Operations and Supply Chain Management Commons^™

Building Relationships As An Expat In China: An Observation On How To Successfully Build And Manage Business Relations In China, Lauren Saunders

Supply Chain Management Undergraduate Honors Theses

Since opening itself to free trade in 1979, China’s economy has doubled in size on average every 8 years. With sustained growth across forty years, China now controls the second-largest economy, just behind the United States by an ever-thinning margin. Seeing opportunity, American businesses moved operations into China immediately. As China’s economy grew, America’s reliance on supply chains across China grew. 2020 U.S. trade value in goods with China surpassed 500 billion USD, with the majority trade value coming from imports to the United States. However, starting in 2018, trade war disputes, geopolitical disruption, and the largest pandemic of the …

The Five Essential Building Blocks To Becoming A Top Twenty-Five Supply Chain Program, Phillip Necessary

Supply Chain Management Undergraduate Honors Theses

The overall intention of this research is to develop aspiring programs to reevaluate their institutions and begin growing their program with lessons from other leading institutions—the more comprehensive, educated, and driven students in the Supply Chain industry, the better.

The Supply Chain Management sector has grown substantially in the last fifteen to twenty years; the current placement rate of undergraduates is eighty-five to one hundred percent after graduation (Damast, 2015). This phenomenon correlates with international and domestic interest in information technology, economic dynamics, flexibility, and product availability, all of which have grown industry demand (Rob O'Byrne, 2020). In the last …

A Financial And Environmental Impact Analysis On The Implementation Of Electric Vehicles For The Washington County, Arkansas Sheriff's Department, Lauren Chadwick

Supply Chain Management Undergraduate Honors Theses

Since the Biden administration has provided implication that the hope is for state and local governments to adopt net zero emission federal vehicles, it is important to see how this might work for a county in a rural area of Arkansas. Applying this real possibility to the local Sheriff’s department will aim to create a case either for the implementation of electric vehicles or prove to show that it is not a feasible solution.

This research will compare the financial advantages and disadvantages of this order along with the possible environmental impact that this solution can attribute to. Focusing on …

Integrating Systems, Processes, And Human Judgment: Three Essays On Value Creation With Supply Chain Analytics, Rebekah Inez Brau

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Big-data, analytics, automation, and machine learning are changing the role of managers in supply chain and operations functions. Extant research indicates that effective value creation by analytics is achieved through careful attention to three components: technology, people, and processes. As such, the purpose of my dissertation is to improve the integration of people in current supply chain and operations management systems with ever-changing technologies and processes. I focus on one critical function—demand planning—since it is increasingly influenced by predictive analytics yet can still require human judgment. My dissertation is comprised of three essays as follow.

In Essay 1, I implement …

Cross Domain Iw Threats To Sof Maritime Missions: Implications For U.S. Sof, Gary C. Kessler, Diane M. Zorri

Publications

As cyber vulnerabilities proliferate with the expansion of connected devices, wherein security is often forsaken for ease of use, Special Operations Forces (SOF) cannot escape the obvious, massive risk that they are assuming by incorporating emerging technologies into their toolkits. This is especially true in the maritime sector where SOF operates nearshore in littoral zones. As SOF—in support to the U.S. Navy— increasingly operate in these contested maritime environments, they will gradually encounter more hostile actors looking to exploit digital vulnerabilities. As such, this monograph comes at a perfect time as the world becomes more interconnected but also more vulnerable.

Flexible Resource Allocation For Service And Production Systems, Peng Wang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Resource flexibility hedges against uncertainty in service and production systems. However, flexibility also brings complexity and difficulty in allocating resources. The thesis mainly studies managing flexible resources in two scenarios. The first scenario is a type of coordination of workers in a production or assembly line – bucket brigade. Specifically, the study shows how to manage a stochastic bucket brigade with discrete work stations. The second scenario is a service system with flexible service resources. The study proposes a distributive decision rule for the allocation of resources under both supply and demand uncertainty.

Chapter 2 studies a J-station, I-worker bucket …

Essays On Management Of Scarce Resources, Qian Luo

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Efficient management of scarce resources is critical to the improvement of economic, social and/or environmental performances. In this dissertation, I focus on the management of two scarce resources: i) healthcare resources and ii) water, and investigate two important problems: i) the estimation of patients’ health transition to support healthcare resources control under the context of sequential medical treatments, and ii) the urban water system control with a specific focus on the wastewater recycling capacity investment in the presence of climate change and urban water scarcity. The first chapter studies how to estimate patients’ health transition considering the effects of treatment-effect-based …

Debiasing A Decision Maker Facing Supply Uncertainties In A Newsvendor Setting, Alan William Zeller

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Companies must be prepared to manage uncontrollable events that will disrupt their supply chain and add uncertainty to their inventory models.

This thesis first studies the effect of different types of supply disruption risks on the ordering performance of profit-maximizing decision makers in a newsvendor setting.

Then, this thesis aims at extending the literature on the newsvendor model in studying the effect of a Decision Support System and the effect of a Secondary Task on the ordering performance of profit-maximizing decision makers who face supply uncertainties in a newsvendor setting.

Finally, implications for scholars and practitioners are discussed.

Resilience As An Organisational Capability: A Study Of How Firms Survive And Outperform In Disruptive Times, Dietmar Kappel

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

An environment, in which volatility and deep uncertainty represent the leading paradigm, pressures firms to focus their attention on adapting to disruptive environmental conditions. Although scholarly attention in the firm-level resilience construct has increased over the years, a number of important issues remain underexplored. To advance progress in the field, research is needed on the dimensions of resilient response formulation and enactment, the dimensions of the disruptive environment and situational factors as well as resilience as a latent outcome variable. Based on an in-depth, systematic review of the received literature, this thesis aims to extend the firm-level resilience literature by …

Behavioural Incentivization In Healthcare Operations, Nicholas Teck Boon Yeo

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Common across current research in healthcare operations is the conclusion that there exist many inefficiencies in today’s healthcare systems. Governments and healthcare organisations have sought to address these inefficiencies through the introduction of new policies and operational procedures or by relying on incentives to encourage specific behaviour. However, despite these attempts to reduce inefficiencies in the healthcare systems, the problem persists and is further exacerbated by growing medical complexities coupled with a rapidly ageing population. Against this backdrop, this dissertation investigates two issues within healthcare operations: (i) colorectal cancer (CRC) screening adherence, and (ii) blood donor management. A distinguishing feature …

Examining The Real Costs Of Us Manufacturing Decoupling Strategies, Sze Chiang Jonathan Chee

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Decoupling strategies have been the main focus of supply chain and resource management studies. Increasingly, due to the shift in geopolitical dynamics, the term ‘decoupling’ is now used in finance, accounting, political, and strategic management fields to describe the effect from the fallout of tense international relations. Existing research on this topic includes modeling strategic retaliation theories and evaluating firm effects from an accounting and finance perspective. Yet, there still is little research published on meso-level analysis of the relationship between macro and micro factors that affect organizational decoupling strategies. This study hopes to add to this new body of …

Beauty And Lifestyle Subscription Services: A Modern Retailing Format For The Vigilante Collaborative Consumption Consumer, Melisa Spilinek

Department of Textiles, Merchandising and Fashion Design: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Advancements in technology and ease of use of online shopping via phone applications (apps) and subscription services have fundamentally changed how consumers shop. Now more than ever, consumers are turning to time-saving technological tools that are subscription services. Subscription services provide a multitude of benefits to consumers and contribute to collaborative consumption in nearly every product and service category from coffee to apparel. To investigate beauty and lifestyle subscription services and collaborative consumption this study will utilize a mixed methods convergent design to analyze user experience including price sensitivity, subscription service apps and ease of use. Anticipated contributions to the …

Automation And Distribution Center Labor Effectiveness: A Case Study Of Operations Company X, James Rizzitano

Honors Projects in Global Supply Chain Management

Distribution center automation has progressed rapidly in recent times, with substantial improvements in automated systems which improve worker efficiency. These improvements have enabled distribution centers to increase their total throughput, while lowering their labor cost-per-case. However, when a distribution center transitions from manual fulfillment to an automated warehouse execution system, there will be growing pains as the facility adapts. In this exploratory case study of Operations Company X, we observe one such facility that recently transitioned to use an automated warehouse management system. To best explore the happenings of this facility, an archival analysis of pre and post automation data …

The Role Of Digital Technology Adoption In Coping With Sc Disruptions Caused By Covid-19 Pandemic, Nicole Record

Thinking Matters Student Research Symposium

Supply chain disruptions in addition to the immediate effect of stopping/ impeding the flows, long term effects can include bankruptcies, reduced business growth and increased business uncertainty. Unlike prior disruption events, the COVID-19 pandemic presents a novel opportunity to study a near-simultaneous global supply chain disruption. We carry out a systematic literature review to understand disruption response in this context.

The Distribution Trends Of Labor Cost In A Government Organization, Robert Carlos

Public Administration ETDs

This study will research growth in the cost of support personnel in a government organization. It will provide a comprehensive, six-year comparison of costs from Fiscal Year (FY) 2014 to 2020. Furthermore, the study will analyze trends, and provide recommendations for best practices and optimum resource allocation.

Significant management concern has arisen due to the recent trend in rising indirect labor costs. A comparison of indirect and overhead to direct labor costs details a growth trend illustrating the uneven development and inefficiencies in the distribution of labor cost in the directorate.

The cost of labor is rising faster than the …

How Exemplary Industrial Production Managers Lead Successfully Through The Turbulence Of The Covid-19 Crisis, Wendi Fast

Dissertations

Purpose: The purpose of this phenomenological study was to discover and describe behaviors that exemplary industrial production managers in organizations practice to lead their organizations through the turbulent times of COVID -19 using the leadership attributes of personal temperament, concern for the collective interest, resilience, and moral purpose.

Methodology: This qualitative study used a phenomenological research design. Data was collected from 10 interviews of industrial production managers and artifacts collected to discover and describe behaviors that industrial production managers in manufacturing organizations practice to lead their organizations through the turbulent times of the COVID-19 crisis.

Findings: The study revealed 27 …

A Systematic Literature Review : Information Technology Capital And Performance, Ilham M, Anis Eliyana, Tri Siwi Agustina

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

This study aims to conduct a systematic literature review of research in the field of Information Technology Capital and Performance with data from all international research publications. The data obtained in this study amounted to 113 academic documents published from 1994 to 2020 globally. Research has discussed a lot about the causal relationship between information technology capital and company performance, the results of empirical studies vary to some extent with the exception of Information Technology business partnerships which are referred to as Information Technology business and strategic alignment. To that end, strategic alignment has emerged as one of the most …

Decarbonising And Digitalising Shipping, Perlin Chan, Serene Johnson, Aladdy Choo, Lay Lin Tan, Annie Koh

Perspectives@SMU

Targeted regulation and a mindset shift are necessary to transform the maritime industry

Surface Transportation Supply Chain Security: Creating A Blueprint For Future Research, Frances Edwards, Joseph Szyliowicz, Dan Goodrich, William Medigovich, Liz Lange, Autumn Anderton

Mineta Transportation Institute

Ninety percent of the world’s trade goods travel by surface transportation, using maritime, road and rail assets. The security of the goods in transit, the infrastructure supporting the movement, and the vehicles, are required to ensure that international commerce proceeds successfully. Much has been written about the surface supply chain itself, but little has focused on the security of these components. This report provides a guide for those wanting an increased understanding of the security issues that supply chain surface transportation systems confront and a blueprint to guide their future research.

Business Responses To A Pandemic In A Global Economy: Case Studies Detailing The Impact Of Covid-19 On Medical Supply Chains, Lowell Hundley Coleman

Senior Theses

This paper details the best practices of three multinational medical supply companies in their efforts to overcome supply chain disruptions stemming from the coronavirus pandemic. Through a series of case studies on the supply chain responses of 3M, Becton Dickinson, and Honeywell between January and December of 2020, this paper highlights the strengths and weaknesses of their respective supply chains, company cultures, and mitigation strategies and provides useful insight into what actions medical supply companies will need to make going forward to prevent and reduce supply chain disruptions amidst future global pandemics.