Food is one of the most traded goods, and the conflict in Ukraine, one of the European breadbaskets, has triggered a significant additional disruption in the global food supply chains after the COVID-19 impact. The disruption to food output, supply chains, availability, and affordability could have a long-standing impact. As a result, the availability and supply of a wide range of food raw materials and finished food products are under threat, and global markets have seen recent increases in food prices. Furthermore, the Russian-Ukrainian conflict has adversely affected food supply chains, with significant effects on production, sourcing, manufacturing, processing, logistics, and significant shifts in demand between nations reliant on imports from Ukraine. This paper aims to analyze the impacts of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine on the effectiveness and responsiveness of the global food supply chains. A PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) approach, including grey literature, was deployed to investigate six key areas of the food supply chains that would be impacted most due to the ongoing war. Findings include solutions and strategies to mitigate supply chain impacts such as alternative food raw materials, suppliers and supply chain partners supported by technological innovations to ensure food safety and quality in warlike situations.

Quality control is an essential element of manufacturing operations that reduces product defects and provides excellent products of the right specifications to the end consumer. Industry 4.0 solutions, such as digitalisation, along with lean manufacturing tools, may support quality control operations. This paper presents a case study of a food company wherein quality control checks were optimised using business process re-engineering to reduce physical waste and resource usage. Following close analysis of the company’s pack-house operations, it was proposed to adopt elements of Industry 4.0 by digitalising the quality control process. Implementing such a solution led to a reduction in the time needed to complete recorded checks, an increase in the time the pack-house quality control team spends with packers on the production lines, and the facilitation of defects identification. It also ensured that the product met the customers’ specifications and reduced the likelihood of rejection at the customers’ depot. The new system also enabled monitoring of each line in real-time and gathering of additional information faster and more accurately. This article proves how employing lean principles in combination with Industry 4.0 technologies can lead to savings in resources and a reduction in waste, which leads to improvements in operational efficiency.

The fashion industry creates a large amount of pollution, making it one of the least environmentally friendly industries in the world with an ever-growing adoption of the linear fashion system “take-make-dispose” that continues to exploit scarce natural resources and energy. This advocate shifting to a circular economy to achieve sustainable production and consumption. However, numerous challenges are faced when introducing the principles of circular economy, obstructing the system transition. The ten challenges identified from the literature include poor material and energy efficiency, poor circular design, technological challenges, regulatory pressures, internal stakeholders’ pressures, financial pressures, insufficient human capital, poor management and leadership, lack of external collaborations, and consumer-related challenges. This research aims to identify the level of significance of the challenges identified from the literature to assist top management with formulating a strategy. Decisions will be made and prioritised based on the key challenges to ensure a successful and effective implementation of the circular economy in the fashion industry. To achieve the aim of this research, seven experts within both the circular economy and fashion context are interviewed. Fuzzy Total Interpretive Structural Modelling (Fuzzy-TISM) is used to arrange the challenges into a hierarchy-based model and to illustrate the interrelationship between these challenges. Also, Fuzzy MICMAC analysis is used to map and rank these challenges depending on their driving and dependence power. Based on the findings, regulatory pressures and poor management and leadership are the key challenges with the highest significance level. Therefore, successful and effective implementation of a circular economy requires a change in managerial strategies.

The primary aim of this paper is to survey the literature’s coverage of integrating circular economy practices with renewable energy sources in the manufacturing sector. A systematic review of 107 peer-reviewed articles published between 2018 and 2023 in journals within the Web of Science and Scopus databases was conducted. The review documented CE and RE applications in emerging economies across Africa, Asia, and South America, assessing the overall characteristics of the research, its methodological rigour, and the barriers to or facilitators of CE and RE integration. Integration refers to the implementation of at least one CE practice, as well as one or more RE sources, in a single context, like manufacturing. A total of 14 practices were included in this analysis because they were mentioned at least 10 times by varying authors. The practice list includes recycling (mentioned in 74 articles), reducing materials (57), remanufacturing (53), the reuse of materials (51), waste minimisation (48), renewable energy use (43), consumer awareness (38), repurposing (35), refuse (33), education and training (28), environmentally friendly design (22), environmental criteria for supplier selection (17), reverse logistics (16), and stakeholder collaboration (14). Recycling, life cycle assessment, and end-of-life management were the most common CE practices in the literature. Additionally, solar power and bioenergy emerged as the most frequently recurring areas of integration for CE practices within the RE realms. Governmental support, incentives, research and development, and strong environmental legislation were found to be the most frequently recurring facilitators of effective CE and RE integration. Organisational resistance, bureaucratic red tape, lack of human capital, limited stakeholder involvement, and insufficient collaboration were found to be important barriers to effective integration between CE and RE.

This paper presents a novel holistic modeling approach for investigating and analyzing the relationship of qualitative variables such as training and absenteeism with quantifiable shopfloor key performance indicators such as quality, inventory, and production rate. Soft variables, supervisor support and work environment, and their relationships with the hard variables, facility layout, and production strategies were investigated in this research. It was found in the literature that increasing absenteeism reduces the rate of production and causes a decrease in motivation, while training can increase the level of motivation if effective. A causal loop diagram was developed based on the evidence in the literature, and a system dynamics simulation model was created to depict these relations. It was confirmed that absenteeism affected the cycle time and motivation inversely, but it was not possible to always maintain a desired level of motivation. A discrete event simulation model was also built for the current and the future state maps of the production system. The model used output from the system dynamics model as its input to investigate the effects of the qualitative variables on the production system performance. This paper discusses in detail the stages of building the simulation models and the results recorded.