Business Commons^™

Crm In Russia And U.S. -- Case Study From American Financial Service Industry, Tamilla Curtis, Tom Griffin, Donald Barrere

Dr. Tamilla Curtis

This paper discusses Customer Relationship Management in two sharply contrasting business cultures: the United States and Russia. Included in the present work is a case study of a midsized American financial services firm that illustrates a common path to the decision to have a CRM system: the planning, selection, and the implementation of the CRM program, including a discussion of the likelihood of success. The clients in this case are Financial Advisors, who in turn sell the investment products to the end user individual investors. CRM in Russia is yet in its infancy as the economy emerges from 200 years …

Exploiting Knowledge About Future Demands For Real-Time Vehicle Dispatching, Soumia Ichoua, Michel Gendreau, Jean Yves Potvin

Soumia Ichoua

An important, but seldom investigated issue in the field of dynamic vehicle routing and dispatching is how to exploit information about future events to improve decision making. In this paper, we address this issue in a real-time setting with a strategy based on probabilistic knowledge about future request arrivals to better manage the fleet of vehicles. More precisely, the new strategy introduces dummy customers (representing forecasted requests) in vehicle routes to provide a good coverage of the territory. This strategy is assessed through computational experiments performed in a simulated environment.

The Sourcing Hub And Upstream Supplier Networks, Anupam Agrawal, Luk N. Van Wassenhove, Arnoud De Meyer

Arnoud DE MEYER

In this paper, we explore how firms can better manage their sourcing by developing relationships not only with their suppliers but also with their suppliers' suppliers. We detail an empirical case study explaining how the firm developed relationships with its suppliers and raw material suppliers via a collaborative center, the sourcing hub. We then analytically model the scenarios encountered in our empirical work and examine two facets of upstream sourcing under uncertain demand scenarios: (a) firms can supply raw material directly to their suppliers, and this may be beneficial for the firm and its suppliers; and (b) firms can bring …

German, French And British Manufacturing Strategies Compared: A Growth Towards Each Other, Arnoud De Meyer

Arnoud DE MEYER

Manufacturing has gained over the last years in attention as a tool to create competitive advantage. For four years now a survey has been carried out by a research team at Insead to build a database on the manufacturing strategies as they are defined and implemented by large European companies. In this paper some of the 1987 data are presented, and a comparison of manufacturing strategies of large companies in the three most important European countries is made. Though the most important conclusion is that there are only slight differences between the three countries, one can see some difference in …

Manufacturing Operations In Europe: Where Do We Go Next?, Arnoud De Meyer

Arnoud De Meyer

Extrapolating from the results of a 10-year INSEAD Survey, the author offers some views on the future for manufacturing in Europe. The model on which the Survey was based indicates that competitive priorities and action plans in manufacturing changed over the 10-year period. Taking lessons from these, the author makes some 'informed guesses' on the future implications for European manufacturers in the form of seven normative features: innovation in the value package; close integration between manufacturing and service; the importance of internationalism; flexible project-based organisation; more integrated management of the value added chain; successful transformation of operational programmes into strategic …

On Uncertainty, Ambiguity, And Complexity In Project Management, Michael T. Pich, Christoph H. Loch, Arnoud De Meyer

Arnoud DE MEYER

This article develops a model of a project as a payoff function that depends on the state of the world and the choice of a sequence of actions. A causal mapping, which may be incompletely known by the project team, represents the impact of possible actions on the states of the world. An underlying probability space represents available information about the state of the world. Interactions among actions and states of the world determine the complexity of the payoff function. Activities are endogenous, in that they are the result of a policy that maximizes the expected project payoff.

A key …

Lasting Improvements In Manufacturing Performance: In Search Of A New Theory, Kasra Ferdows, Arnoud De Meyer

Arnoud DE MEYER

Is there a way to avoid trading off one capability for another in manufacturing? The prevailing wisdom says no. But some manufacturers seem to have been able to defy that: compared to their competitors, they have better quality, are more dependable, respond faster to changing market conditions, and in spite of all that, achieve lower costs. How can this be explained? Our aim here is to provide an explanation. We contend that the nature of the trade-offs among manufacturing capabilities is more complex than has been assumed. Depending on the approach taken for developing each capability, the nature of the …

Flexibility: The Next Competitive Battle: The Manufacturing Futures Survey, Arnoud De Meyer, Jinichiro Nakane, Jeffrey M. Miller, Kasra Ferdows

Arnoud DE MEYER

Over the past 4 years research teams from INSEAD (Fontainebleau), Boston University and Waseda University (Tokyo) have administered a yearly survey on the manufacturing strategy of the large manufacturers of the three industrialized regions of the world. In this paper the results for the 1986 survey are compared. One of the most striking results of that year’s survey is the emphasis some of the more advanced manufacturers put on their efforts to overcome the trade-off between flexibility and cost efficiency. In particular for the Japanese respondents these attempts become clear. Europeans and North Americans are not yet seizing the opportunity …

Exchanging Preliminary Information In Concurrent Engineering: Alternative Coordination Strategies, Christian Terwiesch, Christoph H. Loch, Arnoud De Meyer

Arnoud DE MEYER

Successful application of concurrent development processes (concurrent engineering) requires tight coordination. To speed development, tasks often proceed in parallel by relying on preliminary information from other tasks, information that has not yet been finalized. This frequently causes substantial rework using as much as 50% of total engineering capacity. Previous studies have either described coordination as a complex social process, or have focused on the frequency, but not the content, of information exchanges. Through extensive fieldwork in a high-end German automotive manufacturer, we develop a framework of preliminary information that distinguishes information precision and information stability. Information precision refers to the …

Ecosystem Advantage: How To Successfully Harness The Power Of Partners, Peter James Williamson, Arnoud De Meyer

Arnoud DE MEYER

Changes in the global environment are generating opportunities for companies to build advantage by creating loosely coupled networks or ecosystems. Ecosystems are larger, more diverse, and more fluid than a traditional set of bilateral partnerships or complementors. By leveraging ecosystems, companies can deliver complex solutions while maintaining corporate focus. This article describes six keys to unlock ecosystem advantage: pinpointing where value is created, defining an architecture of differentiated partner roles, stimulating complementary partner investments, reducing the transaction costs, facilitating joint learning across the network, and engineering effective ways to capture profit.

Managing Value In Supply Chains: Case Studies On The Sourcing Hub Concept, Anupam Agrawal, Arnoud De Meyer, Luk N. Van Wassenhove

Arnoud DE MEYER

A firm’s raw material sourcing knowledge can be a strategic resource. This article explores how firms can capture and use this knowledge. It examines the sourcing experiences of four firms in four different countries in the automotive industry and identifies the raw material sourcing knowledge-related parameters. Synthesizing the findings from these case studies, it proposes the concept of the sourcing hub—a collaborative center involving the firm, its suppliers, and raw material suppliers—which can effectively capture and deploy the raw material sourcing knowledge for managing value in upstream sourcing.

Managing Value In Supply Chain: Case Studies On The Sourcing Hub Concept, Anupam Agrawal, Luk N. Van Wassenhove, Arnoud De Meyer

Arnoud DE MEYER

In this paper, we postulate that a firm's sourcing knowledge can be a strategic resource for the firm, and explore how firms can capture and build on their sourcing knowledge. We examine the sourcing experiences of four firms in four different countries in the automotive industry, who are in the process of improving their supply-chain partnerships. We study upstream sourcing of these firms: their suppliers and their suppliers' suppliers, and focus on identifying the sourcing knowledge and sourcing cost related parameters with appropriate theoretical explanations. Synthesizing the learnings from these case studies, we propose the concept of the Sourcing Hub, …

The Manufacturing Contribution To Innovation, Arnoud De Meyer

Arnoud DE MEYER

The description of the contribution of manufacturing to the innovation process is often limited to the task of providing the necessary information to enable the development function to create a design which is easy to manufacture, and to be instrumental in the fast ramp-up of the production process. Though these are important tasks, it is argued in this paper that there is a third aspect of manufacturing’s contribution to innovation, namely the creation of a manufacturing system which is favorable to product innovation. This goes far beyond the design of an appropriate production process, but requires the creation of a …

Managing Expert Systems: A Framework And Case Study, Rob R. Weitz, Arnoud De Meyer

Arnoud DE MEYER

This paper addresses the problem of managing the development and implementation of a large expert system in an organization. A traditional systems analysis and design methodology is used as a framework to highlight similarities and differences in managing large scale traditional computer based projects and large expert systems. As a non-technical, prescriptive guide, this article focusses on defining at each stage in the project, the tasks to be accomplished, resources required, impact on the organization, likely benefits and potential problems. The case of a large expert system implemented by a multinational corporation across several European sites is used to clarify …

How To Arrive At Computer Integrated Manufacturing: A 3-Year Survey, Arnoud De Meyer

Arnoud DE MEYER

The large majority of modern production companies have at their disposal a multitude of computer systems. The immediate challenge for these companies consists of integrating these computer systems and databases. How will one arrive at this integration? On the basis of a questionnaire administered in 1985, 1986 and 1987 among a group of large European manufacturers, one comes to the conclusion that this integration is one of the immediate priorities for this group of companies. They do not intend to implement turnkey systems. but instead will integrate the different databases and computer systems gradually. One can see emerging islands of …

A Typology Of Plants In Global Manufacturing Networks, Ann Vereecke, Roland Van Dierdonck, Arnoud De Meyer

Arnoud DE MEYER

The purpose of this paper is to propose a new, empirically derived typology of plants in the international manufacturing network of multinational companies. This typology is based on the knowledge flows between the plants. In our research, network analysis has been used as a methodology for understanding the position of plants in international manufacturing networks. The focus has been primarily on the intangible knowledge network, and secondarily on the physical, logistic network. Our analysis leads to four types of plants with different network roles: the isolated plants, the receivers, the hosting network players, and the active network players. Our analysis …

Impact Of Radio-Frequency Identification (Rfid) Technologies On The Hospital Supply Chain: A Literature Review, Alberto Coustasse, Shane Tomblin, Chelsea Slack

Shane Tomblin

Supply costs account for more than one-third of the average operating budget and constitute the second largest expenditure in hospitals. As hospitals have sought to reduce these costs, radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology has emerged as a solution. This study reviews existing literature to gauge the recent and potential impact and direction of the implementation of RFID in the hospital supply chain to determine current benefits and barriers of adoption. Findings show that the application of RFID to medical equipment and supplies tracking has resulted in efficiency increases in hospitals with lower costs and increased service quality. RFID technology can reduce …

The Long Haul: Risks Associated With Livestock Transport, Michael Greger

Michael Greger, MD, FACLM

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations describes live animal transport as “ideally suited for spreading disease,” given that animals may originate from different herds or flocks and are “confined together for long periods in a poorly ventilated stressful environment.” Given the associated “serious animal and public health problems,” the Federation of Veterinarians of Europe has called for the replacement of the long-distance transportation of live animals for slaughter as much as possible to a “carcass-only trade.” In the United States, more than 50 million live cattle, sheep, and pigs and an unknown number of the more …

Impact Of Radio-Frequency Identification (Rfid) Technologies On The Hospital Supply Chain: A Literature Review, Alberto Coustasse, Shane Tomblin, Chelsea Slack

Alberto Coustasse, DrPH, MD, MBA, MPH

Supply costs account for more than one-third of the average operating budget and constitute the second largest expenditure in hospitals. As hospitals have sought to reduce these costs, radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology has emerged as a solution. This study reviews existing literature to gauge the recent and potential impact and direction of the implementation of RFID in the hospital supply chain to determine current benefits and barriers of adoption. Findings show that the application of RFID to medical equipment and supplies tracking has resulted in efficiency increases in hospitals with lower costs and increased service quality. RFID technology can reduce …

A Review Of Radio Frequency Identification Technologies And Impacts On The Hospital Supply Chain: 2002–2012, Alberto Coustasse, Shane Tomblin, Chelsea Slack

Shane Tomblin

Supply costs are the second largest expenditure in hospitals, accounting for more than one third of the average operating budget. RFID technology can reduce these costs, improve patient safety, and supply chain management by increasing the ability to track and locate equipment, as well as monitoring theft prevention, distribution management, and patient billing. Findings of this study have shown that the application of RFID on medical equipment and supplies have resulted in efficiency increase in healthcare with lower costs and increased quality services. Even though the cost of RFID implementation is decreasing, the total expenditures are still significant and the …

Inventory Competition In Make-To-Stock Systems, Ehsan Elahi, Saif Benjaafar, Karen Donohue

Ehsan Elahi

We present models for competition among multiple suppliers for demand from a single manufacturer. The suppliers produce to stock a single product and are allocated demand by the manufacturer based on the amount the amount of inventory they hold. We prove the existence of a Nash equilibrium for a broad class of market allocation schemes. For the special case of identical suppliers under either a stock-proportional or fill rate-proportional allocation, we show the uniqueness of the Nash equilibrium. Analysis of the Nash equilibrium for this case reveals that (a) the manufacturer benefits from competition (in the form of higher fill …

Antecedents And Consequences Of Trust In Supply Chain: The Role Of Information Technology, Qing Hu, Jinghua Xiao, Kang Xie, Nilesh Saraf

Qing Hu

Trust has been a central construct in studies of inter-firm relationships. Many operational, organizational, social, and cultural factors have been identified to have significant impact on inter-firm trust. In this study, we investigate the role of information technology in generating inter-firm trust and the consequences of this trust in the context of supply networks. Using structural equation modeling techniques, our data show that the level of information systems integration among the partner firms in a supply network significantly impacts the trust among the firms which, together with the integrated information systems, explains more than half of the variances in information …

Rfid And Its Impacts To The Hospital Supply Chain, Dan Feng Lu, Hai Do, Anna Jones, Alberto Coustasse

Alberto Coustasse, DrPH, MD, MBA, MPH

A radio frequency identification device (RFID) is a type of information technology used to improve supply chain management through an enhanced visualization of products. The RFID market in the U.S healthcare industry has been projected to be approximately $297 million and has been expected to grow at a rapid speed. RFID had a great impact on the hospital supply chain. It has been demonstrated that 30% of large healthcare organization that had IT budgets over $100 million had already deployed RFID technology. RFID is the latest technology to reduce costs by tracking both equipment and employees. This technology can also …

A Review Of Radio Frequency Identification Technologies And Impacts On The Hospital Supply Chain: 2002–2012, Alberto Coustasse, Shane Tomblin, Chelsea Slack

Alberto Coustasse, DrPH, MD, MBA, MPH

Supply costs are the second largest expenditure in hospitals, accounting for more than one third of the average operating budget. RFID technology can reduce these costs, improve patient safety, and supply chain management by increasing the ability to track and locate equipment, as well as monitoring theft prevention, distribution management, and patient billing. Findings of this study have shown that the application of RFID on medical equipment and supplies have resulted in efficiency increase in healthcare with lower costs and increased quality services. Even though the cost of RFID implementation is decreasing, the total expenditures are still significant and the …

Transport Replacement And Sustainability Aspects Associated With Additive Manufacturing, Marcus R. Wigan

Marcus R Wigan

Additive manufacturing has a range of characteristics that suggest enhancements to sustainability should be possible. The nature of the process influences not only how products can be made, but also how they can be delivered. Logistics and the global supply chain are central aspects to manufacturing, and considerable attention is being paid to making the supply chain more sustainable. This often makes sound economic sense without any consideration of the environmental benefits, as this usually delivers energy reductions and reduced reworking or redelivery. Additive manufacturing has also secured increasing attention from a sustainability standpoint, but this has in the main …

An Experimental Investigation Of Outsourcing Through Competition, Ehsan Elahi, Roger Blake

Ehsan Elahi

Our research uses laboratory experiments to examine the theoretical results of competition between suppliers in an outsourcing setup. We consider a supply chain in which a single buyer needs to outsource the manufacturing of a product among N potential suppliers. The buyer allocates demand to suppliers not on the basis of price, but rather on service. We analyze the levels of service suppliers will decide to provide when competing on three different criteria specified by the buyer. For the first, suppliers compete by providing the buyer a specific service level (fill-rate), and for the second by maintaining a specific quantity …

Moving Beyond Boycotts: Strategies For Shared Responsibility In The Collegiate Apparel Industry, Scott Kelley

Scott Kelley

An Integrated Outsourcing Framework: Analyzing Boeing’S Outsourcing Program For Dreamliner (B787), Ehsan Elahi, Mehdi Sheikhzadeh, Narasimha Lamba

Ehsan Elahi

This paper analyzes the outsourcing model which Boeing devised to develop its latest commercial airplane model: Dreamliner (B787). The development of this airplane which seemed to be very promising in the beginning turned into the longest delayed program in the history of the company. In this paper, we propose an integrated outsourcing framework through which we try to find the root causes of the delays and the resulted extra costs. The proposed framework shows how the interaction of all influential factors in four outsourcing dimensions (who, what, to whom, and how) determines the performance of an outsourcing program.