Industrial Engineering and Operations Management – a view from IJCIEOM 2020-2021

18, No. 03, e20211221. https://doi.org/10.14488/BJOPM.2021.033 ABSTRACT This Special Issue of the Brazilian Journal of Operations and Production Management (BJOPM) offers nine papers selected from the 26 th International Joint Conference on Industrial Engineering and Operations Management (IJCIEOM – 2020-2021). The conference theme was “Challenges and Trends for Sustainability in the 21st Century”, looking ahead to bridge theory and practice of economic, social, and environmental sustainability. This editorial paper summarises the selected contributions of collaborative efforts of international researchers to advance knowledge in different research topics of investigate what are the main implications of 4.0 technologies management. The study was carried out through a survey with companies of the metal-mechanic and automotive industry of the Curitiba Metropolitan Region (Brazil) and the Upper Bavaria Region (Germany) to determine the overall level of implementation of technologies commonly associated with Industry 4.0, and their respective impacts on operations performance. Analogous researches that formally discuss the implications of the Industry 4.0 technologies for production management are lacking. Most studies focus excessively on the technologies without approaching their impact on management systems.


INTRODUCTION
The 26 th International Joint Conference on Industrial Engineering and Operations Management (IJCIEOM -2020) was promoted by ABEPRO (Brazilian Association of Production Engineering) jointly with Adingor (Asociación para el Desarrollo de la Ingeniería de Organización), IISE (Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers), AIM (European Academy for Industrial Management) and ASEM (American Society for Engineering Management). It was initially planned to be held at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio) in February 2021. However, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, it became a virtual conference, and its organizing committee decided to merge IJCIEOM 2020 and IJCIEOM 2021 into one conference. Although virtual, the conference could achieve its goal of enhancing the connection between academia and industry and gathering researchers and practitioners specializing in industrial engineering and operations management.
The research papers offered in this special issue focus on operational excellence, total quality management (TQM), business analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), information technology (IT), supply chain management and integration, sales and operations planning (S&OP), and industry 4.0. Next, this editorial introduces the papers, which were written by researchers from different countries and institutions: Brazil Thomé et al. (2020;2021) and at http://www.abepro.org.br/proceedings/ index.asp.

OVERVIEW OF THE SPECIAL ISSUE ARTICLES
Researchers from the Institute of Technology Management of the University of St. Gallen offer the paper entitled "Analysis of the effects of Operational Excellence implementation on Inspection Outcomes in the Pharmaceutical Industry: An Empirical Study". This empirical study aims to evaluate the connection between pharmaceutical manufacturing plants' operational excellence implementation and regulatory inspection outcomes, through logistic regression models to improve resource management in manufacturing sites and laboratories exposed to a higher risk of quality non-compliance. They conclude that sites with a higher degree of implementation of their operational excellence plans and programs have better inspection outcomes.
Researchers from different Portuguese institutions (Polytechnic of Viseu, University of Aveiro, and the University of Lisbon) analyse the influence of artificial intelligence (AI) on public employment and the ways politics are reacting to it, based on the results of a systematic literature review. AI became an important issue, as public administration is constantly changing in response to new challenges, and political leaders are finding ways to restrain or regulate AI in public services. Additionally, scholars are raising legitimate concerns about its impacts on public employment. The paper entitled "Influence of artificial intelligence on public employment and its impact on politics: A systematic literature review" addresses this issue.
Different papers highlight the strong research connection between Brazil and Germany. For instance, the paper entitled "Implications of Industry 4.0 to companies' performance: A comparison between Brazil and Germany" was the result of an international academic partnership that embraced two universities in Brazil (Pontifical Catholic University of Parana and Federal University of Paraná) and one in Germany (Technische Hochschule Ingolstadt). This paper aims to investigate what are the main implications of Industry 4.0 technologies for production management. The study was carried out through a survey with companies of the metal-mechanic and automotive industry of the Curitiba Metropolitan Region (Brazil) and the Upper Bavaria Region (Germany) to determine the overall level of implementation of technologies commonly associated with Industry 4.0, and their respective impacts on operations performance. Analogous researches that formally discuss the implications of the Industry 4.0 technologies for production management are lacking. Most studies focus excessively on the technologies without approaching their impact on management systems. The main results reveal that the overall implementation and improvement levels of the Industry 4.0 technologies are higher in Germany than in Brazil. Regarding the technologies, the Internet of Things (IoT) presented one of the highest overall improvement levels for both regions, showing that the adoption of these technologies could bring significant improvements for all performance objectives. From a practical approach, companies that are willing to invest in new technologies can find a starting point to understand the benefits that they can achieve based on results obtained from companies that have already adopted the technologies in Brazil and Germany. The connection between researchers from Brazil and Germany is also seen in the paper entitled "Literature Review on Maturity Models for Digital Supply Chains", which involves researchers from the University of Münster (Germany) and the Catholic University of Rio (Brazil). The paper investigates existing maturity models for digital supply chains and proposes possibilities for future research. It offers a structured literature review. Using the step-by-step guidelines provided by Thomé et al. (2016), the authors identified twenty-eight maturity models, each one associated with specific supply chain functions (plan, source, make, deliver, and return) or digital technology (Big data, AI, IoT), mainly in manufacturing and none embracing a comprehensive set of digital dimensions. Issues related to the quality of the proposed models, the lack of models applied to other sectors than manufacturing, and the development of maturity models covering all dimensions of digitalization of supply chains are suggestions for future research.
The paper entitled "Usage of Information Technology and Business Analytics with Sales and Operations Planning: A Systematic Literature Review" also involved researchers from Germany (University of Münster) and Brazil (Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro). The paper's main objective is to explore the extent of the use of information technology and business analytics in the context of S&OP. The results highlighted the dominant themes in IT, business analytics, and S&OP. The article also has shown that maturity models include IT as a critical dimension of S&OP. Also, the survey conducted by the authors identified that analytical techniques were developed for all major S&OP planning tasks, from supply, production, logistics, and demand planning to financial planning. Finally, the study suggests an interesting research agenda composed of four relevant topics that deserve to be read and followed.
Researchers from the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro offer a novel exploratory case study research in the S&OP process applied in an audio-visual content production industry, operating under the production strategy of Engineer-To-Order (ETO), adding important empirical knowledge in little-explored areas of ETO strategies in the entertainment business. The study applies well-established contextualized S&OP frameworks and demonstrates that in this segment of the service industry and for this production strategy, the observed S&OP dimensions of context, inputs, structure, and process, and outcomes/results were key to manage the company's production complexity and to fulfil the companies' objectives. This article contributes to bridging the research-practice gap with important lessons to be learned by practitioners and researchers alike about applying the S&OP process in the underresearched ETO-services' production context.
The research topic of S&OP is also investigated in another paper, but now within a case study approach conducted by researchers from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro and the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul. The paper entitled "Sales and Operations Planning: Learning from 15 Brazilian Companies" involved empirical research in a significant number of Brazilian companies. The article´s purpose was to characterize the implemented processes in sales and operations planning (S&OP) and discuss the challenges and opportunities for improvement. The research results include a broad discussion about companies that consider "data collection" a normal task and not just a stage in the S&OP cycle.
Moreover, this research also shows that some organizations are starting to include a new stage in the S&OP process, preceding the "Demand Planning", that is, the "Portfolio Management". The improvement opportunities are related to the "Pre-meeting" and "Executive Meeting" stages, which involve the simulation of different financial scenarios. Finally, the authors also found the studied companies did not adopt an S&OP software, facing limitations in managing information and performing what-if analyses. The paper presents additional contributions that deserve to be highlighted and justifies further research.
Researchers from the University of Brasilia and the University of Milano partner in offering a maturity model for industry 4.0 application to inventory management in a beverage factory in Brazil. The goal of this research is to explore how improvements in industry 4.0 can improve companies´ business processes, in particular the required dexterity for responsive and agile inventory management. The method applied to the companies' warehousing systems is action research. Based on a previous search in the literature for suitable Industry 4.0 maturity models, an appropriate model was identified, applied to the companies' operations and results were evaluated. The application of the maturity model resulted in the identification and development of "islands of improvement", which the authors suggest appearing to be a "side effect of implementing industry 4.0 based on maturity models." The paper titled "Modified control chart for monitoring the variance" brings the results from joint research by the Brazilian universities of São Carlos, Federal Fluminense University, and the University of Alabama (US). It proposes a chart in which the process variance can be larger than the in-control variance value. The proposed Modified Control Chart aims to reduce the number of unnecessary interventions in the processes. Throughout the use of simulated data, the authors indicated the chart could detect only genuinely increases in the process variance, contributing to the prevention of unnecessary interventions and incrementing efficiency.

FINAL REMARKS
The editors believe that the papers of this special issue provide an interesting contribution to Industrial Engineering and Operations Management, with a sample of what was offered at IJCIEOM 2020-2021. Many of the papers build their contributions in different empirical research, particularly case studies. There is also a concentration of papers that conduct systematic literature reviews, a research method that has received much attention from OM scholars recently (Thomé et al., 2016). Altogether, these papers constitute a stimulating reading for different audiences, who will find new perspectives and findings, applications of alternative research methods, and new empirical contexts in different research areas, expanding the frontier of knowledge in Industrial Engineering and Operations Management.