The design and development of a digital platform is usually highly complex and involves many individual steps in preparation. Within the scope of the research project PERMA (Platform for efficient ...resource utilization in the furniture and furnishing industry) a digital platform is developed to promote circular economy core mechanism in the furniture and furnishing industry. The aim of these core mechanisms is to establish an overarching platform that covers processes and involved stakeholders from primary use (purchasing/renting/leasing), secondary use (processing or upcycling) until end of life (EoL) (recycling, refurbish, reuse etc.). This paper gives an overview on the identified circular economy core elements and stakeholder needed as well as barriers and drivers and a design approach to develop processes to enable circular economy features on a digital platform. Within the paper the developed design approach will be presented and the identified main processes for the PERMA platform will be described. Lastly, final considerations are presented with the identification of new research streams, including the need of the evaluation of these processes in other sectors to implement CE platforms and the potential to collect cross-sectoral platform use cases that are successfully mastering CE best practices.
Environmental sustainability has become one of the key issues for strategy, marketing, and innovation. In particular, significant attention is being paid by companies, customers, media, and ...regulators to development and consumption of green products. It is argued that through the efficient use of resources, low carbon impacts, and risks to the environment, green products can be essential to help society toward the environmental sustainability targets. The number of green product introductions is rapidly increasing, as demonstrated by the growing number of companies obtaining eco‐labels or third party certifications for their environmentally friendly products. Hundreds of companies representing most of the industries, such as Intel, SC Johnson, Clorox, Wal‐Mart, and Hewlett–Packard, have recently introduced new green products, underlining the need to develop products that create both economic and environmental values for the firm and customers. A review of the literature shows that academic research on green product development has grown in interest. However, to date, only a few empirical studies have addressed the challenge of integrating environmental issues into new product development (NPD). Previous empirical works have mainly focused on a set of activities for the green product development process at the project level. After years of paying no or marginal attention to environmental sustainability issues, most of the companies now generally realize that it would require knowledge and competencies to develop green products on a regular basis. These knowledge and competencies can be varied, such as R&D, environmental know‐how, clean technology/manufacturing process, building knowledge on measuring environmental performance of products, etc., that may be developed internally or can be integrated through external networks. Adopting a resource‐based view of the firm, this article aims at (1) investigating the role of capabilities useful for companies to integrate knowledge and competencies from outside of the firm on green product development in terms of both manufacturing process and product design and (2) understanding whether green product development opens new product, market, and technology opportunities, as well as leads to better financial performance of NPD programs. To this end, a survey was conducted in two Italian manufacturing industries in which environmental issues are becoming increasingly important, namely textiles and upholstered furniture. A questionnaire was sent to 700 firms, and 102 useable questionnaires were returned. Results show that (1) companies engage in developing external integrative capabilities through the creation of collaborative networks with actors along the supply chain, the acquisition of technical know‐how, and the creation of external knowledge links with actors outside the supply chain; (2) external knowledge links play a key role in the integration of environmental sustainability issues into the manufacturing process, whereas capabilities such as the acquisition of technical know‐how and the creation of collaborative networks prove to be more important for integrating environmental issues into product design; and (3) the integration of environmental sustainability issues into NPD programs in terms of product design leads to the creation of new opportunities for firms, such as opening new markets, technologies, and product arenas, though not necessarily leading to improved financial performance of the NPD programs.
This book covers impact of trade liberalization on Canadian agriculture, prospects for trade liberalization in agriculture, as well as trade liberalization and the Canadian pulp and paper industry ...and trade liberalization and the Canadian furniture industry.
Suicide rates in the working-age U.S. population have increased by over 40% in the last two decades. Although suicide may be linked with characteristics of workplaces and their industries, few ...studies have reported industry-level suicide rates. No study has reported suicide rates by industry using nationally representative data. This study estimates suicide risks across industries in the U.S. working population.
Industry-level estimates of suicide risks require substantial data; we combined 29 years of U.S. suicide data using the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS)-Mortality Linked data from 1986 through 2014, with mortality follow-up through 2015. We conducted survey-weighted Poisson regression analyses to estimate suicide mortality rates and rate ratios across all populations and stratified by gender. All analyses were adjusted first for age, and then for age, employment status, marital status, race/ethnicity, and rurality/urbanicity (demographic-adjusted). Rate ratios compared results for workers in each industry to those for all industries, accounting for the NHIS survey design.
A total of 1,943 suicide deaths were recorded. Age-adjusted suicide rates per 100,000 were highest in the furniture, lumber, and wood industry group (29.3), the fabricated metal industry (26.3), and mining (25.8). Demographic-adjusted rates were higher among men than women in most industries. Demographic-adjusted rate ratios were significantly elevated in the furniture, lumber, and wood industries (Rate Ratio, RR = 1.60, 95% confidence interval, CI = 1.18-2.18); chemicals and allied products (RR = 1.49, 95%CI = 1.04-2.13); and construction (RR = 1.21, 95% CI = 1.03-1.41).
Several industries had significantly high suicide rates. Suicide prevention efforts may be particularly useful for workers in those industries.
Flexible polyurethane foam (FPUF) has many advantages such as lightweight, low density and high specific strength and is widely used in furniture, automobile industry, construction and ...transportation. However, FPUF is extremely flammable in the air, and a large amount of toxic gas will be generated when it is burned. The fire protection technology of FPUF has attracted more and more attention. Generally, it is an effective method to improve fire protection of FPUF by introducing additive flame retardant. As a relatively new approach, layer-by-layer (LBL) self-assembly technology is widely used in research fields such as biology, materials and nanoscience. In this work, the research and application of LBL self-assembly technology in the field of flame-retardant FPUF were described, and zero-dimensional, one-dimensional, two-dimensional nanomaterials, one- and two-dimensional nanocomposites systems and other self-assembly systems in flame-retardant FPUF were introduced in detail. The flame-retardant mechanism of flame-retardant FPUF systems was also systematically analyzed, and finally, the development of LBL self-assembly technology in flame-retardant FPUF was prospected.
In deciding how much information about their firms' customers to disclose, managers face a trade off between the benefits of reducing information asymmetry with capital market participants and the ...costs of aiding competitors by revealing proprietary information. This paper investigates the determinants of managers' choices to disclose information about their firms' customers using a comprehensive data set of customer-information disclosures over the period 1976-2006. We find robust evidence in support of the hypothesis that proprietary costs are an important factor in firms' disclosure choices regarding information about large customers.
Cooke offers a fresh and appealing cross-disciplinary study of the furnituremakers, social structure, household possessions, and surviving pieces of furniture of two neighboring New England ...communities.Winner of the Decorative Arts Society, Inc.'s Charles F. Montgomery PrizeOriginally published in 1996. In Making Furniture in Preindustrial America Edward S. Cooke Jr. offers a fresh and appealing cross-disciplinary study of the furnituremakers, social structure, household possessions, and surviving pieces of furniture of two neighboring New England communities. Drawing on both documentary and artifactual sources, Cooke explores the interplay among producer, process, and style in demonstrating why and how the social economies of these two seemingly similar towns differed significantly during the late colonial and early national periods. Throughout the latter half of the eighteenth century, Cooke explains, the yeoman town of Newtown relied on native joiners whose work satisfied the expectations of their fellow townspeople. These traditionalists combined craftwork with farming and made relatively plain, conservative furniture. By contrast, the typical joiner in the neighboring gentry town of Woodbury was the immigrant innovator. Born and raised elsewhere in Connecticut and serving a diverse clientele, these craftsmen were free of the cultural constraints that affected their Newtown contemporaries. Relying almost entirely on furnituremaking for their livelihood, they were free to pay greater attention to stylistically sensitive features than to mere function.
Introduction: Wooden furniture is one of Indonesia's superior products, with a low-efficiency level. However, the wooden furniture industry is often associated with intense environmental degradation ...and high levels of waste. In anticipating waste, a green manufacturing model proposed is Lean-Green manufacturing. This current study aims to explore the implementation of the Lean-Green model in a furniture company's waste processing system and assess the effectiveness of Lean-Green implementation. Methods: The research methodology was qualitative with the Lean-Green scoring method implemented in the supply chain of Company S. Data were collected through interviews and field observations. Results: Company S had a low score, meaning that the interaction between the Lean and Green approaches in the waste processing of the supply chain was not optimal. The Lean-Green implementation in the wooden furniture industry was effective in evaluating waste processing in the supply chain. The research findings urge the initiatives to improve the understanding and implementation of the Lean-Green concept. Conclusion and suggestion: The evaluation of the Lean-Green implementation helps the company’s manager improve the supply chain with sustainable measures.
•The rotation of professional roles moved the team members out of their comfort zone conversing individual tacit professional knowledge into productive tacit knowledge enabling explicit business ...knowledge.•The upper management team conversed the tacit productive team knowledge into collective tacit managerial knowledge enabling the conversion to innovative products.•Expert, nodding, familiarity and holistic individual tacit knowledge are conversed to collective productive and managerial tacit knowledge translated to new products..•We have found a workable strategy of conversing individual tacit knowledge to collective productive and managerial tacit knowledge enabling explicit business performance.•The process of conversing individual and collective tacit knowledge to productive and managerial business performance can be designed, planned, managed and controlled through teams..
Our research question is how do we transform individual and collective tacit knowledge into collective, explicit and actionable knowledge in teams?.
As our methodological approach, we conducted a longitudinal survey study from 2012 to 2014 to of two teams of staff employed with a Norwegian furniture manufacturer. Each team included designers, production engineers, and salespeople. The survey included the teams and the upper corporate team. The survey monitored the design, production and market processes involved in launching furniture to the marketplace (30 months).
The teams decided to rotate their professional roles as designers, production engineers, and salespeople. This rotating role mechanism and socialization process encouraged the sharing of knowledge. The team members transformed their tacit knowledge into collective explicit knowledge, allowing it to deliver innovative results within a time limit. As a theoretical implication, we have found a workable means of transforming tacit, productive, individual and collective knowing into explicit actionable knowledge. Productive team knowledge was converted into tacit managerial knowledge in upper management personnel, enabling the group to translate knowledge into explicit business actions. We propose, as a general theory, that by rotating professional roles within a team individual tacit knowledge can be transformed into collective explicit knowledge. The productive team tacit knowledge that was transferred was identified as expert, nodding, familiarity and holistic knowledge.
As a practical implication, we show that rotating professional roles within a team works when a team is afforded enough time to develop a socialization process. When professionals are given direction, trust, responsibility and time to develop results, they break out of their comfort zones and deliver extraordinary results together. As a practical implication, we show that this process can be planned, managed and controlled. Role rotation facilitates both the creation of high-performance teams and the transformation of tacit professional knowledge into explicit knowledge. The transformation of tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge helps increase efficiency and effectiveness in knowledge-intensive corporations. Therefore, practically, is it possible to create a corporate flywheel from tacit knowledge? The conversion of productive tacit knowledge into tacit managerial knowledge converted into specific business actions can create an explicit corporate flywheel while maintaining tacit knowledge as a competitive advantage.
Despite the growing awareness about Circular Economy (CE) in production and supply chain management, there is little evidence linking CE practices to environmental and economic performances, ...especially within the traditional wood furniture industry in Indonesia. As with other management practices, implementation of CE can be supported by various factors. Among these factors are the so-called environmental-oriented supply chain cooperation (ESCC) practices. The study reported in this paper has three purposes. First, to investigate how the different levels of ESCC practices will affect the CE practices across the traditional wooden furniture industry in Central Java, Indonesia; second, to investigate the relationship between varying ESCC practices (which is grouped based on the implementation of CE practices) on the CE-targeted performances; and third, to examine the role of ESCC practices as a moderating variable in the relationship between CE practices and CE-targeted performances. This study uses primary data which were collected through closed questionnaires to 190 valid samples of wooden furniture SMEs across the cities of Jepara, Kudus, Rembang, Semarang, Blora and Surakarta. The data were processed using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), K-means clustering analysis, Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) and regression analysis. The results indicated that, depending on the levels of ESCC practices, the SMEs could be grouped into leaders, followers and laggard, which also determined the extent to which they practised the CE principles. The study also elaborated on the interactions between ESCC and CE practices, and how these might affect the CE-targeted environmental and economic performances.
