Operations Management Research Research Articles

Guest editorial: humanitarian logistics - an opportunity for service research

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the nature service operations management (OM) and its application to the field of humanitarian operations. Design/methodology/approach – The paper serves as the editorial for this issue of JHLSCM. Findings – The paper suggests that there is an opportunity for service OM academics to apply their knowledge and skills to answer fundamental questions in the humanitarian OM field. Research limitations/implications – There is a need for a re-conceptualization of the term “humanitarian operations” to include services. Humanitarian OM is not just products but also services. Originality/value – The paper contributes to the knowledge and applications of services OM in humanitarian operations research. This is the first work to identify how services OM theories can be adopted for humanitarian OM research. This research should serve as a foundation for future research.

Operations research/management contributions to emergency department patient flow optimization: Review and research prospects

In recent years, Operations Research/Management (OR/OM) has had a significant impact on improving the performance of hospital Emergency Departments (EDs). This includes improving a wide range of processes involving patient flow from the initial call to the ED through disposition, discharge home, or admission to the hospital. We review approximately 350 related papers to (i) demonstrate the influence of OR/OM in EDs, and (ii) assist both researchers and practitioners with the OR/OM techniques already available to optimize ED patient flow. In addition, we elaborate on some practical challenges yet to be addressed. By shedding light on some less studied aspects that can have significant impacts on ED operations, we also discuss important possibilities for future OR/OM researchers.

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.

Seeing the Forest but Missing the Trees: The Role of Judgments in Performance Management

Various solutions have been proposed to “fix” performance management (PM) over the last several decades. Pulakos, Mueller Hanson, Arad, and Moye (2015) have presented a holistic approach to improving PM in organizations. Although this approach addresses several key elements related to the social context of PM, namely the buy-in of organizational stakeholders, timely and regular feedback, and future-directed feedback, we believe that several robust findings from the PM research literature could further improve this process. Are Pulakos et al. looking at the forest but missing the trees? In the following commentary, we offer several reasons that performance judgments and perhaps even informal ratings are still operating and occurring in the proposed holistic system. Therefore, advancements in other areas of PM research may offer additional ways to fix PM.

Achieving employee commitment for continuous improvement initiatives

Purpose – Although prior research has found that employee participation is key to successfully implementing quality management initiatives (Baird et al., 2011; de Menezes, 2012; Lagrosen and Lagrosen, 2005), little research in operations management exists that investigates which management actions and behaviors lead to employee commitment to such initiatives. The purpose of this paper is to address this gap in the operations management literature by investigating which influence tactics are the most effective in soliciting employee commitment to continuous improvement tasks. The paper also examines how influence tactics affect the supervisor-subordinate relationship and the manager’s effectiveness in implementing continuous improvement initiatives. Design/methodology/approach – A survey instrument was used to measure supervisor-subordinate relationship quality, usage of influence behaviors and participants’ task commitment to continuous improvement initiatives. Findings – The results indicate that five of the 11 influence tactics identified in the prior literature, i.e., collaboration, consultation, ingratiation, inspirational appeals, and rational persuasion, are significant and strong predictors of employee commitment to continuous improvement initiatives. Further, analyses show that these influence tactics are significant drivers of the quality of the supervisor-subordinate relationship, which was found to partially mediate the relationship between influence tactics and the supervisor’s effectiveness in implementing continuous improvement projects. Research limitations/implications – Since the extant CI and Total Quality Management literature has looked at the plant or program level rather than the worker-level as in the research, the findings offer one explanation as to why earlier studies investigating the relationship between quality management programs and increased organizational performance reported mixed results. Practical implications – Increasing managers’ awareness and usage of influence tactics may increase the success rate of continuous improvement projects as well the quality of the relationship with the manager’s subordinates. Originality/value – While the extant literature has argued that management support and employee commitment are key components of a continuous improvement project implementation, little has been written about the specific management actions and behaviors that lead to success.

The internationalisation of operations management research

Operations management (OM) is a relatively new field of business, having become recognised as a standalone discipline in the mid 1980s. With this in mind, this study analyses the origins, geographical regions, countries, and institutions, of OM research in 11 top level academic journals from 1985 through 2010. Since the field is rather new and is still being developed, an analysis of current and past research constituents offers a unique opportunity to assess how research and education in OM has spread across the globe. We identify those geographic regions and countries that encourage and support OM research and education from the academic institutions within their boundaries. Further, through the research contributions of affiliated authors and PhD graduates, we identify those institutions within each country that are the leaders in terms of OM research and education efforts. We consider the research of faculty affiliated with each institution as well as the research of each institution’s PhD graduates. We find that the early development of the field was centred in the US and UK but, in recent years, much of the research is being published by authors and institutions from many other geographic regions and countries.

Delivering Humanitarian Assistance at the Last Mile: Insights on Recruiting and Training

Humanitarian operations management research has focused on structural issues and resource allocation, but little is known about human resources delivering aid on the ground. Even less is known abou...

Computing Performance Measures with National Performance Management Research Data Set

The National Performance Management Research Data Set (NPMRDS) was procured by the FHWA Office of Operations in 2013. NPMRDS initially served as a research data set for sponsored programs, but rights to use the data set were secured for state departments of transportation and metropolitan planning organizations in anticipation of the performance measure requirements of the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act. NPMRDS is a form of commercial GPS probe data; that is, the traffic conditions are derived from vehicles that periodically self-report speed, position, and heading with GPS electronics. NPMRDS differs from commercially available data feeds in that FHWA specified that no smoothing, outlier detection, or imputation of traffic data be performed. As a result, NPMRDS contains unique characteristics for statistical distribution of reported travel times. These are characteristics such that traditional processing techniques are ineffective in obtaining accurate performance measures. This paper proposes a method for handling the challenges posed by NPMRDS and computing meaningful performance measures from it. The paper first exposes the challenges in processing NPMRDS data and defines a method for overcoming the challenges. The paper compares the results from the proposed method with traffic data from commercial probe data sources and a reference reidentification data source at two case study locations. The case studies indicate that this paper successfully shows the ability to capture performance measures from NPMRDS more accurately with techniques originally developed to accurately reflect travel time and travel time reliability on interrupted-flow facilities.

Operations in the context of urban mobility: Evaluating the Performance of the Deliveries to Small Retailers

This study aims to clarify the performance attributes of logistical service that retailers identify as more relevant to their suppliers’ distribution process in urban areas. And, this task was performed using the Stated Preference Technique, a tool not so widespread among operations management researchers. The research focused the small retail food stores in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, considering the complexity involved in the delivery of perishable and fragile foods. As result, the technique show us the relative importance of the attributes related to the service level, highlighting the high degree of relevance achieved by the attributes that define the service level. This means that gaps in services are not easily shadowed by compensatory practices of stock build-up, which are financially very burdensome or unviable in terms of storage area. This kind of approach may call attention to opportunities of improving buyer-supplier relationships and the management of these processes, as well as public issues.DOI: 10.12660/joscmv7n2p26-36URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.12660/joscmv7n2p26-36

Improving Patient Flow in Emergency Departments with OR Techniques: A Literature Overview

The emergency department (ED) is an interesting field for operations research (OR) and operations management (OM) researchers. Having timevarying arrivals and heterogeneous patients that need to be treated in consecutive processing steps by several doctors, nurses and other employees, it is a complex environment to control. The difficulty to control EDs often results in (over)crowded EDs. In general, an ED is said to be experiencing periods of crowding when the demand for ED services exceeds the available ED resources (Higginson, 2012). ED crowding is a worldwide phenomenon with regional influences (Jayaprakash et al., 2009) and may cause a myriad of operational problems like patients being treated in hallways, excessive length of stay (LOS) and wait times, patients leaving without treatment or even medical errors and increased mortality. Descriptive studies that define crowding (Hwang & Concato, 2004), examine the causes and effects (Richardson & Mountain, 2009; Hoot & Aronsky, 2008; Asplin et al., 2003), and propose models to measure crowding (Hwang et al., 2011; Higginson, 2012) can be found in the medical literature. Applying OR and OM techniques to improve the performance of EDs is needed now more than ever since health budgets are tight, demand for health care services is rising and higher performance standards are being demanded simultaneously.The scope of the articles that have been selected for discussion and the search method are delineated in Section 1.1 and Section 1.2 respectively. Section 2 will provide an overview of the selected articles that use OR and OM techniques to improve ED processes. Considering the existing literature, Section 3 will outline my future research perspectives.

Operations management research—call for papers

Operations management research—call for papers

Exploring the financial impact of outsourcing services strategy on manufacturing firms

Procuring business services has become an important part of the way that companies acquire external resources. However, there is limited empirical evidence in Operations Management research that explores the financial consequences of outsourcing services. This paper seeks to fill this gap by analyzing the effects on financial performance of one of the dimensions of the services outsourcing strategy, depth, which entails deciding whether each of the activities is outsourced totally or partially. The financial effects have been measured by indicators relating to cost, productivity and profitability. Data are drawn from a sample of 1,522 Spanish manufacturing firms. The results show significant differences on all levels for personnel-related indicators and that these depend on the depth of the services outsourcing strategy. Moreover, the companies that tend to outsource their services totally are those that present the most favorable values for each of these indicators. These findings imply that when companies outsource services they should consider that the depth with which they outsource activities has an impact on financial indicators.

Leadership in OM research: a social network analysis of European researchers

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the leadership role of authors, institutions, and countries based on research co-authorship networks in the field of operations management (OM) and ranks European authors, institutions, and countries using network centrality measures. It also identifies the primary research areas of each of the leading European authors and maps the areas that European research in general has focussed most on. Design/methodology/approach – Based on co-authorships in publications appearing in a representative set of three leading OM journals over the 15-year period of 1998-2012, network measures of total degree centrality and betweenness centrality are used to identify influential European agents serving as leaders and bridge builders in OM research. Keyword analysis is used to identify the dominant areas of OM research in Europe as well as the primary areas of research of the leading authors. Findings – With UK, Spain, The Netherlands, and Italy accounting for the dominant share of authorship of papers in the journal set, many authors and institutions from these countries are also found to rank high on network centrality measures. While certain authors, institutions, and countries are found ranking high on total degree centrality based on number of direct connections in the network, others are found to play uniquely important roles as gatekeepers and bridge builders in network relationships. The body of research is found to be focussed most on the area of supply chain management. It is also found to be focussed more on manufacturing than service. Research limitations/implications – The examination of networks in this study based on co-authorships in publications in the set of three leading journals: Journal of Operations Management, International Journal of Operations & Production Management, and Production and Operations Management, is not all encompassing as there are likely other co-authorship relationships of OM researchers that go beyond publications in this set of journals. Practical implications – Co-authorship of papers in the leading academic journals in a discipline provides a window on patterns of collaboration among key researchers within that academic community. The findings of this study inform the community of stakeholders on who the leading European agents in OM research are, what the primary areas of research of the leading European authors are, and areas that European research has focussed most on. Originality/value – This is the first study of its kind that identifies and maps key European authors, institutions, and countries based on the analysis of co-authorship networks of researchers who have published in a set of leading OM journals that are considered to be among the most relevant outlets in the field of OM. It also maps the primary areas of research.

The relationship between team autonomy and new product development performance under different levels of technological turbulence

Operations management researchers have frequently suggested that autonomy can motivate teams to actively and flexibly adapt to fast-changing environments, fostering innovation and creative problem solving. However, empirical studies have not consistently supported the benefits of team autonomy. We articulate the behavioral and mechanistic effects of team autonomy by integrating operations management and behavioral literatures. Further, we view team autonomy as a bipolar factor and argue that both the behavioral and mechanistic effects of team autonomy on operational outcomes are non-linear. Drawing on information processing theory, we propose that the benefits of team autonomy depend on the degree of technological turbulence. A study of 212 new product development projects supports these propositions. Specifically, the relationship between team autonomy and operational outcomes is ∩-shaped in technologically turbulent environments and U-shaped in technologically stable environments. Further, operational outcomes mediate the relationships between team autonomy and product success. We discuss the theoretical implications regarding new product development, operations management, the bipolarity of autonomy, and information-processing theory.

The Use of Latent Semantic Analysis in Operations Management Research

ABSTRACTIn this article, we introduce the use of Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) as a technique for uncovering the intellectual structure of a discipline. LSA is an emerging quantitative method for content analysis that combines rigorous statistical techniques and scholarly judgment as it proceeds to extract and decipher key latent factors. We provide a stepwise explanation and illustration for implementing LSA. To demonstrate LSA's ability to uncover the intellectual structure of a discipline, we present a study of the field of Operations Management. We also discuss a number of potential applications of LSA to show how it can be used in empirical Operations Management research, specifically in areas that can benefit from analyzing large volumes of unstructured textual data.

Enabling More Objective Performance Appraisals: A Training Program Model of Pinpointing

Enabling objective performance appraisals have been the aim of many organizations including years of research in performance management. As today's business environments become more complex and are ongoing rapid change, it is very important for managers not to ignore the attention and the time they should allocate to their subordinates’ performance observations. The current study exemplifies an important methodology “pinpointing” implemented for the sales managers working in a pharmaceutical industry as part of a training program.

Supply‐Chain Research Opportunities with the Poor as Suppliers or Distributors in Developing Countries

Many social enterprises and some companies have developed supply chains with the poor as suppliers or distributors to alleviate poverty and to create revenues for themselves. Such supply chains have created new research opportunities because they raise issues fundamentally different from those examined in the existing operations management literature. We report this phenomenon of supply chains with the poor as suppliers or distributors in developing countries and identify operations management (OM) research opportunities. We also provide some stylized models to serve as potential seeds for modeling‐based research in this area.

Production Operation Management Research of Mixed Private Cloud Enterprise

According to manufacturing characteristics of mixed private cloud enterprise, production operation management requirements of mixed private cloud enterprise are analysed. Function of production operation management in mixed private cloud enterprise is summarized. Specific content of production operation management is inducted based on mixed cloud enterprise. The process of production operation management are designed in detail. Object model diagram of production operation management are elaborated. It is analysed that the content of the reform of production order and the specific process are obtained. It is researched that production order form to be queried and finally end process has been preliminaryly discussed.It has laid a basis for optimal and reasonable application of production operation management.

Bullwhip effect reduction and improved business performance through guanxi: An empirical study

Many operations managers have realized the potential of guanxi to facilitate business transactions. Likewise, operations management researchers have looked at the negative impact caused by the bullwhip effect on excess inventory and the impact of the bullwhip effect on business performance. To date, however, no empirical research has integrated these research streams. Therefore, we draw on both operations strategy literature as well as marketing strategy literature to propose a conceptual model that links guanxi, the bullwhip effect, and business performance in an empirical study. Analysis of our survey data (N=205) using structural equation modeling (SEM) indicates that guanxi has a positive impact on business performance and also reduces the bullwhip effect. We also show how a moderating factor, competition, affects the usefulness of guanxi. Specifically, we provide evidence that the link between guanxi and business performance is weakened by a highly competitive environment.

Socially Responsible Practices: An Exploratory Study on Scale Development using Stakeholder Theory

ABSTRACTSocially responsible practices of firms have evolved into an important area of research in operations management; however, it remains challenging to identify specific scales that capture multiple dimensions of such social practices. In this exploratory study, we use stakeholder theory to develop new multi‐item measurement scales linked to multiple groups (i.e., internal, supplier, customer, and community stakeholders). Furthermore, we empirically test a higher order multidimensional construct that collectively assesses the socially responsible practices of a firm. Using these stakeholder‐derived constructs as taxons in a cluster analysis, we identify important patterns in the way that multiple groups of stakeholders are engaged. Finally, we demonstrate that the set of social practices are complementary and concentrating on one group can yield spillover effects to other specific stakeholder groups.