Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering

 

Industry 5.0 paradigm aims at implementing innovative processes to bring the human touch back to manufacturing while addressing personalized manufacturing and empowering human beings in manufacturing processes. Enabling consumers to personalize products that best fulfill their specific needs is the key value driver in product personalization towards online sales configurators (OSC). Online Sales Configurators are knowledge-based software applications designed to proactively guide users toward product/service configuration solutions that best fulfill their specific needs from within the company’s offerings. The product configuration processes vary depending on Mass-customization capability (MCC) which refers to the capability of a company to fulfill each customer’s idiosyncratic needs without substantial trade-offs in cost, delivery, and quality performance. Additional benefits of MCC within the Industry 5.0 paradigm are the reduction of warehousing and over-production costs and waste generation. To implement the right technology is crucial to achieve high performance of mass customization capability, especially for those companies with limited resources to invest in technology innovation likewise small and medium enterprises (SMEs). SMEs from handcraft sector can produce highly personalized products but most of them lack the MCC capabilities needed to face current and upcoming challenges of digital markets in the context of Industry 5.0. The startup Future Fashion designed a made-to-order suite implemented with an OSC to address this gap and represents a case of best practice to foster transition to industry 5.0 for SMEs of handcraft fashion Made in Italy.

The scope of the present seminar is to discuss on barriers and benefits in the implementation of online sales configurators as digital toolkit to bring the human touch back to manufacturing while ensuring additional benefits of digital product configuration for SMEs of handcraft fashion Made in Italy. The discussion is structured on three key topics:

 

1) Industry 5.0

2) Online sales configurators

3) The case of Future Fashion online sales configurator

 

Chiara Grosso received a Ph.D. in Management Engineering and Real Estate Economics at the University of Padua. Her academic career started late compared to the usual path since she decided to go back to academia after matured work experiences in companies in the risk management department. She was postdoc at the University of Milano Bicocca, where she was involved in different Erasmus projects.In her academic output she applies an interdisciplinary approach as witnessed in her works published in Journal of Industrial & Management Data Systems, Journal of Intelligent Information Systems, and International Journal of Industrial Engineering and Management. She serves as reviewer of Computer in Human behavior. She's a member of the scientific committee of the international workshop on configuration CWS, and co-Chair of next CWS 2024. Her research interests mainly focus on product/service personalization in digital domain, social  recommender systems, user experience in multisided platforms designed for different purposes (i.e., e-commerce, Learning and Health)