Operations and Supply Chain Management Commons^™

Organic Production Systems: What The Biological Cell Can Teach Us About Manufacturing, Lieven Demeester, Knut Eichler, Christoph H. Loch

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Biological cells run complicated and sophisticated production systems. The study of the cell's production technology provides us with insights that are potentially useful in industrial manufacturing. When comparing cell metabolism with manufacturing techniques in industry, we find some striking commonalities, but also some important differences. Like today's well-run factories, the cell operates a very lean production system, assures quality at the source, and uses component commonality to simplify production. While we can certainly learn from how the cell accomplishes these parallels, it is even more interesting to look at how the cell operates differently. In biological cells, all products and …

Solving Hierarchical Constraints Over Finite Domains With Local Search, Martin Henz, Roland H.C. Yap, Yun Fong Lim, Seet Chong Lua, J. Paul Walser, Xiao Ping Shi

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Many real world problems have requirements and constraints which conflict with each other. One approach for dealing with such over-constrained problems is with constraint hierarchies. In the constraint hierarchy framework, constraints are classified into ranks, and appropriate solutions are selected using a comparator which takes into account the constraints and their ranks. In this paper, we present a local search solution to solving hierarchical constraint problems over finite domains (HCPs). This is an extension of local search for over-constrained integer programs WSAT(OIP) to constraint hierarchies and general finite domain constraints.The motivation for this work arose from solving large airport gate …

Closed-Loop Supply Chain Models With Product Remanufacturing, R. Canan Savaskan, Shantanu Bhattacharya, Luk N. Van Wassenhove

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The importance of remanufacturing used products into new ones has been widely recognized in the literature and in practice. In this paper, we address the problem of choosing the appropriate reverse channel structure for the collection of used products from customers. Specifically, we consider a manufacturer who has three options for collecting such products: (1) she can collect them herself directly from the customers, (2) she can provide suitable incentives to an existing retailer (who already has a distribution channel) to induce the collection, or (3) she can subcontract the collection activity to a third party. Based on our observations …

Metaheuristics With Local Search Techniques For Retail Shelf-Space Optimization, Andrew Lim, Brian Rodrigues, Xingwen Zhang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Efficient shelf-space allocation can provide retailers with a competitive edge. While there has been little study on this subject, there is great interest in improving product allocation in the retail industry. This paper examines a practicable linear allocation model for optimizing shelf-space allocation. It extends the model to address other requirements such as product groupings and nonlinear profit functions. Besides providing a network flow solution, we put forward a strategy that combines a strong local search with a metaheuristic approach to space allocation. This strategy is flexible and efficient, as it can address both linear and nonlinear problems of realistic …

Operational Hedging: A Review With Discussion, Onur Boyabatli, L. Beril Toktay

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Motivated by the increasing prevalence of operational hedging in corporate-level risk management programs, this paper provides an extensive overview and synthesis of the existing literature on operational hedging. In particular, we focus on the treatment of operational hedging in the operations management literature. We then explore how the concept of operational hedging is studied in the fields of finance, strategy and international business. Finally, we discuss and critique the approaches adopted in the operations management literature in the context of the broader literature on the topic.

Heuristics For A Brokering Set Packing Problem, Yunso Guo, Andrew Lim, Brian Rodrigues, Yi Zhu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In this paper we formulate the combinatorial auction brokering problem as a Set Packing Problem (SPP) and apply a simulated annealing heuristic to solve SPP. Experimental results are compared with a recent heuristic algorithm and also with the CPLEX Integer Programming solver where we found that the simulated annealing approach outperforms the previous heuristic method and CPLEX obtaining results within smaller timescales.

Nurse Rostering Problems: A Bibliographic Survey, Brenda Cheang, Haibing Li, Andrew Lim, Brian Rodrigues

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Hospitals need to repeatedly produce duty rosters for its nursing staff. The good scheduling of nurses has impact on the quality of health care, the recruitment of nurses, the development of budgets and other nursing functions. The nurse rostering problem (NRP) has been the subject of much study. This paper presents a brief overview, in the form of a bibliographic survey, of the many models and methodologies available to solve the NRP.

Manpower Allocation With Time Windows And Job Teaming Constraints, Xi Li, Yan Zhi Li, Andrew Lim, Brian Rodrigues

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In the Manpower Allocation Problem with Time Windows and Job-Teaming Constraints (MAPTWTC), we have a set of jobs located at various locations where each job requires a team of workers. Each job has a time window and a job duration, during which everyone on the team has to be present. The job requirement is satisfied if and only if the required composite team works for long enough duration within the job's time window. The objective of the problem is find a schedule to minimize a weighted sum of the total number of workers, the total travelling distances of all workers …

Broadcast Scheduling For Mobile Advertising, Bert De Reyck, Zeger Degraeve

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We describe a broadcast scheduling system developed for a precision marketing firm specialized in location-sensitive permission-based mobile advertising using SMS (Short Message Service) text messaging. Text messages containing advertisements were sent to registered customers when they were shopping in one of two shopping centers in the vicinity of London. The ads typically contained a limited-time promotional offer. The company's problem was deciding which ads to send out to which customers at what particular time, given a limited capacity of broadcast time slots, while maximizing customer response and revenues from retailers paying for each ad broadcast. We solved the problem using …

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 …

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, …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Scale-Invariant Behavior In A Spatial Game Of Prisoners’ Dilemma, Yun Fong Lim, Kan Chen, Ciriyam Jayaprakash

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

A spatially extended version of the game of prisoner’s dilemma, originally proposed by Nowak and May, is modified to include stochastic updating and found to exhibit scale-invariant behavior. Two critical regimes with different scaling behaviors are found; the corresponding exponents have been determined numerically. Spatially, the critical states are characterized by the existence of delicately balanced networks of defectors separating domains of cooperators; temporally, the evolution of the critical states following local perturbations is characterized by avalanches of various magnitudes, which cause restructuring of the networks of defectors on all scales.

Managing A Flow Line With Single-Kanban, Dual-Kanban Or Conwip, Kum Khiong Yang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

To control the production of different parts on a single flow line, managers can choose between the Single-kanban, Dual-kanban, and Conwip. This paper therefore compares the three different systems. The results show that Conwip consistently produces the shortest mean customer wait time and lowest total work-in-process. Our results also contradict the finding of a previous study, which showed that Dual-kanban performed better than Single-kanban. The different findings can, however, be attributed to the use of a material transfer policy, which favors the Dual-kanban modeled in the previous study. Our study shows that transferring replenished containers immediately to downstream stations, increasing …

The Empirical Determinants Of Inventory Levels In High-Volume Manufacturing, Marvin B. Lieberman, Susan Helper, Lieven Demeester

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This study uses survey data on several hundred automotive suppliers in North America to evaluate the determinants of inventory levels in high-volume discrete parts manufacturing. We assess the magnitude of raw materials, work-in-process, and finished goods inventories held at automotive supply plants. Inventories are shown to be jointly determined by technological and managerial factors in a manner roughly consistent with classical inventory theory. Several categories of managerial practices are found to be important. Low inventories are linked to employee problem solving and frequent communication with customers. More unexpectedly, we find the absence of inventory differences between U.S.-owned and Japanese-owned plants …

Inventory Reduction And Productivity Growth: Linkages In The Japanese Automotive Industry, Marvin B. Lieberman, Lieven Demeester

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The literature on JIT production suggests a causal link between work-in-progress inventory and manufacturing productivity. Such a connection has been described in numerous case studies but never tested statistically. Historical data for 52 Japanese automotive companies are used to evaluate the inventory-productivity relationship. It is found that firms increased their productivity rank during periods of substantial inventory reduction. More detailed tests suggest that inventory reductions stimulated gains in productivity. On average, each 10% reduction in inventory led to about a 1% gain in labor productivity, with a lag of about one year. Such effects were more immediate for Toyota affiliates, …

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 …

Managing New Product Definition In Highly Dynamic Environments, Shantanu Bhattacharya, Viswanathan Krishnan, Vijay Mahajan

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In highly dynamic environments, characterized by changing customer preferences and uncertainty about competitive products, managing the development of a new product is a complex managerial task. The traditional practice, recommended in the literature, of reaching a sharp definition early in the new product development (NPD) process may not be optimal, desirable or even feasible in such dynamic situations. Under high uncertainty, forcing early finalization of specifications may result in a firm getting locked into an incorrect definition. Based on our study of NPD in the high technology industry, we present a model of an approach called real-time definition, in which …

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

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

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 …

Salesforce Evaluation By Local And Foreign Wholesale Companies In Singapore, Rajah Vellan Komaran, Lee Ching Tok

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

No abstract provided.

Reducing Cycle Time At An Ibm Wafer Fabrication Facility, Lieven Demeester, Christopher S. Tang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In 1991, IBM San Jose decided to produce and sell magnetic heads for computer disk drives on the open market to original equipment manufacturers. However, as IBM's wafer fabrication facility increased the number of products it manufactured, its manufacturing cycle time lengthened. Since cycle time is important in competing in the open market, IBM San Jose formed a study team (in cooperation with UCLA) to examine the wafer fab and to develop ways to reduce cycle time. The team designed a new production control system and proposed new performance measures for operators and engineers. IBM implemented the new production control …

R&D/Marketing Communication During The Fuzzy Front-End, Rudy K. Moenaert, Arnoud De Meyer, William E. Souder, Dirk Deschoolmeester

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The planning stage of an innovation project has a great effect on the commercial performance of the project. During the "fuzzy front-end", the organization formulates a concept of the product to be developed, and determines whether or not the organization will invest resources in the concrete development of the idea. The integration of R&D and marketing activities is a necessary condition for success in innovation projects. The research question of this study is: from an information processing perspective, what role does information transfer play in integrating R&D and marketing functions during the planning stage, and what effects do project formalization …

Internationalisation Of R&D Improves A Firm's Technical Learning, Arnoud De Meyer

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Companies have been reluctant to internationalize the R&D function. The reasons for keeping R&D geographically centralized are mostly related to preserving optimal communication patterns. But market forces, and the diffusion of the sources of technological know-how, oblige many companies to decentralize and internationalize their R&D laboratories. How does one manage this international network of laboratories? The author takes the position that companies internationalize R&D to improve the process of technical learning. If this is the case, the management of the laboratory network has to stimulate this technical learning. On the basis of 14 case studies, five areas warrant attention: creating …

The Manufacturing Contribution To Innovation, Arnoud De Meyer

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

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

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

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

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

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 …

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

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

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

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

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 …