Dear colleagues:
As its fifth editor, it is my privilege to introduce you to the journal of Manufacturing & Service Operations Management (M&SOM). Established in 1999, M&SOM is published by INFORMS: the professional association that publishes leading management research journals such as Management Science, Marketing Science,Organization Science, Information Systems Research, etc.
Just like Marketing Science that was established in the mid-80s for the Marketing area,M&SOM is the preferred outlet for Operations Management (OM) research articles that are innovative, rigorous and relevant. Also, the M&SOM journal is the flagship journal of theMSOM Society -- the largest subdivision of INFORMS with over 1500 members. As we celebrate the success of M&SOM over the last 15 years, I write to share one key message: M&SOM publishes OM research articles that matter!
M&SOM articles matter because:
· M&SOM articles cover a wide range of timely and important topics in OM that matter to the world.
· M&SOM articles are written by top OM researchers from leading universities around the world.
I welcome you to take a quick look at a sample of our M&SOM articles (below) that truly matter!
Sincerely yours,
Christopher S. Tang, Editor
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management M&SOM
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A sample of M&SOM research articles published between 2011 and 2015
Sustainability: “Engaging Supply Chains in Climate Change.”
Author(s): Chonnikarn (Fern) Jira and Michael W. Toffel (Harvard Business School).
Abstract: Suppliers are increasingly being asked to share information about their vulnerability to climate change and their strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Their responses vary widely. We theorize and empirically identify several factors associated with suppliers being especially willing to share this information with buyers, focusing on attributes of the buyers seeking this information and of the suppliers being asked to provide it. We test our hypotheses using data from the Carbon Disclosure Project's Supply Chain Program, a collaboration of multinational corporations requesting such information from thousands of suppliers in 49 countries. We find evidence that suppliers are more likely to share this information when requests from buyers are more prevalent, when buyers appear committed to using the information, when suppliers belong to more profitable industries, and when suppliers are located in countries with greenhouse gas regulations. We find evidence that these factors also influence the comprehensiveness of the information suppliers share and their willingness to share the information publicly.
Global Operations and Taxation: “Tax-Effective Supply Chain Decisions Under China’s Export-Oriented Tax Policies.”
Authors: Vernon N. Hsu and Kaijie Zhu (Chinese University of Hong Kong).
Abstract: In this paper, we study the impacts of a set of China’s export-oriented tax and tariff rules on the optimal supply chain design and operations for a firm that produces its product in China and sells it in markets both inside and outside China. We develop an analytical framework to evaluate four major supply chain structures that we observed in practice. We derive the optimal supply chain decisions for each structure and investigate various business environments under which one of the structures is preferred over the others. Our analysis indicates that the ultimate purpose of a product sold in the China market (i.e., whether it will be consumed domestically or be assembled in another exported product) may have a significant impact on the structure preference. In addition, threshold values exist for several key business parameters over (or under) which certain supply chain structures are favored over others. Managerial insights based on such results are useful for multinational firms who are challenged to develop effective supply chain strategies in the region’s increasingly volatile business environment.
Online Advertising: “Cost-per-Click Pricing for Display Advertising.”
Author(s): Sami Najafi-Asadolahi (Santa Clara University) and Kristin Fridgeirsdottir (London Business School).
Abstract: Display advertising is a $25 billion business with a promising upward revenue trend. In this paper, we consider an online display advertising setting in which a web publisher posts display ads on its website and charges based on the cost-per-click pricing scheme while promising to deliver a certain number of clicks to the ads posted. The publisher is faced with uncertain demand for advertising slots and uncertain traffic to its website as well as uncertain click behavior of visitors. We formulate the problem as a novel queueing system, where the slots correspond to service channels with the service rate of each server inversely related to the number of active servers. We obtain the closed-form solution for the steady-state probabilities of the number of ads in the publisher's system. We determine the publisher's optimal price to charge per click and show that it can increase in the number of advertising slots and the number of promised clicks. We show that the common heuristic used by many web publishers to convert between the cost-per-click and cost-per-impression pricing schemes using the so-called click-through-rate can be misleading because it may incur substantial revenue loss to web publishers. We provide an alternative explanation for the phenomenon observed by several publishers that the click-through-rate tends to drop when they switch from the cost-per-click to cost-per-impression pricing scheme.
Patient Safety in Healthcare Operations: “Complexity-Augmented Triage: A Tool for Improving Patient Safety and Operational Efficiency.”
Author(s): Soroush Saghafian (Arizona State University), Wallace J. Hopp, Mark P. Van Oyen, Jeffrey S. Desmond, and Steven L. Kronick (University of Michigan).
Abstract: Hospital emergency departments (EDs) typically use triage systems that classify and prioritize patients almost exclusively in terms of their need for timely care. Using a combination of analytic and simulation models, we demonstrate that adding an up-front estimate of patient complexity to conventional urgency-based classification can substantially improve both patient safety (by reducing the risk of adverse events) and operational efficiency (by shortening the average length of stay). Moreover, we find that EDs with high resource (physician and/or examination room) utilization, high heterogeneity in the treatment time between simple and complex patients, and a relatively equal number of simple and complex patients benefit most from complexity-augmented triage. Finally, we find that (1) although misclassification of a complex patient as simple is slightly more harmful than vice versa, complexity-augmented triage is relatively robust to misclassification error rates as high as 25%; (2) streaming patients based on complexity information and prioritizing them based on urgency is better than doing the reverse; and (3) separating simple and complex patients via streaming facilitates the application of lean methods that can further amplify the benefit of complexity-augmented triage.
Employees are Slacking off in Service Operations: “Work Expands to Fill the Time Available: Capacity Estimation and Staffing under Parkinson’s Law.”
Authors: Sameer Hasija (INSEAD), Edieal Pinker (Yale University), and Robert A. Shumsky (Dartmouth College).
Abstract: We develop a method to estimate the capacity of agents who answer e-mail in a contact center, given aggregate historical data that have been distorted both by constraints on work availability and by internal incentives to slow down when true capacity exceeds demand. We use the capacity estimate to find a contact center’s optimal daily staffing levels. The implementation results, from an actual contact center, demonstrate that the method provides accurate staffing recommendations. We also examine and test models in which agents exhibit speed-up behavior and in which capacity varies over time. Finally, we use the capacity estimates to examine the implications of solving the staffing problem with two different model formulations, the service-level constraint formulation used by the contact center and an alternate profit-maximization formulation.