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Full-Text Articles in Business
Subcontracting And Rework Cost Sharing In Engineering-Procurement-Construction Projects, Zhenzhen Chen, Wanshan Zhu, Pascale Crama
Subcontracting And Rework Cost Sharing In Engineering-Procurement-Construction Projects, Zhenzhen Chen, Wanshan Zhu, Pascale Crama
Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business
Infrastructure development projects are overwhelmingly managed through engineering–procurement–construction (EPC) contracts, which allow a project end user to shift all project risks to a contractor. Accordingly, the International Federation of Consulting Engineers recommended a contract template based on a lump-sum contract between the end user and main contractor. However, EPC projects often suffer from quality issues due to moral hazard, which is aggravated by the involvement of subcontractors hired by the main contractor to perform parts of the project. Besides, costly rework is frequently needed to achieve the contractually mandated quality. When the main contractor must share some of the subcontractor’s …
Encouraging Help Across Projects, Pascale Crama, Fabian J. Sting, Yaozhong Wu
Encouraging Help Across Projects, Pascale Crama, Fabian J. Sting, Yaozhong Wu
Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business
Companies struggle with timely project execution despite employing sophisticated management methods. Although help across projects is critical for time performance, it has not been explicitly incorporated into project management (PM) systems. We model a PM system, based on an innovative real-life practice, that both incorporates and shapes project managers’ helping behavior. A help process is at the core of this system, in which project managers may ask for and provide help while top management facilitates such exchanges. We find that companies should take a nuanced approach when designing help exchange and time-based incentives in tandem. A company that faces high …
Managing Project Uncertainty: From Variation To Chaos, Arnoud De Meyer, Christoph H. Loch, Michael T. Pich
Managing Project Uncertainty: From Variation To Chaos, Arnoud De Meyer, Christoph H. Loch, Michael T. Pich
Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business
The article cites a study finding that accurately gauging the degree of uncertainty inherent in the projects can help project managers quickly adapt to it. Researchers studied 16 projects in areas including personal-computer development, telecommunications, Internet startups, pharmaceutical development, iron-ore processing, airship development, and building construction, to examine risk management and project outcomes. They found that most managers failed to recognize that there are different types of uncertainty, each requiring a different management approach. This paper explores uncertainty-based management, which derives planning, monitoring and management style from an uncertainty profile comprising four types of uncertainty: variation, foreseen uncertainty, unforeseen uncertainty, …
Phase Transitions In Project Scheduling, Willy Herroelen, Bert De Reyck
Phase Transitions In Project Scheduling, Willy Herroelen, Bert De Reyck
Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business
Researchers in the area of artificial intelligence have recently shown that many NP-complete problems exhibit phase transitions. Often, problem instances change from being easy to being hard to solve to again being easy to solve when certain of their characteristics are modified. Most often the transitions are sharp, but sometimes they are rather continuous in the order parameters that are characteristic of the system as a whole. To the best of our knowledge, no evidence has been provided so far that similar phase transitions occur in NP-hard scheduling problems. In this paper we report on the existence of phase transitions …
Flexibility And Fms: An Empirical Analysis, Mihkel Tombak, Arnoud De Meyer
Flexibility And Fms: An Empirical Analysis, Mihkel Tombak, Arnoud De Meyer
Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business
It is shown how the concerns of the managers of firms with flexible manufacturing system projects (FMS) differ from those of manufacturing firms without FMS projects. An economic model is developed from which two hypotheses are obtained. The first hypothesis is that firms were investing in FMS to deal with the variance in their inputs. The second proposition is that firms wished to use FMS to deal with the variance in their outputs. Through an analysis of manufacturing survey data it was found that firms planning to implement FMS were statistically more concerned about vendor quality and vendor lead times …