Search results for "operations management"
showing 10 items of 239 documents
Skilled workforce scheduling in Service Centres
2009
Abstract The Skilled Workforce Project Scheduling Problem (SWPSP) is a complex problem of task scheduling and resource assignment that comes up in the daily management of many company Service Centres (SC). The SWPSP considers many real characteristics faced daily by the SC: client-company service quality agreements that establish maximum dates for the beginning and the end of tasks with penalties for delays, criticality levels indicating the client-priority in processing each task, generalized precedence relationships that can produce cycle structures, time period and percentage time lags and variable task durations depending on the worker executing the task. Furthermore, the SC workforce i…
Service quality and the optimum number of members in intermunicipal cooperation: The case of emergency primary care services in Norway
2021
Intermunicipal cooperation (IMC) is often used as a mean to reap scale benefits. Most studies on the effects of IMC focus on cost savings, while service quality is overlooked. In this study, the focus is set on input quality in a service characterized by high asset specificity and need for redundancy: emergency primary care. We analyze how mode of governance affect performance by (1) measuring whether IMC versus single-municipal production affects input quality and (2) identifying optimum scale of operation; effect of the number of participants in the cooperation on input quality. The findings indicate that cooperation weakens the input quality of medical workforce, but that this negative e…
Economic Allocation in Life Cycle Assessment The State of the Art and Discussion of Examples
2012
Summary This article examines methods for analyzing allocation in life cycle assessment (LCA); it focuses on comparisons of economic allocation with other feasible alternatives. The International Organization for Standardization's (ISO) guideline 14044 indicates that economic allocation should only be used as a last resort, when other methods are not suitable. However, the LCA literature reports several examples of the use of economic allocation. This is due partly to its simplicity and partly to its ability to illustrate the properties of complex systems. Sometimes a price summarizes complex attributes of product or service quality that cannot be easily measured by physical criteria. On th…
Economic impact of Ice Thermal Energy Storage Systems in residential buildings in presence of double-tariffs contracts for electricity
2009
Thermal energy storage is one of the most important methods of demand-side load management, thanks to the capacity of reducing significantly the peak power demand for air conditioning in buildings. Thermal Energy Storage Systems (TESS) are indeed used for producing and storing cooling capacity during off-peak hours (in particular during night hours) to meet the following day's air conditioning requirements. The current paper presents a study on the effects of the installation of Ice TESS for cooling on the power daily profile of residential buildings, and examines the economic repercussions on the electricity billing. With reference to this second theme, the paper examines, in particular, t…
How firms are using networking decisions to achieve strategic objectives: Building theories from four case studies
2011
Many research studies in OM literature have investigated how different kinds of focal firm decisions regarding business vertical relationships (i.e. with both suppliers and buyers) can positively affect firm’s operations performance and thus improve its competitive position. In this paper we extend this genre of study by also considering business horizontal relationships (i.e with competitors and firms that own complementary capabilities) and by considering the impact of business relationships not only on focal firm’s operations performance but also on its resources endowment. We present four cases that describe what are the strategic manager intents (in term of operations performance and r…
The reconciliation process of market requirements and operations resources – an empirical view
2018
Firms are confronted with the challenge of designing strategy processes, which guide decision-making in a way that leads to high and sustainable performance. The purpose of this paper is to address this challenge, by delivering empirical insights on Slack & Lewis’ concept of reconciliation in Operations Strategy from a process point-of-view. We argue that while this concept roots in the alignment literature of Operations Strategy it has not yet been subject to detailed and empirical research. We discuss the development of a survey that examines if and how reconciliation is carried out in companies and how this affects operations performance.
The effects of using participatory working time scheduling software on working hour characteristics and wellbeing : a quasi-experimental study of irr…
2020
Background: Studies in the health care sector indicate that good work time control is associated with better perceived wellbeing but also with non-ergonomic work schedules, such as compressed work schedules. Participatory working time scheduling is a collaborative approach to scheduling shift work. Currently, there is a lack of information on whether working hour characteristics and employees' wellbeing in irregular shift work change after implementing participatory working time scheduling. Objective: To investigate the effects of using digital participatory working time scheduling software on working hour characteristics and well-being among Finnish hospital employees. Participants and met…
A new decision model for economic evaluation of novel therapies for HCV
2014
In 2014, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) has given the license to two new direct-acting antiviral: sofosbuvir and simeprevir. The evidence provided by the studies, reported a high rate of SVR even in patients with decompensated cirrhosis. This and other innovative elements are potentially adept at changing the entire natural course of HCV. However, the dramatic prevalence rates of HCV observed in Italy, and the high prices that are expected to be required by the pharmaceutical industry, raises some critical issues about how to regulate access to such drugs. The objective of this article is to present a new decision model for the evaluation of novel therapies for HCV. This model is inten…
Melanoma Extirpation with Immediate Reconstruction
2017
Letter to Editor
Positioning flexibly scheduled ECEC in the chain of childcare by parents working non-standard hours
2022
This study examined how Finnish parents working non-standard hours (N=18) positioned institutional flexibly scheduled early childhood education and care (ECEC) as a link in their chain of childcare. Interview data, analysed following the principles of discursive psychology, yielded three discourses on flexibly scheduled ECEC: the discourse of the child’s best interest, the discourse of the labour market, and the discourse of equality of opportunity for the child. Flexibly scheduled ECEC was positioned in these discourses either as the last resort option for childcare, a safe haven for the child, a societal service enabling parents to work during non-standard hours or as a place for children…