ISO 9000 standards for quality system management are involving a higher and higher number of enterprises and organizations. This paper presents a detailed analysis of certification diffusion in Italy and in some European countries with similar economic structures. Benchmarking and evolution forecasts are based on the "logistic model", traditionally used for studying biological growth phenomena. The presentation is supported by many empirical data, which show that, in many countries, the phenomenon is going to be close to saturation. Finally, some considerations about new developments, after the present "certification era", are proposed.

Outsourcing is a management approach by which an organization delegates some noncore functions to specialized and ef®cient service providers. In the era of ªglobal marketº and ªe-economyº, outsourcing is one of the main pillars of the new way to conceive the relationships among companies. Despite outsourcing large diffusion, huge business cases and big deals of documentation available on network or press, there is no structured procedure able to support the govern of the evolution of a generic outsourcing process. In accordance with the principles of total quality management, this paper describes a proposal of a new approach for managing outsourcing processes. The model, which can be easily adapted to different application ®elds, has been conceived with the main aim of managing strategic decisions, economic factors and human resources. The approach is supported by different decision and analysis tools, such as benchmarking techniques, multiple criteria decision aiding (MCDA) methods, cost analysis, and other process-planning methodologies. An application of the method to a real case is also provided.

This paper presents a method for carrying out the calculus of the risk priority of failures in Failure Mode and EOE ect Analysis (FMEA). The novelty of the method consists of new management of data provided by the design team, normally given on qualitative scales, without necessitating an arbitrary and arti® cial numerical conversion. The practical eOE ects of these issues are shown in an application example.

In the last decade, a growing number of studies focused on the qualitative/quantitative analysis of bibliometric-database errors. Most of these studies relied on the identification and (manual) examination of relatively limited samples of errors. Using an automated procedure, we collected a large corpus of more than 10,000 errors in the two multidisciplinary databases Scopus and Web of Science (WoS), mainly including articles in the Engineering-Manufacturing field. Based on the manual examination of a portion (of about 10%) of these errors, this paper provides a preliminary analysis and classification, identifying similarities and differences between Scopus and WoS. The analysis reveals interesting results, such as: (i) although Scopus seems more accurate than WoS, it tends to forget to index more papers, causing the loss of the relevant citations given/obtained, (ii) both databases have relatively serious problems in managing the so-called Online-First articles, and (iii) lack of correlation between databases, regarding the distribution of the errors in several error categories. The description is supported by practical examples concerning a variety of errors in the Scopus and WoS databases.

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