Alec Coutroubis-Dimetrios

Manufacturing organisations are currently experiencing a tight competition with their global rivals through new product offerings. With the viewpoint of rapid developing sustainable practices, this research pursues to investigate the impact of sustainable practices within demand driven distribution networks towards effective planning for product development purposes. Utilising the systematic review method of literature, different angles of this emerging perspective will be clarified. In the first step, we identify new product development (NPD) approaches as well as identification of traditional supply chain and demand chain approaches followed by scrutinising current world literature and a critical review as inputs of research findings. The systematic literature is guided by five key steps recommended by previous studies. A systematic literature review is conducted comprising of 75 scientific journal and conference papers from the year 2000 to 2020 towards analysis and discussions. The proposed conceptual framework provides with six propositions to be further measured, tested and validated. This research highlights the need for both academia and industries to combine the demand chain rising theories with sustainable supply chain to act as inputs towards increasing the success rate of NPD projects.

Integration of Sustainability and sustainable practices have been of paramount importance within most manufacturers' supply chain environment globally. Apart from the fact that every organisation now use this to improve on their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), this is also used as an opportunity to manage production and services within most firms efficiently. This sustainability is now a strategy adopted by most businesses to meet their customers' expectation considering the sustainable society awareness of which food manufacturing is not an exception. The use of several innovative strategies and incorporation of Industry 4.0 has been employed by some food manufacturers to meet up with this sustainability. This paper through a qualitative research study seeks to bridge the interconnection between Industry 4.0 and sustainable practices within food manufacturing supply chain.

This research study aims to examine and review the key advantages of smart manufacturing to achieve and improve performance within global supply chain environments. In recent years supply chain has been arisen as one of the major areas to gain a competitive edge in manufacturing industries. The current business methodologies of short product life cycle, increased outsourcing, expanding product variety, improved customer focus and improved technologies has led supply chain to be some challenging and complex tasks. Smart Manufacturing has been considered as a successful advancement in industrial revolution featuring resource efficiency, adaptability, agitability with wide application of internet and other innovative engineering technologies integrating of customers and business value processes creating a better manufacturing environment. The research is at its preliminary stages and will aim to examine and evaluate existing literature within the areas of smart and digital manufacturing and compare examples of best practices and methods towards creating a detailed comprehensive and systematic finding of the key research studies. This paper is a literature review which aims to review the benefits of smart manufacturing and its influence to achieve an improved performance in supply chain.

The study seeks to fulfil the ultimate step of the previous researches on demand chain concepts within manufacturing environments, with a specific focus on sustainability criteria. In this case, New Product Development (NPD), Industry 4.0 and smart manufacturing act as effective tools towards production of updated products facilitating both business survivability and customer satisfaction. This paper utilizes a brief overview of the literature studies as a knowledge platform and further investigates the case of two German manufacturing companies using a mixed research method. The outcomes and findings will then be analyzed to examine the study hypothesis towards creation of a comprehensive conceptual framework defining interconnections between NPD and Sustainable Demand Chain Management (SDCM) within global manufacturing domain. The novelty of this research is to develop the results of previous stages of this study including comparison of practices within several manufacturing companies in terms of the linkage between SDCM and NPD projects. This will be completed by creation of the main conceptual framework of this study introducing the new concept called sustainable demand-driven product development (SDPD).

Integration of suitable supply chain system with the industry 4.0 in the face of the evolving sustainability consciousness is of paramount importance to engineering and manufacturing industry at large; this is gradually becoming an irresistible option to manage production effectively and with high efficiency in engineering and manufacturing sector. Industry 4.0 also referred to as "smart factory" enables to address issues such as food safety, security, control, perishability, competitive pressure, demand predictions etc. within the food manufacturing aspects. The paper examines the challenges and opportunities towards the advancement of technology and that of industry 4.0 implications towards sustainability and more closely on sustainable food supply chain environments.

The aim of this paper is to analyse literature studies towards the potential of Vaca Muerta Field in the Neuquen Basin, its current development situation and the country's and Oil & Gas Industry background. Argentina is the second largest country in South America, which highly depends on its service and agricultural industries, been one of the major exporters of beef and soybean products. Strongly dependent on hydrocarbons, which account for 86.1% of its energy consumption, the country lost energy self-sufficiency in 2007, when it became a net importer of oil and gas. Concerns around the world about future shortages of energy were partially alleviated by the developments of commercially feasible techniques to extract oil and gas from unconventional resources, which are hard to extract due to the low porosity of the generating rock. Argentina turned to be the third and fourth larger holder of technically recoverable unconventional gas and oil respectively, mainly in the Neuquen Basin, were the second largest unconventional formation worldwide is located: Vaca Muerta is considered a world class resource, especially for its size, hydrocarbons content and thickness. It has been developed for seven years, achieving increasing production of oil and gas and improvements regarding costs, time and resources invested. As a conclusion, Argentina has vast and high-quality hydrocarbon reserves, what represents a huge opportunity for the country to recover energy self-sufficiency and its exporter position. New technologies and techniques are improving times and costs involved in the extraction of unconventional hydrocarbons in the country. In addition, the new government is taking action to improve reliability and encourage investments. All these should enhance Vaca Muerta's development.

Purpose – Innovation has been considered as the most important factor in today’s global and competitive environments for meeting growth, customer demands and expectations for any product development environment. This research study examines the concepts of sustainable development, its practices and impacts within demand driven supply chain environments. This paper is part of a wider project and within later stages of the study, a novel framework will be developed in order to link new product development (NPD) and demand chain management (DCM) aspects from the analysis of the research findings.
Design/methodology/approach – This research has adopted the approach of descriptive method which tends to examine demand chain concept and its evolution through recent years, while having a particular focus into NPD projects.
Findings – The paper investigates early study models through key findings of the literature that focuses on demand chain and NPD for the use and implementation of sustainability measures within manufacturing environments. The research study highlights the need for incorporation of NPD-DCM through the entire business ecosystem entities and also through the flow of information, materials and resources within the structure of the supply chain. The study finds out the key hurdles of the companies towards adoption of demand-driven supply chains in NPD environments, such as lack of cross-organisational association and lack of innovative demand chain frameworks.
Originality/value – The novelty of the research is to develop an early understanding within demand driven supply chains, considering the product development programmes particularly focused on marketing activities. The study provides future researchers with a platform to undertake studies within similar function of demand driven supply chain environments

Sustainability and sustainable practices has been the focus of importance for both manufacturers and customers within the global markets. Every manufacturer and supplier within the Supply Chain environments now strive hard to ensure they are part of this sustainable development goal to achieve better results and fulfill their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) principles. This is done mostly by business owners to meet up with customers’ expectation of sustainable society, including that of the food manufacturers and other small suppliers. They need to work hard and think of innovative strategies that could be employed to meet up with this popular challenge of sustainable society. This paper reviews current literature studies to analyse food processing suppliers who have adopted new technological advances and that of Industry 4.0 practices to achieve and fulfill better sustainable practices within their production and logistics activities in their supply chains. Through this research study we aim to bridge the interconnection between Industry 4.0 and that of sustainability practices within food manufacturing environments.

Research studies highlights that Industry 4.0 plays a vital role in different areas of manufacturing industries and requires constant research and improvements due to high demand to meet the global competitive markets in an efficient and economical method. The current industrialisation is facing great challenges in ensuring the sustainability balance of its social, economic and environmental dimensions while they strive to achieve the product demands in competitive market space. As part of achieving these high demands, different studies focus towards developing the understanding of industry 4.0 implementation practices to attain a sustainable manufacturing process that incorporates advanced technological tools for increasing efficiency, financial gains and competitiveness in the market. This paper aims to examine the interrelationship of sustainability practices, the key factors affecting sustainability within manufacturing, and finally the advancements of industry 4.0 and different technologies to achieve sustainable manufacturing that focuses on KPI’s of environmental and social dimensions.

Technological advances are constantly driving dramatic increase in effective sharing of information and material among the supply chain entities, since the development of industrial changes. Living in early decades of 21th century, the fourth industrial revolution has been emerged called “Industry 4.0”, being a hot topic for academic discussions. On the other side, demand chain management (DCM) is being highly considered as a transformed version of supply chain, looking the business chains through a customer-centric lens and aiming towards making pulls for new products in contrast to supply chain strategies. This paper seeks to explore the opportunities for expansion of Industry 4.0 within the context of demand-driven supply chains, due to the expected implications in this field. Reviewing the existing literature and industrial challenges, authors tend to shed some lights on the advantageous linkage between Industry 4.0 and demand chain, introducing a new concept called DCM 4.0. The results and findings would be utilized by scholars and practitioners aiming to discover the interrelationships within the same field.