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tion Supply Chain and of the Construction Site and

their digital representations in companies’ informa-

tion systems. Last decade was the time for RFID

(Radio-Frequency IDentification) tags, which have

found multiple applications in CSCM, as in Ja-

selskis and El-Misalami (2003), Wang et al. (2007),

El-Omari and Moselhi (2009) and Ren et al. (2011).

Despite their great potential, and several interesting

applications, RFId has not become a standard in

this industry, due to limitations in reading capabi-

lities and difficulties related to benefits sharing, as

happened in other industries.

Nowadays, the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm Fig. 5 - Tank truck sensors for fleet management, safety
and payload protection
(from wireless sensors to smart and connected
interrogated to feed the Vendors Rating system,
objects) is spreading in the business scenario to as well as to update MRP (Materials Requirements
Planning) parameters, or to feed an application,
empower the connection capabilities between which optimises the supply line given a target
risk level (Cagno and Micheli, 2011). Secondly,
physical and digital worlds. IoT appears to fit ex- products in the construction industry fall very of-
ten in what Porter and Heppelmann (2014) called
tremely well the Construction industry thanks to a “Product Systems” or “System of Systems” (e.g.,
a renewable energy plant connected with local in-
more favourable cost ratio, with respect to mass frastructures, weather forecasting and energy mar-
kets). In these situations, the source of competitive
markets, and to the higher value of the collected advantage will be reinforced by the pivotal role in
the value chain, thanks to the Extended Enterprise
information in a product lifecycle management per- view, enabled by a smart-connected product.

spective. Conclusions

For instance, the Refining and Marketing division In the present paper, we discussed how manage-
ment practices and tools coming from traditional
of Eni started a few years ago a manufacturing and service industries could be suc-
cessfully applied to an ETO context. Issues such as
project for advanced data col- integrated Design and Sourcing, simulation-aided
project Design, lean adoption for the Build/Run
Nowadays, the Internet lection concerning its fleet of phases and IT enabled Supply Chain, are impor-
of Things (IoT) paradigm tank trucks (about 700 trucks tant areas in which ETO companies should look for
(from wireless sensors operating in Italy). Each truck a competitive advantage.
has been equipped with multi- In this regard, there is somehow a peculiar symme-
to smart and connected ple sensors (engine on/off, GPS try with the mass-market industry. Fisher (1997) fo-
objects) is spreading in position and speed, fluid pumps stered the adoption of a more “engineered to pur-
the business scenario to pose” supply chain for mass-market companies:
empower the connection on/off, suspension elongation he suggests to just define the type of your products
to estimate actual payload, fi- (in terms of e.g., product life cycle, product varie-
capabilities between gure 5), and a GPRS connec- ty and contribution margin) and adapt the supply
physical and digital tivity was added so as to have chain accordingly. The ETO industry, conversely, is
pretty accustomed with a “engineered to purpo-
a 5-min data update toward the se” supply chain, but we think that in nowadays
scenario there might be the room for more “mass-
worlds control tower. In this way, alarms market” oriented management models.
and warnings about driving be- In this paper we discussed how some manage-
ment approaches and models, which are almost
haviour (e.g. excessive driving commodities in traditional manufacturing compa-
nies so far, could be adopted in ETO contexts, with
time), travel schedule (e.g., excellent results. These models (figure 6) can co-
ver all the phases of Project design and delivery
unexpected stoppages) and load management and may represent a powerful cross-fertilisation

(e.g. unscheduled fluid download, or manual fluid

download) can be gathered and managed in real

time. Moreover, collected data can be stored in a

database, which is useful for truck capacity plan-

ning and day-by-day scheduling.

Construction companies pushing this vision to the

state-of-the-art will find more competitive advan-

tages at their reach. First, extended enterprise

technologies, to be fully exploited, require state-of-

the-art IT architectures, such as pervasive Cloud

computing and Service Oriented Architectures.

When embracing such architectures and thanks to

the improved connection with the physical world,

many management techniques and tools which are

now seen as isolated applications within isolated

departments will be naturally re-engineered, from

shared data to shared services, pushing toward a

genuine supply chain oriented view of every pro-

cess. For example, a web service that manages

recorded data about components quality could be

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