Productivity Improvement through Reengineering and Simulation: A Case Study in a Footwear-Industry

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

One of the criteria used for identifying data affected by errors could been applied to the obtained results (example: Chauvenet"s  Criterion).

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The main problem of this paper is that it is too long and dispersive, including sections that are not necessary to the objective of the paper (see II. Contextual Analysis) and in the end it is not clear to the reader what is the real objective of the work.

 

Moreover, several times there are sentences that are too general and not motivated (i.e. the only way for a business or company to grow and increase its profits is increasing its productivity). This is true in the footwear industry in a MTO environment?

 

The state of the art in Reengineering do not had a real value to the paper and it is too general. Maybe you should consider to limit it to the footwear industry, or to industries that have the same characteristics.

 

The section 3.2 presents a "new" methodology. Is it the added value of this paper? You should add a state of the art section regarding the methodology to perform reengineering in the footwear industry.

But if the result of the paper is a new methodology, the adopted methodology can be the case study or the action research.

 

Is the added value of the paper the simulation model? You should remove sections that are not used in the simulation and better describe the results.

Author Response

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Reviewer 3 Report

The paper 'Productivity improvement through Reengineering and Simulation. A Case Study in a Footwear-Industry' is nicely written, mostly in a clear and logical manner. The addressed topic is of great significance and value to the industry.

Some remarks are provided in the attached file.

Two major point should be pointed out:

1. The authors should provide credits to other production system engineering methods in the literature review.
2. Issues on model validation should be clarified (please see the attached pdf)

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 4 Report

BRIEF SUMMARY

The authors present a reengineering initiative supported by simulation, for the improvement of productivity in industry sector. As an illustrative example, the authors use the case study of a Footwear Industry in which they propose the reengineering of a problem area in the production decoration line, and compare it with the AS-IS process using models of Simulation performed in the Arena™ software.

BROAD COMMENTS

The topic addressed in the paper is interesting and fits perfectly well with the Applied Sciences Journal area of research. The paper is comprehensive, the conducted reengineering is methodologically sound and is well presented in a convenient manner. However, the authors do not communicate the research work done, in particular sections of the paper. Also, the literature review section should be improved and elaborated to clearly present – and ultimately address - the research gap of this research. Lastly, minor syntactical and vocabulary errors occur.

 SPECIFIC COMMENTS

Abstract:  The abstract is articulate and robust providing the purpose, particular focus and findings of the paper. The authors also provide the necessary information regarding research methodology and main research contribution.

Section 1 - Introduction: This section provides an introduction to process reengineering and how it correlates to the objectives of the paper. The authors conveniently present the aim and objectives of the paper along with a brief indication of each section. What should be amended is the relevant literature, e.g. process definition in Line 34 (Please elaborate with a more concise definition) and the determination of what is considered a “business problem” in your context in lines 34-35 (add corresponding reference if this is derived from relevant literature). Also some typographic errors should be corrected, e.g. in lines 44, 48.

 Section 2 – Literature Review: The literature review is adequately performed, in regards to reengineering approaches and their main findings. The authors, nevertheless, fail to present a research gap in those approaches, a fact that weakens the contribution of their paper. Also, the section should initiate with a concrete discrimination of what is conceived as “process reengineering” and the differences with process improvement and redesign, in order for the reader to comprehend the orientation of the paper.  Some typographic errors occur in lines 87, 89, 106, 116, 119.

Section 3 – Materials and Methods: This section is significantly imbalanced in relation to the rest sections. You present – in a section – the methodology, the problem formulation, the actual reengineering and the simulation of your case study. Consider revising the sections to improve the structure of your paper. Some critical research questions should also be answered. For instance you should answer and elaborate how you analyzed the process (Line 343). Also, where did the new production process derive from? Was it intuitive to the Czar, or did you follow specific methodology given the particular problem. Also you should consider explicitly stating the redesign heuristics (see “Fundamentals of Business Process Management” by M Dumas, M La Rosa, J Mendling, HA Reijers) applied for producing the TO-BE model. In lines 221-222 please state clearly that the information provided in Table is open-source. Improve Figure 2 (line 246) as the mapping is not clear, e.g. by adding a legend for the description of elements, edges and their function/properties. Also Table 9 (line 501) is not clear because column headings do not correspond to the forthcoming columns, due to page swift. Also typographic errors occur in lines 413, 456-458, 475, 476-477, 495, 497-498.

Section 4 - Discussion: The authors provide a solid discussion section with the reengineering findings. 

Section 5 - Conclusions: This section provides the key findings and contribution of this approach. I would like to view a discussion about the limitations and future work (if any) of your research approach.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx