Search

This special issue is dedicated to Operations Management (OM) in Asia. A requirement for the special issue articles is that they have content related to the effects of national culture on OM. Here, the OM literature is combined with work from Anthropology and Women's Studies to provide a wide view of the effects of various Asian cultures on OM. The basic premise is that OM decisions may need to take culture into account: some OM practices are altered or precluded by culture, while others are more effective in some cultures than others. Numerous examples are provided involving quality management, shift scheduling, revenue management, facility location, layout, supply chain strategies, and other areas.

We consider a single product, single level, stochastic master production scheduling (Mps) model where decisions are made under rolling planning horizons. Outcomes of interest are cost, service level, and schedule stability. The subject of this research is the Mps control system: the method used in determining the amount of stock planned for production in each time period. Typically, Mps control systems utilize a single buffer stock. Here, two Mps dual-buffer stock systems are developed and tested by simulation. We extend the data envelopment analysis (dea) methodology to aid in the evaluation of the simulation results, where Dea serves to increase the scope of the experimental design. Results indicate that the dual-buffer control systems outperform existing policies.

Data envelopment analysis (dea) has become an increasingly popular method to measure performance for service firms with multiple sites. DEA is superior to many traditional methods for firms that have multiple goals. The promise of DEA is that the complex, multi-objective problem of performance measurement can be reduced to a single number. Unfortunately, the practice of DEA often belies the promise. Misconceptions concerning the purpose and implementation of DEA can cause DEA applications to be less than successful. Here, the technique is explained, and a guide to the implementation of DEA is proposed, utilizing DEA studies of retail bank branches.

Operations Management ( OM) research on organizational culture has to change to be able to inform practice. Currently, organizational culture research in OM is largely confined to narrow topical and methodological niches and culture is most frequently used as an explanatory variable in quantitative, survey-based research. We argue that the relegation of culture to this niche is due to self-imposed methodological blinders that hobble the OM field. We then present four research imperatives to reinvigorate organizational culture research within our field. We urge OM scholars to view culture as a dynamic concept that can be influenced, to adopt alternative methods, to use non-traditional data sources, and to rethink assumptions about dependent variables. We also identify gaps in the current knowledge and new research questions for the OM domain. We conclude that the field of OM could greatly expand its understanding of organizational culture and in so doing greatly improve business practice, but that to do so will require a change in the culture of the operations management research community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Services are now a larger portion of the economy than manufacturing for every nation on Earth, and services are an overwhelming portion of Western economies. While decision-making research has begun responding to this change, much of the scholarly work still addresses manufacturing issues. Particularly revealing is the field of operations management (OM), in which the proportion of manuscripts dedicated to services has been estimated at 3%, 6%, and 7.5% by various authors. We investigate several possible reasons for the neglect of services in research, including the difficulty in defining services, viewing services as derivative activities, a lack of defined processes, a lack of scale in services, and the effect of variability on service performance. We argue that times have changed, and none of these reasons is valid anymore. We sound the warning that failure to emphasize services in our research and teaching may signal the decline of the discipline. We note the proportion of OM faculty in business schools has shrunk in the past 10 years. Finally, we examine a selection of service research agendas and note several directions for high-impact, innovative research to revitalize the decision sciences. With practitioners joining the call for more research in services, the academic community has an exciting opportunity to embrace services and reshape its future.

This paper presents an overview of the new issues and research opportunities related to four service operations design topics—the design of retail and e-tail service processes, design of service processes involving waiting lines and workforce staffing, service design for manufacturing, and re-engineering service processes. All four topics are motivated by new technologies (particularly web-based technologies) and require a multi-disciplinary approach to research. For each topic, the paper presents an overview of the topic, the relevant frameworks, and a discussion of the research opportunities.

A potential retail operations strategy is to have a “dense” store. That is, a store that combines high product variety with a small footprint. Retail management desires smaller stores to provide the strategic benefits of convenience and speed to customers, but desires larger stores to provide high product variety. Noting the benefits of smaller, more numerous stores, several retailers well known for their extremely large store size recently have begun experimenting with a small store format. Traditional retail inventory management policies, however, have difficulty combining high variety and small store size. Here, the potential advantages of the dense store type are explored. To facilitate this exploration, inventory policies are developed to help manage small stores by increasing their product density. Results based on grocery industry data indicate that the heuristics compare favorably to optimality and permit the dense store concept to potentially achieve substantial gains compared to current practice.

Consider multiple companies operating as a serial supply chain. Within this environment, end users form the demand for the last company in the supply chain, but the demand for upstream companies is formed by the companies in the immediate downstream supply chain link. It has been shown that demand seasonality and forecast error can increase as we proceed up the supply chain. These demand distortions, called the “bullwhip” effect, create inefficiencies for upstream firms. This work seeks to identify the magnitude of the problem by establishing an empirical lower bound on the profitability impact of the bullwhip effect. Results indicate that the importance of the bullwhip effect to a firm differs greatly depending on the specific business environment. Given appropriate conditions, however, eliminating the bullwhip effect can increase product profitability by 10–30%.