Production And Operations Management Research Articles

Ten Most Influential Papers From the First Thirty Years of the Production and Operations Management Journal

We describe the process used to identify the ten most influential papers published in the Production and Operations Management ( POM) journal in its first thirty years. We also briefly discuss and highlight the selected papers.

The Impact of Production and Operations Management Practices in Improving Organizational Performance: The Mediating Role of Supply Chain Integration

While prior research has consistently established a significant link between production and operations management (POM) practices and organizational financial performance (OFP) across various contexts, the mechanisms driving this connection remain unclear. This study addresses this gap by examining the mediating role of supply chain management (SCM) integration in the relationship between POM practices and OFP within manufacturing firms. Drawing on established theories and concepts such as the resource-based view (RBV) of firm and operation strategies, this study employed a quantitative research design. Survey data were collected from 209 managers in Jordanian manufacturing firms and analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM). The results confirmed a positive and significant association between POM practices and both SCM integration and OFP. Furthermore, SCM integration partially mediated the impact of POM practices on OFP, thereby underscoring its role in transmitting positive effects to financial performance. This research contributes to the field by integrating POM practices with SCM integration and by elucidating the mechanisms through which these practices influence financial performance in Jordanian manufacturing firms. Through this, our understanding of these relationships for practitioners and researchers alike is enhanced.

The robustness of scheduling for trade-off balancing in one-stage production

Production and operations management (POM) faces three challenges in production scheduling, specifically trade-offs at two levels and variation in processing times. Trade-offs at level one are between key performance indicators (KPIs), to balance which we apply a modern portfolio theory (MPT) model. Trade-offs at level two are between the expected value and the variance in the MPT model, to balance which we apply a Lagrange multiplier (LM) model. Because variation in processing times blurs the boundary of solution space for balancing trade-offs at the two levels, we propose an innovative scheme to model the state space of production by linking the concepts of displacement and velocity in physics with the completion time and material flow in production, respectively. Through our modeling scheme, we explain why a scheduling method can be robust to variation in processing times to some extent.

Genuine and sustained POM mastery from linear POM to POM system symphonies

A dramatically changing business landscape characterized by volatility and uncertainty (which in turn are driven by unpredictable alterations of conditions by such factors as geopolitical events, climate changes, disasters—natural and human causes, reduction in food, potable water, and critical materials supply along with environmental contamination), has created a situation whereby a rethink of Production and Operations Management (POM) strategies and practices is considered timely and appropriate. Against a backdrop of current POM strengths and weaknesses, and expected POM futures, a response path for POM adoption to deal with such uncertainties and risks is proposed and described in some detail. This involves the treatment of POM as a more interconnected and integrated system than has hitherto been the case. Such an interconnected approach is described as a POM symphony where all key players would be playing from the same script and the POM leader must serve as a coach‐coordinator, that is, the symphony's conductor.

Pioneering role of the Production and Operations Management in promoting empirical research in operations management

We describe the pioneering role of the Production and Operations Management ( POM) in promoting empirical research in innovation, operations, and supply chain management. We also review and discuss the most influential empirical papers published in POM based on each paper's Google Scholar citation counts. We selected the top 200 cited papers from the 2085 papers published or forthcoming in POM to identify the most influential empirical papers. We classify these 200 papers into three categories: (a) review and conceptual development, (b) analytical, and (c) empirical papers, and then compare these papers across the categories in terms of citation counts. Next we analyze the 75 empirical papers from the top 200 cited papers published in POM by covered topics, data sources, and data analysis methods. Focusing the analysis on empirical papers among the top 200 cited papers can underrepresent emerging themes among the more recently published empirical papers. Therefore, we also analyze 19 more recent empirical papers from 2016 to 2021 that are not covered in the top 200 cited papers but have been impactful given the brief time since their publication. We conclude by offering our thoughts on how editors, reviewers, and authors can work together to further enhance and ensure the quality and influence of future operations management (OM) empirical science research.

Operations for entrepreneurs: Can Operations Management make a difference in entrepreneurial theory and practice?

Although entrepreneurship‐related papers have had some representation in Production and Operations Management (POM) over the past 30 years, the topic still seems a bit like a poor stepchild in the research of operations management (OM) scholars. Yet, entrepreneurship is important to the economy, and many schools are growing significantly their entrepreneurship programs and offerings but often without reference to or inclusion of operations courses. This paper is motivated by the question of the operations needs of new ventures and how they might differ from the needs of large, established firms. Toward that end, we review briefly the state of entrepreneurship scholarship in POM (and beyond), present our own (field‐based) research (and cases), and propose a framework for what we call “operations for entrepreneurs,” that we hope can be a basis for further productive research and curriculum development by the OM community.

Impact of cybersecurity on operations and supply chain management: Emerging trends and future research directions

The new age economy is primarily driven by Industry 4.0 and Industry 5.0, which facilitate smartification of organizations by helping them integrate and automate decision making. Recent advances in information and communication technologies, such as the cloud, big data, Internet of things, and artificial intelligence and nanotechnology, have accelerated the adoption of Industry 4.0 and Industry 5.0. Because of these advancements, organizations are now facing new challenges in the form of cybersecurity risks that are partly caused by these technologies. In recent years, there has been a spike in the number of cyberattacks, and organizations are taking steps to minimize the impacts of these attacks. To address this critical issue, in this article, we discuss possible future research directions that production and operations management (POM) researchers can undertake to help organizations, supply chains, and governments develop robust strategies for reducing the number of attacks and their repercussions. In particular, we identify several avenues for future research in the following domains of POM: (1) global operations strategy, (2) healthcare operations management, (3) public policy, (4) management of technology, (5) supply chain management, and (6) disruptive technologies. Research on the topic of cybersecurity is not only an opportunity for operations management researchers but also critical for industry and society to overcome the challenges of cybersecurity risks.

Planning and scheduling in healthcare for better care coordination: Current understanding, trending topics, and future opportunities

This study reviews the research on planning and scheduling in healthcare published in Production and Operations Management (POM) and other prestigious operations management journals over the past 30 years, identifies trending topics, and discusses opportunities for future research. Specifically, we categorize the capacity planning literature into three problem contexts: (a) hospital units and operating rooms, (b) outpatient clinics, and (c) broader healthcare networks. We further classify the scheduling literature into (a) appointment scheduling, (b) surgery and workforce scheduling, and (c) recurring and integrated scheduling, with several subtopics that have attracted attention in the literature. Afterward, we demonstrate the seven emerging trends in healthcare (i.e., collaborative ecosystem and cooperative competition strategy, expanded reach of virtual care, applications of artificial intelligence in healthcare, patient engagement and personalized care, shifting to value‐based care, working toward health equity, and aging populations) and list relevant research opportunities and their related departments of POM journal. We conclude with a call for multidisciplinary perspectives to deliver coherent solutions that incorporate the complex contemporary issues harmoniously.

Production and operations management for intelligent manufacturing: a systematic literature review

In the context of Industry 4.0, the manufacturing sector is moving from automation towards intelligence. The application of new generation information and communication technologies (ICTs) improves the interconnection and transparency of intelligent manufacturing (IM) systems, which will change how information interacts and work is done, thus changing how work should be managed. These changes require the following characteristics for IM production and operations management (POM): integration, flexibility and networking, autonomous and collaborative decision-making, learning-based operations management, self-optimisation and adaptability, and proactive decision-making. This paper presents the state of the art, current challenges, and future directions of IM-related POM research from the perspectives of these characteristics through a systematic literature review. Descriptive and thematic analyses of 208 research articles published between 2005 and 2020 are provided. The review and discussions focus on five research themes, i.e. value creation mechanisms, resource configuration and capacity planning, production planning, scheduling, and logistics.

English

Industrialisation generally accounts for wealth creation in the economy of a nation. A technician is needed in building an industry and the technician needs to be trained through technical education. Ghana as a developing nation aspiring to develop her industrial capability needs to strategically position its technical education as a key factor. The objective of this paper therefore is to review Ghana’s industrialisation agenda and its technical educational system toward establishing an industrial base as a future cultural heritage. The soft operations methodology of ethnography, which is gaining much popularity in Production and Operations Management (POM), was adapted for this study. The findings, among other things, revealed a high interest in industrialising the Ghanaian economy, which is characterised by an absence of a policy framework for technology development to feed the industry. This is coupled with a disconnection of formal education from application of indigenous knowledge in production methods. This therefore calls for a policy-shift to build a comprehensive technical and vocational education and training (TVET) curriculum with linkage to culture for industrial growth.   Key words: Technical education, industrialisation, development, training, economy.

An interference-adjusted power learning curve for tasks with cognitive and motor elements

Production and operations management (POM) uses learning curve (LC) models to determine the length of training sessions for new workers and predicting future task performance. Empirically validated LC parameters provide managers with quantitative information on the effects of the presumed factors behind the learning process. Previous studies considered LC to compose of cognitive and motor curves. Another widely acknowledged but only recently parameterized phenomenon in the POM field is interference, which assumes some loss of information or experience could occur over a learning session. This paper takes a logical step in this line of research by developing an interference-adjusted power LC model, a composite of cognitive and motor elements. This paper accounts for the decay of cognitive and motor memory traces from repetitions to measure the residual (interference-adjusted) experience and capture these phenomena. Three variants of the model are developed that assume power and exponential decay functions and an approximate version of the exponential one. Assembly data representing various forms of an individual learning profile have been used to test the fits of the developed models. In addition to those models, four potential models from the literature were selected for comparison purposes. The results show that the approximate model fits very well exponential learning profile. The findings highlight the confluence of the three phenomena in learning, component (cognitive/motor) learning, interference, and plateauing.

Competitive priorities for regional operations: a Delphi study

Perceptions and principles of competitiveness in the context of production and operations management (POM) have evolved over time towards trends in which firms compete at supply chain level. This evolution underscores the need for competitive priorities to be re-evaluated from time to time. The purpose of this article is to explore how POM experts perceive and rate competitive priorities for regional operations. The article presents a Delphi-based study with a panel of seventy POM experts from the Sultanate of Oman in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region. It applies a constructivist epistemology in a three-round Delphi Exercise to identify, select and prioritise the key competitive priorities perceived by panel experts. Nonparametric statistics test the dichotomous responses and levels of concordance and discordance of ranked outcome variables among the Delphi panellists. The analysis identifies nineteen competitive priorities thematically clustered into five orientations for productivity-efficiency, relationship-building, technology-enabled, environmentally-conscious and conformance-improvement. Polled results show heterogeneity during both selection (Cochran's Q: p < 0.05) and prioritisation (Friedman’s Q: p < 0.05) rounds. The conformance-improvement orientation consistently produced the top ranked priorities in the Delphi rounds. Theoretical contributions and managerial implications are discussed and potential future research areas on examining coordinate systems for POM strategy and modelling ecological and field views of POM are also elaborated.

OM Forum—A Review of Empirical Operations Management over the Last Two Decades

We develop a database of all empirical research related to operations management in the journals Management Science, Manufacturing and Service Operations Management (M&amp;SOM), and Production and Operations Management (POM) from the beginning of 1999 to the end of 2016. This database includes 236 empirical papers. We analyze the set of empirical papers to look for longitudinal trends and other bibliometric patterns. In particular, we show that (a) empirical research as a whole is gaining in popularity as measured by the publication rates in these three journals, (b) empirical papers in M&amp;SOM are more likely to get citations than nonempirical papers, and (c) researchers are now more commonly using instrumental variables and are more likely to consider endogeneity challenges in their research design. Using our database, we propose three dimensions on which empirical operations management papers can be compared, including their main objective, their data sources, and their identification strategy.

Research in Production and Operations Management: A University-Based Bibliometric Analysis

Universities across the world are contributing greatly to production and operations management (POM) research and playing significant roles in social and economic development. This article analyzes the performance of universities in POM research and development between 1990 and 2014. The Web of Science core collection database is used to collect all the necessary data. The results show a wide diversity among the countries of origin of the top universities, with some of them being in Asia, Europe, and North America. These results are quite different from many other management areas where English-speaking countries, especially the USA, tend to be dominant. Hong Kong Polytechnic University is the most productive university, while Michigan State University is the most influential one. Time-based evolution reveals that the USA previously had a more dominant position, while now there is more distribution of top universities around the world. The analysis of selected journals indicates that many journals tend to be more influenced by their respective countries of origin. However, other journals show a more general profile by publishing papers from most of the countries around the world.

China-related POM research: Literature review and suggestions for future research

This study investigates trends in China-related production and operations management (POM) research over the past 10 years (2006–2015). Descriptive statistics analyses are used to identify trends in topics, data, and contributions. We also identify representative examples from the literature to illustrate topics and contributions. Due to China's economic success, there has been a remarkable growth of China-related POM research in the past 10 years. Supply chain management, performance measurement and productivity, regulatory and environmental issues in operations, and purchasing/sourcing systems are the four most prominent research areas, which is a different pattern from the publications on other emerging economies. The number of articles adopting novel frameworks and approaches has increased, while the number of descriptive articles has decreased. This literature review offers an overview of previous China-related POM articles and provides several areas for future research. It also provides a better understanding of how China-related POM research has evolved and of new research topics that are emerging, which will help researchers to identify key POM issues in China.

The Role of Industry Studies and Public Policies in Production and Operations Management

The research domain Industry Studies and Public Policy (IS&amp;PP) seeks to further our understanding of industrial practices and managerial challenges by explicitly considering contextual details in the design and interpretation of research studies. These details can be vital considerations when shaping public policies. This article reviews a sample of IS&amp;PP publications and analyzes the content of 180 selected papers—85 papers published in the Production and Operations Management (POM) journal and 95 papers published in related journals between 1992 and 2014. Our analysis of the sample dataset and examination of exemplar papers provide four findings. First, studies in different industries emphasize different themes of operational decisions. This difference in emphasis reveals potential research opportunities, especially for conducting inter‐industry studies. Second, our analysis reveals a shift in focus over time. Earlier studies contain a mix of benchmarks and inter‐industry comparisons, while later studies tend to be context‐specific, intra‐industry studies. Third, we report on empirics → analytics → empirics cycles that reveal gaps for building novel theories. Finally, we observe that the relationship between POM decisions and public policy is bi‐directional. This highlights the need to jointly examine operational decisions with policy considerations, especially in information goods, healthcare, sustainable operations and high‐tech manufacturing industries.

The Role of Industry Studies and Public Policies in Production and Operations Management

Industry studies and public policy (IS&PP) is a research domain that seeks to further our understanding of industrial practices and managerial challenges by explicitly considering contextual details in the design and interpretation of studies. These details can also be vital considerations when shaping public policies. This article reviews a sample of IS&PP publications and analyzes the content of 180 selected papers - 85 papers published in the Production and Operations Management (POM) journal and 95 research papers published in related journals between 1992 and 2014. Analysis of the sampled data set and examination of exemplar papers provide four findings. First, studies in different industries emphasize different themes of operational decisions. This difference in emphasis reveals potential research opportunities, especially for conducting inter-industry studies. Second, our analysis reveals a shift in focus. Earlier studies contain a mix of benchmarks and inter-industry comparisons, while the later studies tend to focus on context specific, single-industry studies. This trend highlights the potential for developing new measures and multi-method approaches. Third, we report on empirics-analytics-empirics cycles that reveal gaps for building novel theories. Finally, we observe that the relationship between POM decisions and public policy is bi-directional. This highlights the need to jointly examine operational decisions with policy considerations, especially in information goods, healthcare, sustainable operations and high-tech manufacturing industries.

Research Constituents and Authorship Patterns in the Production and Operations Management Journal

The Production and Operations Management Society is the largest professional society dedicated to creating and disseminating knowledge in product and process design, operations, and supply chains for the management of manufacturing and services. Its research journal, Production and Operations Management ( POM), covers all topics in the discipline and all research paradigms to serve the entire community. Since its inception in 1992, POM has become recognized as a top tier outlet for operations management research. We identify research institutions in the operations management community that have played major roles in developing the journal based on the research of their faculty members and doctoral graduates. Our findings show that the constituency of the journal reflects the constituency of the society.

Call for Papers: Special Issue of Production and Operations Management: Not for Profit Operations Management

Over the past few years, there has been increasing interest in studying the management of operations run with not for profit incentives. In the area of Production and Operations Management (POM), the applied areas that have captured more attention related to this type of operations are humanitarian disaster management and global health care, but not for profit operations appear in multiple other applied settings such as education, community services, public services, and even some activities run by for-profit organizations.

Modelo Didáctico en Toma de Decisiones relacionadas con la Gestión de Producción y Operaciones: Aplicación en Ingeniería Química

A training tool for chemical engineering students with the aim of promoting a proper learning environment in decision making related to production and operations management (POM) was developed. This tool is supported on discrete event simulation, by which end users can pose different scenarios of operation of the production process, using the production of soap as a study case, and evaluates how they affect system performance in terms of production level achieved. The tool developed not only addresses the production of soap, but also takes into account the distribution of raw materials for processing and distribution of final products among other decisions addressed by the POM. The study shows the importance of simulation in the teaching / learning process, especially on issues related to the production and operations management