Many innovative technologies have been successfully adopted in logistics and supply chain management processes to increase efficiency, reduce costs or enhance communication. In recent years, considerable attention from both practitioners and academics has been focused on evaluating the impacts of innovative technologies adoption. However, the current body of literature on technology adoption, implementation and evaluation in logistics is quite fragmented; thus, an updated and structured overview of the scientific literature in this field might be useful. To this end, this work presents a systematic literature review (SLR) that aims to increase the understanding of the trend toward new technologies in logistics and identify the main research trends and gaps. The principal research trends that emerged from the SLR involve the technologies, their evolution over time and their relationships with the research methodologies. The main literature gaps concern integration and communication, technology-adoption processes and differences between inbound and outbound logistics.

Despite the huge body of academic literature on inventory management of maintenance spare parts, few companies seem to deliberately use the proper approaches and tools for a factual and quantitative assessment. Detaining or not stocks of a spare item, deciding upon the right level of inventory, forecasting its sporadic consumption are just some of the evidences of the complexity and criticality underlying the daily decisions the management of a company has to undertake. The objective of the paper is to provide a stepwise decision-making path in order to orienteer an industrial manager on how to pragmatically handle the management of maintenance spare parts in a company. The framework is structured into five sequential steps: part coding, part classification, part demand forecasting, stock management policy and policy test and validation. Its applicability is demonstrated by making use of a real business case where it has been successfully adopted.

This paper illustrates the results of an empirical study involving 21 engineer-to-order (ETO) companies, operating in the machinery-building industry. The study investigates the needs and requirements of such companies in terms of software support for governing the businesses, with particular emphasis on production planning and control (PPC) processes. An empirical analysis investigated two main aspects: (i) the set of business activities performed by the companies in the analysed industry and (ii) the relevant, high-level software functionalities required for the execution of such activities. As an answer to the observed compelling need for reviewing the general approaches to PPC in machinery-building companies, we develop an empirical, high-level production planning and scheduling reference framework, encompassing all the activities involved in the order fulfilment process.