Business Commons^™

A Correlation Study Of Second Destination Transportation Funding And Vehicle Movement, Stephen D. Wier

Theses and Dissertations

HQ AFMC has consistently experienced problems with the Second Destination Transportation budget being under funded. This under funding causes the command to implement control actions on how funds are allocated to ensure that enough funds are available. This research effort was intended to show the relationship between spending restrictions and how vehicles move between theaters. By identifying whether or not and how the control actions on Second Destination Transportation funding affects inter-theater vehicle movement capabilities, this research seeks to assist those decision makers in making fully informed decisions when allocating scare fiscal resources. The results of this research indicate that …

Joining The Department Of Defense Enterprise Resource Planning Team: The Air Force's Role In The Enterprise, Coreen R. Mueller

Theses and Dissertations

Over time, the Air Force (AF) built customized legacy logistics data and information systems, which have evolved into an inflexible network of obsolete systems that are costly to maintain and upgrade, and struggle to share data in a timely and coherent manner. The Department of Defense (DoD), to include the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), the US AF, the US Army, and the US Navy, have all recognized the need to modernize and integrate their legacy systems to improve warfighter support. The DLA, the US Army, and the US Navy all see Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) technology as a commercial best …

A Service Life Analysis Of Coast Guard C-130 Aircraft, Jonathan B. Duff

Theses and Dissertations

The U. S. Coast Guard, much like the rest of the Armed Services, is facing a dramatic transformation of its forces to meet current and future service requirements. The Coast Guard has responded to this transformation by initiating the Deepwater System, a complete review of the offshore mission requirements and the modernization of its infrastructure. In particular, Deepwater will review and modernize the Coast Guard's aviation assets, improving aircraft systems, airborne sensors, and communications and information management systems. However, these capability advancements will take time and money to implement, and will require careful management of the current resources to ensure …

Exploring The Diversification Discount: A Focus On High-Technology Target Firms, Donald F. Adkins Jr.

Theses and Dissertations

When firms choose to acquire others, those acquisitions can either be considered diversifying or non-diversifying. Whether the firm diversifies or not has been shown to affect the post-acquisition performance of that firm. Past merger and acquisition (M&A) research has identified a "diversification discount" when firms diversify through M&A activity. However managers continue to diversify, posing the question, "Why do firms continue to diversify in the face of research indicating negative post-acquisition performance"? The answer may be found in that much of the past research has treated all acquisitions the same by analyzing a wide cross-section of acquisitions from industries of …

Evaluation Of Personnel Parameters In Software Cost Estimating Models, Steven L. Quick

Theses and Dissertations

Software capabilities have steadily increased over the last half century. The Department of Defense has seized this increased capability and used it to advance the warfighter's weapon systems However, this dependence on software capabilities has come with enormous cost. The risks of software development must be understood to develop an accurate cost estimate.

Effects Of Three Types Of Free-Stall Surfaces On Preferences And Stall Usage By Dairy Cows, Cassandra B. Tucker, Daniel M. Weary, David Fraser

Housing and Confinement of Farm Animals Collection

One important criterion in choosing appropriate housing systems for dairy cattle is that the freestall provides a comfortable surface for the cow. This paper describes two experiments testing the effects of commonly used lying surfaces on stall preference and stall usage by Holstein cows. In both experiments, 12 cows were housed individually in separate pens. Each pen contained three free stalls with a different surface: deep-bedded sawdust, deep-bedded sand, and a geotextile mattress covered with 2 to 3 cm of sawdust. The animals were restricted to each surface in turn, in a random order for either 2 (Experiment 1) or …

Trends. Thinking On Transportation Security, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

This Trends article discusses the necessity of gathering intelligence successfully to combat terrorism as it pertains to commerce.

The Eu Ban On Battery Cages: History And Prospects, Michael C. Appleby

State of the Animals 2003

On June 15, 1999, the European Union (EU) passed a directive on the welfare of laying hens, requiring that battery cages (so called because they are arranged in batteries of rows and tiers) be phased out by 2012. Enriched laying cages (which may also be arranged in batteries but which provide increased area and height, when compared with conventional cages, and a perch, nest box, and litter area) will still be allowed. This chapter outlines how this directive came about, and the social, economic, and political issues involved. It considers prospects for the future, both within and outside the EU, …

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

Management Science and Information Systems Faculty Publication Series

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 …

The Evolving E-Business Strategy: Lessons Learned, Anand Jeyaraj, Marius Janson

Management Information Systems Faculty Publications

Bricks-and-mortar companies wishing to create value-added Internet services do so in a business environment that is characterized by great uncertainty and, hence, formulating a coherent business strategy is exceedingly challenging. This paper presents a case study based analysis of the evolving eBusiness strategy of a bricks-and mortar grocer contrasted with the strategies of other competitors. The grocery company took a logical, measured, incremental, and, ultimately, successful approach to its eBusiness strategy formulation, development, and implementation. Our case study suggests that in an environment characterized by chaotic change bricks-and-mortar companies can benefit from a strategy informed by organizational learning and eBusiness …

Cattle Industry Biosecurity Plan, Department Of Agriculture Western Australia

Biosecurity published reports

StockGuard has been initiated to develop a series of biosecurity plans for the animal industries in Western Australia. Through StockGuard, representatives from the animal industries have been working with the Department of Agriculture Western Australian to identify potential threats to each of the animal industries and to develop action plans detailing how these threats can be managed. The overall purpose of StockGuard is to highlight threats to the animal industries before they occur and to develop effective ways to minimise the potential impact of these threats.

The recommendations of the working group are based on detailed strategic assessments of the …

A New Node Centroid Algorithm For Bandwidth Minimization, Brian Rodrigues, F. Xiao, A. Lim

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We propose a Node Centroid method with Hill-Climbing to solve the well-known matrix band-width minimization problem, which is to permute rows and columns of the matrix to minimize its bandwidth. Many heuristics have been developed for this NP-complete problem including the Cuthill-McKee (CM) and the Gibbs, Poole and Stockmeyer (GPS) algorithms. Recently, heuristics such as Simulated Annealing, Tabu Search and GRASP have been used, where Tabu Search and the GRASP with Path Relinking have achieved significantly better solution quality than the CM and GPS algorithms. Experimentation shows that the Node Centroid method achieves the best solution quality when compared with …

Textile And Fashion: Challenges And Strategies For The Industry Edited By V L Mote, Tata Mcgraw Hill, 2000, Pp 159., Atanu Ghosh

IIMB Management Review

Textile and Fashion: Challenges and Strategies for the Industry examines the challenges and opportunities facing India’s textile and garment sectors in the post-Multifibre Arrangement (MFA) and WTO era. Based on expert seminar papers, the book emphasizes the need for global competitiveness through customer focus, product innovation, technology upgrading, workforce skill development, and efficient supply chain management. Contributors discuss retail transformation, buyer power, quality management, human resource development, and international trade policies. The book advocates collaborative leadership, strategic planning, and stronger industry partnerships to overcome global competition and achieve sustainable growth, profitability, and long-term success in the new millennium.

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, …

Short-Line Railroad Managers Discuss Class I Railroads, James C. Johnson, Diane J. Mcclure, Kenneth C. Schneider, Donald F. Wood

Journal of Transportation Management

Managers/owners of short-line railroads were queried about three issues: (1) How would you describe your company’s business relationship with the Class I railroad(s) with which you interchange traffic; (2) Do you believe that mergers between Class I railroads have been good or bad for short-line railroads; and (3) Besides merger activity, what do you believe will be the most important trend for Class I railroads in the next 10 years?

Liberalization Of International Air Transportation Markets: The Effect Of Terrorism On Market Trends, Dawna L. Rhoades

Journal of Transportation Management

Since the United States deregulated its airline industry with the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, the international air transport industry has been on a path toward market liberalization. Market changes have included entry, capacity, and pricing freedom as well as increased levels of foreign ownership. The recent terrorist acts of September 11, 2001 have the potential to alter, if not reverse this course. This paper examines the forces fueling the trend toward liberalization and analyzes the impact of recent events on the future prospects of open aviation markets.

Examining Sources Of Driver Turnover From A Managerial Perspective, Hokey Min

Journal of Transportation Management

There is growing concern about the declining profitability of the U. S. trucking industry. Such concerns often stem from the increased difficulty of recruiting and retaining qualified drivers. In fact, the trucking industry has been hit hard by shortages of qualified truck drivers over the last two decades. To cope with this chronic problem, trucking firms have attempted to formulate various driver recruitment and retention strategies that include pay raises, bonuses, equipment improvement, and adjustments in working hours. This article provides trucking firms with the means to implement a more effective driver recruitment and retention strategy by examining sources of …

Trends In The Transportation Of Goods In The U.S., James S. Keebler

Journal of Transportation Management

This article describes the development and growth of various modes of transportation in the United States and recent trends in the length, size and value of domestic shipments. Changes in the transportation of goods in the United States are being driven largely by four factors—the shift toward a digital economy, the growth of third-party logistics providers, globalism, and the application of new technologies. Finally, this paper looks at emerging forms of supply chain integration and operation.

Developing The Buyer-Friendly Transportation Salesperson: An Empirical Analysis Of The Most Important Seller Traits And Behaviors From The Transportation Buyer’S Perspective, Charles E. Pettijohn, R Stephen Parker, John L. Kent

Journal of Transportation Management

The research reported in this manuscript provides several insights regarding the specific behaviors and traits of transportation salespersons as sought by a sample of shippers. Shippers in both manufacturing and non-manufacturing industries were asked to evaluate the importance of 30 potential salesperson characteristics. Overall, dependability, ethical conduct, honesty, provision of regular service, and solution selling were ranked as the most important (“must have”) characteristics. In addition to the overall rankings, t-tests were used to compare the manufacturing and non-manufacturing groups and ANOVA tests were used to compare the responses of shippers which were grouped by number of contacts from salespersons.

Solving The Pickup And Delivery Problem With Time Windows Using "Squeaky Wheel" Optimization With Local Search, Hongping Lim, Andrew Lim, Brian Rodrigues

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The Pickup and Delivery Problem with Time Windows (PDPTW) is an important problem in fleet planning where decisions can involve not only dispatching company fleets but also the selection of carriers on certain routes. In this problem, vehicles travel to a variety of locations to deliver or pick up goods and to provide services. The increasing costs for additional vehicles motivate managers to optimize fleet usage. Managers also seek to achieve economical use of fuel, maintenance and overtime costs by minimizing travel distance and duration. As such, PDPTW impacts the interface of supplier-customer relationship management in the supply chain process …

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

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

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 …

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

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

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 …

Combining Two Heuristics To Solve A Supply Chain Optimization Problem, Hoong Chuin Lau, Yuyue Song

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we consider a real-life supply chain optimization problem concerned with supplying a product from multiple warehouses to multiple geographically dispersed retailers. Each retailer faces a deterministic and period-dependent demand over some finite planning horizon. The demand of each retailer is satisfied by the supply from some predetermined warehouse through a fleet of vehicles which are only available within certain time windows at each period. Our goal is to identify a combined inventory and routing schedule such that the system-wide total cost over the planning horizon is minimised. This problem in essence is an amalgamation of two classical …

Indian Software Industry : An Operations Perspective, Subramanya Sharma, P Jai Krishna Ramesh, A Ravikiran

IIMB Management Review

The history of the Indian software industry may be reckoned from 1974, when Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) started off its operations. TCS with its joint ventures became one of the largest software exporters in the early days. However, exports became the core focus of companies sometime around the late 1980s and early 1990s. A major event in the industry was when Texas Instruments proposed to start a 100% export-oriented, foreign owned and operated subAward Winning Student Essay Indian Software Industry: An Operations Perspective sidiary. This caught on rapidly, with large software companies like Siemens, Motorola, and many more setting up …

A Group Theoretic Tabu Search Methodology For Solving The Theater Distribution Vehicle Routing And Scheduling Problem, John R. Crino

Theses and Dissertations

The application of Group Theory to Tabu Search is a new and exciting field of research. This dissertation applies and extends some of Colletti's (1999) seminal work in group theory and metaheuristics in order to solve the theater distribution vehicle routing and scheduling problem (TDVRSP). This research produced a robust, efficient, effective and flexible generalized theater distribution model that prescribes the routing and scheduling of multi-modal theater transportation assets to provide economically efficient time definite delivery of cargo to customers. In doing so, advances are provided in the field of group theoretic tabu search and its application to difficult combinatorial …

Extension Made Easier : A Workshop Presenting Two Planning Frameworks For Better Extension Outcomes, Colin Holt, Jenny Crisp

All other publications

No abstract provided.

Mobile Commerce Applications In Supply Chain Management, Keng Siau, Zixing Shen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As wireless technologies evolve, the coming mobile revolution will bring dramatic and fundamental changes to supply chain management. When complete, the revolution will impact numerous facets of organizational life. It will provide important data in real time to assist decision makers, exert great influence on the ways businesses communicate and develop relationships with consumers and suppliers, and ultimately transform the way we manage the supply chain. This paper examines issues in integrating mobile commerce and supply chain management. The paper discusses issues such as the absence of killer applications, mobile device limitations, networking problems, infrastructure constraints, security concerns, and user …

Where Have All The On-Line Grocers Gone? Lessons Learned From The Demise Of On-Line Grocers, M Theodore Farris Ii, Phil Wilson

Journal of Transportation Management

The grocery concept has evolved over many years to drive cost out of the process. Grocery margins are very thin, typically ranging from 1% to 1 1/2 % such that the grocery business continues to look for innovative ways to take cost out of the process. Ordering groceries on the Internet was initially thought to be a very promising new opportunity. So what happened to on-line grocers? This paper considers what went right and what went wrong for the on-line grocers and uncovers a few logistics lessons along the way.

Establishing And Maintaining A Buyer/Supplier Relationship Within The Product Development Industry For Model-Making And Prototyping, Kelly Vukad

Honors Capstones

Capstone submitted as a graduation requirement for the BSU Honors Program.

The Impact Of Lumper Costs, Empty Miles, And Shipment Size On The Profitability Of Motor Carriers: A Case Study, Hokey Min

Journal of Transportation Management

The passage of landmark deregulatory reforms in the Motor Carrier of Act of 1980 has constantly pressured the U.S. trucking industry to reduce transportation costs. Thanks to such pressure, total logistics costs have declined from 16.5% in 1980 to 10.1% of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2000. In particular, transportation costs have fallen from 7.6% to 5.9% of GDP in 2000. Transportation cost savings definitely benefit shippers, while jeopardizing the viability of carriers. To help transportation carriers cope with enormous cost pressure, this paper examines the impact that “lumper” costs, empty miles, and shipment size have on the very competitive …