant today and management scholars should align its study with its practice in modern organizational structures. However, its focus needs to change and be added to other theories such as LMX.

The kitting feeding policy creates kits with the parts of each product to assemble. Each kit contains elements with heterogeneous physical properties imposing heterogeneous logistic facilities and management solutions for storage and handling. The purpose of this paper is to present and apply a two-step procedure to design the part warehouse layout and to assign locations in case of kitting with high-variety part attributes. The proposed procedure aims at reducing the kitting travelled distance, shortening the picker paths, best positioning the components in the warehouse to enhance the possibility of creating kits through a single corridor access. The saturation of the warehouse and the minimization of the required storage space are also considered.

Starting from part categorization, the proposed two-step procedure, of general applicability, designs the component warehouse, sizing the corridors (Step 1) before clustering the kits in terms of part commonality and best-assigning clusters to corridors (Step 2) with the goal of reducing the travelled distance and saturating the available storage space.

A comparison model considers the traditional versus the proposed warehouse layout highlighting the potential saving in the picker travelled distance. A case study taken from the harvesting machine agricultural sector exemplifies the applicability and the practical implications of this research.

Elements of originality are the warehouse design strategy and the assignment model for parts based on their physical attributes and their occurrence in the assembly kits. Finally, the case study taken from industry, with a high number of components and part categories, adds value to the research making the proposed procedure able to address large-scale industrial problems.