E-commerce is always more diffused as a selling channel around the whole world market, and its importance has increased and continues to increase with the COVID-19 pandemic emergency. It provides enterprises a lot of opportunities, as the importance of physical stores to sell goods is bypassed. However, it has also changed the role of logistics in the supply chain. For this reason, this work aims to identify the main logistics research areas related to e-commerce implementation and the factors and key performance indicators, which should be taken into account for each logistics research area, with particular attention to sustainable aspects. For doing this, a structured and comprehensive literature analysis is carried out. Keywords associated with e-commerce and logistics areas are matched to identify the most interesting works related to its implementation. From the analysis, five main research areas are identified: Supply Chain Network Design (SCND); Outbound Logistics (OL); Reverse Logistics (RL); Warehousing (WR); and IT and data management (E-IT). For each area, key factors, strategies and performance indicators have been identified. Finally, a methodological framework that summarizes the results of the analysis is presented; this is a useful tool for managers to implement or expand their e-commerce business. Many works are focused on one research area, carrying out critical factors, models, and methods to implement that topic. Instead, the methodological framework presented here summarizes multiple research areas from a logistic point of view, identifying for each one input and output variables and how they influence each other.
1 March 2019 in International Journal of Production Research
The paper presents a systematic literature review on big size product manufacturing systems in MTO and ETO environments. In particular, the analysis is focused on highly customised, big and heavy products, calling for highly engineering solutions. This kind of products are characterised by low-volume demand, complex material bills, need of more than one worker in the same workstation (caused by the component dimensions and complexity), multi-skilled human resources and large floor space requirements. The analysis involved 587 research articles published from 1981 to 2017 from 118 international journals in the area of production research and operation management. Finally, 160 papers have been individuated and clustered in three main research topic area: specification processes and product design, production planning and control, project portfolio management. Results indicate that research focused on optimising and managing a large-size product manufacturing system is gaining growing attention in the last ten years. However, product/process design, production planning and control and project management techniques still lack innovations and ad hoc methods, capable to take into consideration both in-house part feeding problems, both ergonomics issues present in this kind of manufacturing environments.
1 December 2023 in International Journal of Production Research