• Energy Research

This paper presents an integrated framework for capacity and operations planning in Spanish sheltered employment centers (SECs). Employment provides socio-economic opportunities for people with disability. Well functioning SECs that provide opportunities for people with and without disability to work alongside each other are an important component of Spain’s current labor market. To be economically sustainable, SECs need to satisfy their clients expectations in terms of price, flexibility and performance, whilst taking into account and strengthening the diverse skills and abilities of their workforce like specific learning and forgetting processes. The SEC studied herein, a non-for-profit organization whose mission is to create employment for people with disabilities its workforce is deployed directly on clients’ premises. Efficient management across this multi-site environment, whilst supporting the diverse employment needs of its staff, is of paramount importance. This paper contributes an integrated framework to support SEC capacity and operations planning, which prioritizes the explicit training needs of workers with disability at all levels (strategic, tactical, and operational) as a lever for achieving the organization’s goals.

The growing interest in sustainable development is reflected in both the market’s sensitivity to environmental and social issues and companies’ interest in the opportunities that sustainable development objectives provide. SMEs, which account for most of the world’s pollution, have significant resource constraints for a sustainable development. Sharing their scarce resources can help them to overcome these constraints and to gain agility and organisational resilience against uncertainties, but the distrust inherent in belonging to different companies prevents them from sharing the necessary information for coordination purposes. This paper presents a coordination mechanism proposal with information asymmetry to allow independent companies’ resources to be sustainably shared as a technological driver. The proposed distributed coordination mechanism is compared to both a decentralised–uncoordinated and a centralised situation. The interest of the proposal is evaluated by a computer simulation experiment employing mathematical programming models with independent objectives in the Generic Materials and Operations Planning formulation with a rolling horizon procedure in different demand, uncertainty and product scenarios. Competitive improvement is identified for all members for their excess capacity use and their operations planning.