Operations Management Journals Research Articles

Call for papers for the 2021 Emerging Discourse Incubator: Managing Working Conditions in Supply Chains: Towards Decent Work

Call for papers for the 2021 Emerging Discourse Incubator: Managing Working Conditions in Supply Chains: Towards Decent Work

Editorial: The Innovation and Project Management Department in the Journal of Operations Management

Editorial: The Innovation and Project Management Department in the <i>Journal of Operations Management</i>

OM Research: Leading Authors and Institutions

ABSTRACTIn this study, we focus on papers published in a set of four premier journals, Journal of Operations Management, Production and Operations Management, Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, and Management Science over the 15‐year period of 2001–2015. Using simple and weighted counts of papers along with network measures of Total Degree centrality and Bonacich Power centrality, we provide rankings of top authors and institutions in the field of Operations Management (OM) serving as hubs of research, connectivity, and productivity from across the world. In view of benefits that can accrue from increased research collaboration between academicians and practitioners, we examine the levels of practitioner participation in the research works published across these premier journals. We survey the extent to which the top ranked authors and institutions network with practitioners in producing joint publications in these journals. By identifying the top ranked authors and institutions in OM, this study provides information that can be useful to stakeholders who may wish to engage in collaborative research with the leading agents, or pursue educational opportunities with them. The study also presents a profile of productivity levels and what it takes for authors and institutions to rank among the top tiers. In so doing, it offers insights into yearly publication rates and underlying trends—insights that can be useful in the context of promotion and tenure, faculty evaluations, and in assessing the standings of individuals and institutions relative to leadership benchmarks.

Role of Analytics for Operational Risk Management in the Era of Big Data

ABSTRACTOperational risk management (ORM) is critical for any organization, and in the big data era, analytical tools for operational risk management are evolving faster than ever. This paper examines recent developments in academic ORM literature from the data analytics perspective. We focus on identifying present trends in ORM related to various types of natural and man‐made disasters that have been challenging all aspects of life. Although we examine the broader operations management (OM) literature, we keep the focus on the articles published in the well‐regarded OM journals, including both empirical and analytical outlets. We highlight how the use of data analytics tools and methods have facilitated ORM. We discuss the need for data monitoring and the integration of various analytical tools into decision making processes by classifying the literature on application fields, analytics techniques, and the strategies used for implementation. We summarize our findings and propose a process to implement data‐driven ORM with future research directions.

Guidelines for establishing practical relevance in logistics and supply chain management research

PurposeRigor and practical relevance are the foundations for logistics and supply chain management (LSCM) as an applied discipline. Whereas there are well-founded criteria for establishing methodological rigor, researchers must provide their own credible logic as to why their papers can influence practice. Accordingly, this paper aims to develop guidelines for establishing practical relevance in research papers.Design/methodology/approachA literature review of LSCM, marketing, operations management and management journals forms the foundation for these guidelines.FindingsRelevance criteria are identified; research should be problem-driven, timely and important, and findings should be implementable, nonobvious, novel and not too costly. Measures for researchers demonstrating the fulfillment of these criteria are identified as practitioner input, gray literature, funding, practitioner involvement and feedback. Researchers should also clearly articulate both problem relevance and the relevance of their findings.Research limitations/implicationsA lack of practical relevance is among the reasons for the rejection of papers by LSCM journals, but researchers can overcome this obstacle using these guidelines.Practical implicationsAt a metalevel, this paper contributes to research with greater practical relevance.Originality/valuePractical relevance is emphasized in the editorials of LSCM journals but has not yet been fully conceptualized from the authors' perspective.

Hedging weather risk and coordinating supply chains

Journal of Operations ManagementVolume 66, Issue 3 p. 365-365 ERRATUM Free Access Hedging weather risk and coordinating supply chains This article corrects the following: Hedging weather risk and coordinating supply chains Xavier Brusset Jean-Louis Bertrand Volume 64Issue 1Journal of Operations Management pages: 41-52 First Published online: December 17, 2018 First published: 24 February 2020 https://doi.org/10.1002/joom.1083 AboutSectionsPDF ToolsExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat In Brusset and Bertrand (2018), the errors were published on pages 41, 43, 46, and in References. On page 41, where the article reads: The fact that temperature, rainfall and other weather variables have direct effects on various economic series is not new (Steele, 1951; Granger, 1978). In retail, weather determines the decisions of consumers as to what they buy, in what quantity, when and even where (Agnew and Thornes, 1995). It should read: The fact that temperature, rainfall and other weather variables have direct effects on various economic series is not new (Steele, 1951; Granger, 1978). In a context of rapid, chaotic and threatening climate change, the issue of adaptation of companies and the economy as a whole is of increasing relevance. As a sign of this increasing importance to decision makers in all walks of life, the work of William Nordhaus has just been rewarded with the 2018 Nobel Prize for Economics for his work in the mid-1990s on an integrated quantitative assessment model to describe the relationship between the economy and climate. In retail, weather determines the decisions of consumers as to what they buy, in what quantity, when and even where (Agnew and Thornes, 1995). On page 43, first column, the paragraph ending by the sentence: …different approach is needed to allow manufacturers to assess their losses due to adverse weather conditions when information provided by retail partners is scarce, inconsistent or limited, and to protect themselves from the financial consequences of such adverse weather conditions (Deschenes and Greenstone, 2011; Bertrand et al., 2015). The reference citation should read: (Deschênes and Greenstone, 2011; Bertrand et al., 2015; Bertrand and Brusset, 2018). On page 46, the paragraph just before section 6.1 that read as: The hedging and coordinating strategies for the sunscreen products and clothing follow the very same principle mutatis mutandis. It should read: The hedging and coordinating strategies for the sunscreen products and clothing follow the very same principle mutatis mutandis. The particular case of the sunscreen products has been dealt in detail in Bertrand and Brusset (2018). This missing reference should be added in the list of references: Bertrand, J.L., Brusset, X., 2018. Managing the financial consequences of weather variability. Journal of Asset Management 19, 301–315. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41260-018-0083-x. The previous publisher of the journal mistakenly published a penultimate version of the text in 2018. The corrections listed above are necessary and the text has been updated for accuracy in 2020. REFERENCE Brusset, X., & Bertrand, J.-L. (2018). Hedging weather risk and coordinating supply chains. Journal of Operations Management, 64(1), 41– 52. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jom.2018.10.002 Wiley Online Library Web of Science®Google Scholar Volume66, Issue3April 2020Pages 365-365 ReferencesRelatedInformation

Looking at ourselves: Lessons about the operations management field learned from our top journals

AbstractWe focus here on questions regarding the craft of producing operations management (OM) research manuscripts. Are the journals we publish in too siloed, with regard to participating authors and institutions? Likewise, are the OM departments we work in too intellectually siloed by virtue of journal choice—are there too many like minds? In light of who publishes in our journals and who we coauthor with, is our field “global enough” or is North America weighing too heavily? We also strive to answer a question faced by many OM departments: should highly published faculty be hired from other schools? How do such highly published authors influence those around them? We arrive at partial answers to these questions by exploring an extensive history of publication data from four journals: Journal of Operations Management, Production and Operations Management, Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, and Management Science.

Editorial: Delivering effective healthcare at lower cost: Introduction to the special issue

Editorial: Delivering effective healthcare at lower cost: Introduction to the special issue

Circular economy: benefits, impacts and overlapping

PurposeThis paper aims to investigate overlaps, complementarities and divergences between the literature on circular economy (CE) models and related literature in non-linear production models and frameworks, including CE, reverse logistics, closed-loop, industrial symbiosis and industrial ecology.Design/methodology/approachA systematic literature review was conducted focussing on the benefits of non-linear modes adoption.FindingsThe results show a high degree of convergence in findings, gaps and weaknesses of these literatures. Negative environmental, economic and operational impacts are understudied. There is a scarcity of studies identifying practices resulting in empirically tested benefits. The business and society case for non-linear production is still largely built upon conceptual studies, modelling and a few case studies. Despite a normative focus, there is very little use of theory, in particular, management theories.Research limitations/implicationsFirst, the authors use only one, albeit highly recognized database, Scopus. This database may have omitted some relevant research, journals such as theJournal of Cleaner Production and Resources Conservation &amp; Recyclingthat are more likely to publish such research and also have a more interdisciplinary approach. This is an important gap and interesting result to claim for more interdisciplinary research. Second, the filtering process used and the focus on Association of Business Schools top journals may have also omitted some relevant research, such as a large stream of literature in specialist journals suchas Resources Conservation and Recycling and the Journal of Cleaner Production.Practical implicationsThere are contradictions, tensions and epistemological ambiguity that needs to be critically addressed. Such tensions may be associated with the knowledge field that gave rise to these different non-linear production approaches. Many of them appeared at the same time, but from different sciences and disciplines with their own perspectives. Then in doing so, they create confusion in the definitions of CE, assumptions underlying modelling and business choices arising from this complexity. This can be minimized through the critical interpretation of knowledge to elucidate epistemological quandaries to improve the understanding of the economic, social and environmental impacts of practices.Social implicationsIn some way, this result makes sense, as the authors have limited the search to management, business and accounts journals, especially talking about Operations Management journals. This is an important gap and interesting result to claim for more interdisciplinary research.Originality/valueIn addition to gaps previously described, the authors identified areas of tensions where the literature offers inconclusive – often contradictory – findings requiring further exploration. A better understanding of these tensions is required to understand the impacts of non-linear production and develop policy guidelines for industry and policymakers to scale-up CE.

Intervention as a research strategy

AbstractThe Journal of Operations Management (JOM) has made design science central to its development strategy, creating a department to incubate papers using this methodology. An inaugural editorial published in 2016 called for papers with a generic design supported by a design proposition that provides pragmatic guidelines to bridge the gap between the case specific and the universal. In this article, I propose ways in which the scope of interventions can be expanded beyond the editorial's proposal to foster theoretical developments and better align with JOM's mission. I propose that, rather than focus on the design propositions, we explore the role that interventions (the ultimate manifestation of design science) can play in testing and developing theory (the ultimate goal of an academic endeavor). Taking as a point of departure the principles of action research and the explanatory framework of process theories, I propose two modes of research for leveraging interventions as a mechanism for testing existing theory and develop theories about organizational and system transformation. I illustrate the application of these two frameworks in the context of a previously published article.

A review of operations management literature: a data-driven approach

Production and operations management has been a significant field of research for many years. However, other than an educated guess by researchers in the field or a perusal of textbook chapter titles, the major topics and their trends over time are not well established. This study provides a comprehensive review of production and operations management literature using a data-driven approach. We use Latent Semantic Analysis on 21,053 abstracts representing all publications in six leading operations management journals since their inception. 18 unique topic clusters were identified algorithmically. Just being aware of the history of research topics should be of great interest to all academics in the field, but to help future researchers we conducted three post hoc analyses: 1) analysis of methods used in all these studies, 2) citation rates by topic area over time, and 3) the growing prevalence of research covering multiple topics.

On the versatility of Little’s Law in operations management: a review and classification using vignettes

Despite Little’s Law being considered as one of the ‘laws’ of operations management, evidence of its application in an empirical context is diverse and diffuse. Hence, this paper aims to identify, classify and consolidate published empirical applications of Little’s Law in a systematic manner to better understand its versatility. This paper undertakes a systematic literature review of the databases of the five main publishers of operations management journals and snowball sampling for additional papers. A final sample of 128 empirical journal articles is identified and categorized. Tactical, medium-term decisions relating to capacity dynamics and operations re-engineering are the most popular categories. To give further insights into versatility, vignettes for each category are developed. The review and vignettes confirm Little’s Law as a highly relevant paradigm to operations management decisions due to its empirical versatility across levels, sectors and time domains. The paper suggests four factors to underline the empirical versatility of Little’s Law in operations management: applicability, utility, simplicity and visibility.

Applying a longitudinal interpretive multi-case research method to study the employee impact of operations management systems in a micro firm setting

While many operations management journals are now publishing interpretive studies, there is still a need for more material on how to carry out such work under the interpretive gestalt. By offering a research account of a longitudinal interpretive multi-case study, this paper seeks to contribute to the literary gap in ‘how to do it [interpretive research]’. The purpose of this paper is to document a longitudinal operations management study in three micro-firms, where the catalyst for this study is the implementation of an electronic operations management system in each case. The paper chronicles the authors’ experience in a four-year multi-case study, and as such provides insight into design, development and execution of longitudinal interpretive operations management research, and the building of a theoretical model. While blueprints are not the purpose of such reflections, they can provide insight and advice to researchers, which is the underlying goal of this paper.

Addressing endogeneity in operations management research: Recent developments, common problems, and directions for future research

Addressing endogeneity can be a challenging task given the different sources of endogeneity and their impacts on empirical results. While premier business journals typically expect authors to rigorously address endogeneity, this expectation is relatively new to many Operations Management (OM) scholars, as exemplified by a recent editorial in Journal of Operations Management that calls for more rigorous treatment for endogeneity. This study serves two purposes. First, we summarize recent OM literature with respect to the treatment for endogeneity by reviewing studies published in leading OM journals between 2012 and 2017. The review provides evidence that endogeneity problems have received increasing attention from OM scholars. However, we also find some common problems that may render the chosen techniques for addressing endogeneity less effective and potentially lead to biased analysis results. Second, since instrumental variable regression is the most prevalent technique for dealing with endogeneity in the OM literature according to our review, we provide an empirical illustration tailored to OM researchers for using instrumental variable regression in the post-design (data analysis) phase. Using variables from a publicly available healthcare dataset, our analysis sheds light on the importance of examining instruments' quality and triangulating results based on more than one test/estimator.

Reviewers 2017

The Journal of Operations and Supply Chain Management would like to thank the reviewers that contributed with the journal.

Assessing the exchange of knowledge between operations management and other fields: Some challenges and opportunities

Addressing a suspicion that the field of Operations Management (OM) draws substantially more knowledge from non-OM journals than those journals draw from OM journals in return, we studied the citations of the top 30 research journals of interest to our field. We conducted citation analyses of the three oldest OM journals over three decades in comparison to the 27 other journals representing the fields of Management, Operations Research/Management Science (OR/MS), Marketing, Practice, and Engineering. We examined both the entire 30-year period and then each decade separately. Our suspicions were confirmed—although citations from these 27 journals to these three OM journals have increased by a factor of 7 over the three decades, we in OM still cite these journals about twenty-five times more often than they cite our journals, giving an indication of the knowledge development and flows among these fields. We then describe some challenges for the field of OM in providing more research knowledge to other fields but also some opportunities that OM should be able to capitalize on, such as our historic ties to practice and our escalating research in strategic and organizational issues.

Keeping up with growing complexity of managing global operations

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to argue that operations management (OM) scholars ought to be among the thought leaders in research into the design and management of global production networks, but too few of them currently are. It suggests possible reasons for what is holding them back and calls for ideas for removing the obstacles.Design/methodology/approachThis paper is a viewpoint. Nevertheless, it reports results of an indicative survey and uses example cases to illustrate and support its arguments.FindingsThe survey confirms the conclusions from previous studies that the number of publications specifically in leading OM journals focusing on management of global operations is small. Relatively high levels of detail and dynamic complexity and hysteresis of variables affecting the management of global operations are identified as the major hurdles. Applying analytical modeling, a popular research methodology among OM scholars, may be of limited use as it mandates making too many simplifying assumptions. Empirical research is also difficult because it is time consuming and requires access to often sensitive data and may require longitudinal studies. These are tough problems with no clear solutions.Originality/valueThe paper urges OM scholars to take on the broad and strategic problems in management of global operations. That would not only change how the OM discipline is viewed, but it would also benefit the firm, the economy, and the society.

Supplier selection in supply chain management: a review study

Supplier selection is the process of finding the appropriate suppliers who can provide the buyer with the right quality products and/or services at the right price, in the right quantities, and at the right time. In this paper, a comprehensive overview of the literature on supplier selection criteria and supplier evaluation approaches is presented. More than 25 major production, manufacturing, operations management, and control journals published in 1995-2018 are reviewed. The literature review is divided into three fields, namely criteria in supplier selection, approaches in supplier selection, and a summary of the survey. This work emphasises the historical progression in these fields and offers the latest findings in this area in an attempt to make it easier for supply chain and logistics engineers to find a convenient principle or technique for supplier selection in various scenarios. Finally, future research directions are suggested.

Strategy and organization research in operations management

In a September 2015 editorial (Guide and Ketokivi, 2015), the co-editors-in-chief of the Journal of Operations Management restructured the management of submissions into departments by substantive domain. This essay expands upon their brief description of the Strategy and Organization Department. While chiefly seeking to clarify what we see as the department's content domain, we also offer insights on how to maximize the contribution of operations management research to the strategy and organization literature.

OM Forum—Three Simple Approaches for Young Scholars to Identify Relevant and Novel Research Topics in Operations Management

The revolution in information technology has provided the research community in operations management (OM) with new areas to explore and many new avenues to develop. In recognition of this, many editors of OM journals strive to publish new ideas. These two forces generate strong motivation, but many young OM scholars find it difficult to find new OM research ideas. To address this challenge, I describe three simple thought processes (or approaches) that I have learned and used to identify new research topics over the last 35 years. These approaches are as follows: (1) observe and learn to develop “problem-based” research, (2) ask “whys” to develop “phenomenon-based” research, and (3) sketch graphs to develop “insight-based” research. Clearly, these simple approaches are neither complete nor optimal; however, I share these personal thought processes with the hope of contributing to discussions as to how the next generation of OM researchers can build upon and expand the remarkable impact that our field has had and will continue to have.