Production and Operations Management

Social Optimal Location of Facilities with Fixed Servers, Stochastic Demand, and Congestion

We consider two capacity choice scenarios for the optimal location of facilities with fixed servers, stochastic demand, and congestion. Motivating applications include virtual call centers, consisting of geographically dispersed centers, walk-in health clinics, motor vehicle inspection stations, automobile emissions testing stations, and internal service systems. The choice of locations for such facilities influences both the travel cost and waiting times of users. In contrast to most previou...

Oliver E. Williamson

Oliver E. Williamson was born in 1932 in Superior, WI. He received a bachelor of science degree in engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1953, an MBA from Stanford University in 1960, and his PhD in economics from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1963. Williamson's contributions to economics and public policy over the course of his career have been many and diverse. Williamson's crowning professional achievement, with which he has become eponymous, is the development of t...

Inventory Management for Customers with Alternative Lead Times

It is common for suppliers operating in batch-production mode to deal with patient and impatient customers. This paper considers inventory models in which a supplier provides alternative lead times to its customers: a short or a long lead time. Orders from patient customers can be taken by the supplier and included in the next production cycle, while orders from impatient customers have to be satisfied from the on-hand inventory. We denote the action to commit one unit of on-hand inventory to...

Management Insights

How to Win 'Spend' and Influence Partners: Lessons in Behavioral Operations From the Outsourcing Game

The Outsourcing Game is a role-play simulation that has been deployed in industry and academic training courses worldwide. It incorporates the concepts of hidden actions, hidden information, and misaligned incentives, and conveys messages about power, trust, and reputation. The game depicts the adventures of Acme, the brand owner of a product manufactured by an outsourced supply chain. Through a series of negotiations, Acme attempts to influence its partners (two suppliers and two service pro...

E-Business: A Review of Research Published in Production and Operations Management (1992-2008)

We review, classify, consolidate, and synthesize the contributions to the expanding field of e-business that have been published in Production and Operations Management. We classify e-business research in the following four categories: (1) e-auctions, (2) radio frequency identification, (3) e-business system design, and (4) competition, conflict, collaboration, and coordination (C^sup 4^ in e-business). We identify important research themes, research methodologies, and research techniques wit...