Abstract
This paper presents the approach and results of an improvement project carried on by a company that provides business process outsourcing services based on customised software solutions. The critical objectives considered were to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the processes involved in developing customised solutions. Thus, the focus of this research was to identify problems in current processes and practices and develop possible solutions to improve. The processes were mapped, the inefficiencies were identified, and suggestions for improvements were presented and analysed. It was concluded that the main problems with the project management and software development processes are related to the lack of visibility of the team load, lack of standardisation and inefficient management processes. These causes result in problems such as IT being unable to plan work and problems associated with quality that negatively influence the lead time of projects. Therefore, suggestions for improvement were formulated and prioritised to address each of these aspects. A more agile approach to software development and redesigning the processes for creating customised solutions were the solutions developed. There was also a need to develop the existing project management software changes to adapt it to these changes. © IEOM Society International.

Abstract
This paper discusses the improvement of product management activities in a fast-growing marketing automation software company. Recently, the company experienced an expansion of its international activities, a fast-growing turnover, and a significant enlargement of the software team. The new needs coming from this situation led the company to move the product development team from a traditional functional organization to a holocratic organization, where self-organized teams are entirely responsible for their product development activities. To design effective management practices and tools for this new organizational model, the company decided to analyze its business processes in-depth. At the first stage, high-level process mapping techniques were employed to comprehensively view the product management activities, their embedding organizational structure, and context. Then, detailed process mapping techniques were employed to build up a detailed visualization of the process workflows. Then, it was possible to conduct a root-cause analysis aiming at identifying the opportunities for improvement. These opportunities were then assessed and prioritized based on their expected impact upon business performance, namely productivity and time-to-market. The actions selected for implementation addressed three main issues: standardization of the planning and monitoring procedures; teams misalignments. Through a systematic process analysis and redesign, it was possible to set up a new set of management tools that cope with these issues, reinforce the workforce commitment and involvement, and ultimately improve business performance. © IEOM Society International.

Abstract
Make-to-order (MTO) supply chains (SC), common in aerospace industries, are very complex compared to mass production chains. Moreover, one of the significant long-term challenges is sustainability performance across its entire supply chain. However, this is not an easy task given the complexity involved, so decision support tools are fundamental instruments in understanding the entire supply chain from a sustainability performance perspective. Using simulation as a research method, this article proposes a hybrid and hierarchical performance assessment model, considering key sustainability indicators. The model is hybrid due to the use of different simulation methods- System Dynamics (SD), Discrete Event Simulation (DES), and Agent-based simulation (ABS). The model is applied to an aerospace manufacturer's real case to assess the sustainability performance of alternative SC. Unlike existing contributions, this work addresses the make-to-order supply chain from a sustainability performance perspective and does not compromise the representation of the diverse manufacturing functions and resources.

Abstract
Digital platforms have, in the past decades, undergone a revolution, evolving from its technical roots so much that nowadays value is mostly generated, not by the technologies that power platforms, but by the ecosystem of applications, developers and users it is able to generate and support. In this paper, we seek to understand the importance industrial platform owners place on the community building and platform growth components of the platform development process by reviewing 50 Horizon 2020 financed projects that stand on the development of platforms. This evidence is leveraged for the case of a validation strategy definition for a platform ecosystem aiming at sharing production capacity. Key findings point to platform developing practices focused on the development of technical components to the detriment of the ecosystem generation element. We also shed light on how different business models and funding schemes impacted the steering of these platforms.

Abstract
The rise of smart manufacturing environments, characterized by high quantity of data/information available, contributes to a growing interest and research towards the use of immersive technologies not only in factories but also across entire value chains. New immersive technologies and devices are being developed to improve cooperation within Collaborative Networks (CNs), especially in the human-machine hybrid networks context. The application of these technologies in such complex environments expands substantially the modes how information is delivered and used, which may exacerbate one of the oldest problems of cognitive ergonomics: information overload. Therefore, this work presents applications of immersive technologies in manufacturing into the perspective of "information work" and "immersive human-centered manufacturing systems". A framework is proposed to be developed in a FabLab to understand the worker needs and interactions. This FabLab aims to demonstrate the potential/real application of immersive technologies, towards the enhancement of the human worker cognitive capabilities.

Abstract
Project management is a critical success factor for any kind of project. When projects involve complex multi-organisational structures, requiring demanding collaborative processes, project management is a complex system in itself. Although this topic has been studied for decades, the ever-changing morphology of projects induced by the increasingly intricate financing schemes, call for a frequent and updated understanding of how the projects initiate, run, and close. Large-scale integrated collaborative projects are a recent example of complex collaborative projects that were not studied yet but can provide important insights for the project and innovation management fields. These projects are carried out typically by a large consortium including research organisations, sectorial technological centres, technology providers and end-user companies, having a significant impact on the technological innovation produced for a specific sector. This chapter reports a multiple case study of four large-scale integrated projects, in Portugal, following an inductive research design. The results showed that collaboration creation and collaboration management are crucial processes for such projects, with challenges intensified by the differences in goals and expectations of researchers and practitioners. The chapter will hopefully contribute to the future development of new models, tools and techniques that will improve the efficiency and effectiveness of this type of projects, by providing a systematisation of the challenges faced and how they were overcome during the cases analysed. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.