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Purpose -Overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) is the key metric to measure the performance of individual equipment. However, when machines operate jointly in a manufacturing line, OEE alone is not sufficient to improve the performance of the system as a whole. The purpose of this paper is to show how to overcome this limitation, by presenting a new metric (overall equipment effectiveness of a manufacturing line -OEEML) and an integrated approach to assess the performance of a line. Design/methodology/approach -An alternative losses classification structure is developed to divide the losses that can be directly ascribed to equipment, from the ones that are spread in the line. Starting from this losses classification structure, an approach based on OEE is developed to evaluate the criticalities and the effectiveness of the line. Findings -This method has been applied to an automated line for engine basements production. Results show that OEEML successfully highlights the progressive degradation of the ideal cycle time, explaining it in terms of: bottleneck inefficiency, quality rate, and synchronisation-transportation problems.Research limitations/implications -OEEML alone fails to explain to which extent effectiveness is supported by in process-inventories and should be integrated with additional metrics to estimate the inventories-related costs. Practical implications -OEEML provides practitioners with an operative tool useful to highlight the points where the major inefficiencies take place and to foresee the potential benefits of corrective actions. Originality/value -In relation to other methodologies, OEEML presents two main advantages: it detects and quantifies the line's critical points and it can be applied even in presence of buffers, without underestimating the efficiency of the system.

This paper presents an advanced version of the failure mode effects and criticality analysis (FMECA), whose capabilities are enhanced; in that the criticality assessment takes into account possible interactions among the principal causes of failure. This is obtained by integrating FMECA and Analytic Network Process, a multi-criteria decision making technique. Severity, Occurrence and Detectability are split into sub-criteria and arranged in a hybrid (hierarchy/network) decisionstructure that, at the lowest level, contains the causes of failure. Starting from this decision-structure, the Risk Priority Number is computed making pairwise comparisons, so that qualitative judgements and reliable quantitative data can be easily included in the analysis, without using vague and unreliable linguistic conversion tables. Pairwise comparison also facilitates the effort of the design/maintenance team, since it is easier to place comparative rather than absolute judgments, to quantify the importance of the causes of failure. In order to clarify and to make evident the rational of the final results, a graphical tool, similar to the House of Quality, is also presented. At the end of the paper, a case study, which confirms the quality of the approach and shows its capability to perform robust and comprehensive criticality analyses, is reported.

In this article, life cycle assessment was used to evaluate the environmental performances of the production and the distribution of durum wheat pasta, in the Italian market. In accordance with a cradle‐to‐grave approach, the environmental impact of the whole manufacturing process was assessed, taking into account the energetic flows, the consumption of materials and the emissions of pollutants. Results revealed that the agricultural production (i.e., cultivation of wheat) and the production of durum wheat semolina were the subprocesses that accounted for most of the environmental load. Therefore, to improve the environmental performance, an alternative production system was designed in which organic agriculture was used to produce wheat; recyclable cardboard was used as the only packaging material, and a more efficient dust collecting system was installed at the mill (for semolina production). The obtained environmental improvements were finally presented and further discussed. PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS Since the late 90s, the Italian producers of pasta have been striving to improve the environmental performance of their productive process and, nowadays, this effort is being extended to the whole supply chain. This article highlights the stages that account for most of the environmental impact (i.e., hot spots) during the production of durum wheat pasta. Suggestions and insight to reduce the overall environmental load are also provided, and their potential benefits are evaluated, in comparison with the traditional productive process. Therefore, this work can be useful for practitioners of the agri‐food industry, who wish to improve the environmental performance of their productive process.