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The idea of adopting the consignment stock concept has enriched the landscape of efficient supply chains and their organizations, due to its major benefits in reducing inventory, compressing delivery time and increasing flexibility towards achieving agility and enhanced market responsiveness. The decision making process is a complex one, as besides the benefits and the economical and administrative aspects, there are also risks that must be identified, measured, assessed and managed. There is little research in the literature concerning the risks and constraints of consignment inventory implementation, while consignment contracts are widely applied in both physical and virtual supply chains. This paper introduces a model of proactive risk assessment via a fuzzy approach, allowing a sensitivity analysis of the identified risks in the matrix, in terms of probability to happen, degree of severity, impact and potential consequences, as well as mitigation. A fuzzy inference system is used to serve as assessment instrument, to fairly and more rigorously evaluate the risks, in order to avoid critical situations during or after program adoption, or even implementation failure. Fuzzy logic theory has been chosen to capture the uncertainty that usually occurs when dealing with risks and decision making. We believe that having these risk assessment insights at hand, managers and practitioners can achieve a better understanding of the challenges that come along with a new consignment program adoption, while allowing them to make the right and justified decision, in accordance with both benefit and risk considerations.

The conveyors are used to transport various products in successive steps until they reach their destination and to ensure cargo volumes to balance the flow buffer. The conveyors monorail type are used for the transfer of the products, piece by piece and they can be suspended and can operate at heights and different tasks. In this paper is presented a method for the design of the drive shaft of a monorail conveyor, by using CAD-CAE applications.

The aim of our study was to investigate the role of entrepreneuship in the socio-economic development of various regions in romania. our research focused on a quantitative analysis based on a projective techniques grid applied on a number of 45 students investigated using "the Chinese portrait" and sentence completion technique. This study answers a series of questions, such as: a) Can history be a significant catalyst for economic development at all levels? b) Can there be big differences in the economic development of various macro-regions of the country caused by their more remote past? c) Except for the macro-region comprising the capital of our country, could history be an important factor in explaining gaps between macro-regions, or even one favouring macro-region 1? d) How is romania perceived after 1989? The results of our research show that the romanian market is on an upward trend, favourable to the development of business and, as for the manner in which entrepreneurship is viewed in society, it is considered a catalyst for the development of local economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The conveyors are used to transport various products in successive steps until they reach their destination and to ensure cargo volumes to balance the flow buffer. The conveyors monorail type are used for the transfer of the products, piece by piece and they can be suspended and can operate at heights and different tasks. In this paper is presented a method for the design of the drive shaft of a monorail conveyor, by using CAD-CAE applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The errors recovery in the production systems will be always an open issue. Therefore, the FMSs have to be endowed with tools and techniques allowing an automatic recovery of errors. The objective of this work consists in proposing an off-line version of the software framework for error troubleshooting in a flexible manufacturing system [1]. The main difference between the on-line and off-line version is that the error database is stored on the mobile device and the frame marker device is connected directly to the FMS components without the need of the PC.). Our framework system is designed to solve the failures in the functioning of the FMS and to generate self-training from previous experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the statistical results obtained from the investigation conducted into how higher education studies in a specific area - in this case pharmaceutical studies-influence the pharmacist students' thinking in dealing with a characteristic phenomenon of contemporary society, namely self-medication. Data was collected using a 3-year questionnaire distributed between 2010 and 2013, to a total of 985 students from all the five years of study at the Faculty of Medicine and Pharmacy, University of Oradea, to track the progress after following subject areas, respectively the evolution of opinions about self-medication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In today’s competitive business environment, with a continuously increasing diversity in customer demand, a high level of supply chain responsiveness is an imperative requisite for companies’ survival. As a consequence, enhanced agility is requested for the supply chains. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the determinants that influence the position of the ‘decoupling points’ along the value chain, as according to the reviewed literature these represent the separation point between leanness and agility in a hybrid supply chain. It has been found that by applying different technical solutions along the chain, including breaking down the complete production process in modular sequences and outsourcing specific ones, considering reshaping the supply chain, the decoupling points’ location can be moved, allowing greater agility. The chosen methodology is a case study of a FMCG company, aiming to illustrate how increased agility is achieved by outsourcing labour-intensive and time consuming activities, while shortening the downstream to customer. The selected firm is since several years under Lean and Agile strategies implementation. The study shows that understanding both, material and information decoupling points, certain lean processes can be moved upstream, leveraging more agile processes close to the end customer. This way, supply chains can be redesigned towards increasing market responsiveness.

Nowadays, manufacturing companies are involved in a big competition, each of them looking to increase productivity and profit by implementing best practices within the company. The present paper presents an analysis of best practices of manufacturing companies which contributes to increasing and improving the productivity, and also have been identified new trends regarding best practices implemented in manufacturing companies. In order to accomplish this research, has been analyzed a successful manufacturing company in the field of manufacturing and automation from Romania. To collect data for this study there were accessed two databases, different specialized websites in the field, but the most important source of information was obtained from the analyzed company. One of the best practices identified in this study was to improve the productivity through re-engineering, practice that the company studied has implemented. In order to highlight this good practice, namely reengineering, were analyzed in parallel both of existing manufacturing types from the analyzed company, respectively production on CNC processing centers and classical production. The exemplification of both types of productions was done by using a Lean Manufacturing method, namely Value Stream Mapping, identifying the operational flow of both types of production.

The complexity of operative fabrication planning, especially in the case of series production, requires a high volume of calculation. The frequent changes of batches require the recalculation of the fabrication cycles with time-consuming operations. In this paper we developed a new algorithm which allows the calculation of the fabrication cycles directly on a component level without the necessity of operation level calculations. In order for this to work it is crucial to memorize on a component level information about the component’s technology. Like this the fabrication cycle can be calculated online for any type of fabrication batch. The algorithms can be used in the contractual phase in order to estimate the delivery timeline, in the fabrication preparation phase in order to estimate the required capacity and workforce, as well as in the fabrication programming and reprogramming phase when different simulation can be made with different priority variants, different capacity allocations with variance efficiency analysis. Through the definition of specific data structures for the presented relations, we demonstrate that the computer assisted operative programming approach is possible in the machine building industry, even on an enterprise level. With these conditions it is ensured a superior quality of the decision system, the accumulated experience is suggesting the realization of a methodological framework in this field.

The temperature control of automotive brake discs during operation is a difficult process because they have shiny metallic surfaces moving rotational contact with fixed brake pads and different temperature gradients. The instrument used for measuring the temperature, in this case is the thermal camera, but requires precise calibration for the emissivity of the material being analyzed and the influence of environment. The study refers to changes depending on the temperature of thermal emissivity of the material disc brake car, both in static and in dynamic regime and determining analytical relationships to estimate this variation acceptable accuracy.