Developing an implementation capacity: justifications from prior research

Implementing innovative operational research solutions into organizations can be messy. Pragmatic inquiry suggests the first step in dissolving a mess is to determine the mindset, or set of concepts, that will be used by decision makers to inform their day to day choice of activities. Van de Ven and Poole reviewed much of the organizational change literature and identified four reasons why change occurs. They labelled them, life cycle, evolution, teleology and dialectic. It would seem logical to suggest that any attempt to make sense of the mess of implementation needs to span these four reasons. However, these reasons need to be operationalized into a mindset for implementers. To do this, the management implementation literature was reviewed under each of these reasons. The result is a justification of four concepts that can create a mindset likely to improve the implementation capacity of organizations. This mindset is that organizations make greater use of ‘champions’ ‘continuous improvement’ ‘job rotation’ and ‘debate’ over alternative activities. Exactly how so, is for individual organizations to interpret.     

Using bimodal kernel for inference in nonparametric regression with correlated errors

For nonparametric regression model with fixed design, it is well known that obtaining a correct bandwidth is difficult when errors are correlated. Various methods of bandwidth selection have been proposed, but their successful implementation critically depends on a tuning procedure which requires accurate information about error correlation. Unfortunately, such information is usually hard to obtain since errors are not observable. In this article a new bandwidth selector based on the use of a bimodal kernel is proposed and investigated. It is shown that the new bandwidth selector is quite useful for the tuning procedures of various other methods. Furthermore, the proposed bandwidth selector itself proves to be quite effective when the errors are severely correlated.     

Belief revision and organisational knowledge dynamics

It is widely accepted nowadays that the ability of a firm to display sustained competitive advantage, relies heavily on its efficiency in managing organisational knowledge, and keeping it up-to-date with internal and external developments. It is therefore imperative to develop a deeper understanding of organisational knowledge evolution. In this paper, we propose the use of methods and techniques from the area of Belief Revision in studying organisational knowledge dynamics. Belief Revision lies at the intersection of Formal Philosophy and Computer Science, and studies the process by which a rational agent changes her beliefs in the light of new information. The formal models that have been developed in this area are intuitive and elegant, and in this paper we show how they can be imported into the context of organisational knowledge management.     

Simulating the Work of a Tendering Technical Company

Preparing tenders usually requires the technical staff who would otherwise be preparing manufacturing drawings for products that have been ordered. Work that will be paid for and work that may not be paid for are thus competing for the same resources. Tendering is essential, however, in the type of company discussed, because it is the successful tenders which generate future company revenue.The simulation explores the allocation of technical resources to tendering and the problem is seen to have something in common with job shop scheduling. There is, however, the additional complication that, since a tender is likely to be unsuccessful, the complete number of activities and costs cannot be predicted.It is found that, if we attempt to load a technical department so heavily that a man is required to work more than about 80% of his available time, unacceptably long job turn-round times are created. Long turn-round times reduce the probabilities of tenders generating orders.Increasing the design effort spent on tenders eventually has a bad effect, ending in reduced numbers of orders.It is necessary for the manager to refuse work when the system is overloaded.     

Robust vehicle routing DSS and road networks on a European scale?

During the last decades we have been involved in the development of an assortment of DSS in the area of Logistics. It comprises systems to support organisations to decide upon logistic network structures on a country. European or even Global level in response to social, economic, market, organisational, technological and environmental changes. Further, it encompasses operational vehicle route planning systems (VRP-DSS) with their incorporated Road Network System (RNS) that are used to support the determination of operational vehicle routing plans within the previously mentioned logistic networks.From our experience we have learned about the complexity and the spectrum of logistic problems and the variety of ways in which these problems are being solved. We have perceived that the functional and performance requirements for VRP-DSS have changed rapidly over the last decade in response to the increased importance of logistic processes, changing practical quantitative and qualitative routing constraints, evolving organisational procedures for planning and alterations in the registration of distribution processes. Many current VRP-DSS and RNS do not satisfy basic functional and performance requirements.In this paper we describe developments regarding the problem domains for VRP and RNS, the variety of requirements for these systems, including quantitative and qualitative routing constraints and National and European Road Networks. Finally, we pay attention to logical architectures for these systems and RNS that satisfy user requirements.     

Analysis of flow shop scheduling anomalies

Anomalies in flow shop scheduling are rare; only two anomalies have been reported. We present five new anomalies for the permutation flow shop models with the minimum makespan objective and seven more anomalies for the minimum total flow time objective. These anomalies (including the existing ones) are divided into three types corresponding to an increased processing time of a single operation, the addition of a job and the addition of a machine. We derive two properties which, when satisfied, eliminate the possibility of certain anomalies. We conclude that restrictions such as no-delay schedules, no job waiting or no machine idle time (after it starts processing) often result in anomalies. We also show that anomalies can also occur in non-permutation flow shops (four new anomalies presented).     

Enterprise resource planning: A taxonomy of critical factors

This paper presents a novel taxonomy of the critical success factors in enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation process. ERP benefits cannot be fully realised unless a strong alignment and reconciliation mechanism is established between technical and organisational imperatives based on the principles of process orientation. It is suggested in the taxonomy that measurement takes place in a balanced perspective, and for the purpose of providing useful information that can enable the decision making process and, which can help deliver the corporate objectives and therefore lead the business competitively forward. Upon this premise, the taxonomy is based on a comprehensive analysis of ERP literature combining research studies and organisational experiences. The taxonomy reflects the essential features of ERP systems, as being built based on the principles of business process management. Furthermore, it illustrates that ERP benefits are realised when a tight link is established between implementation approach and business process performance measures.     

Dynamic construction of statistical models in managerial DSS

The fields of operations research (OR) and artificial intelligence (AI) provide complementary methods that may be combined into managerial decision support systems (DSS). However, the management domain is substantially different from domains in which prior expert systems have been developed. Consequently, successful application of OR/AI techniques in managerial DSS requires careful analysis and additional development. Ongoing research concerning design and implementation of managerial DSS is discussed. A prototype system capable of constructing linear statistical models of direct and indirect relationships from a knowledge base of relationships is described and evaluated.     

Structuring resource allocation decisions: A framework for building multi-criteria portfolio models with area-grouped options

Multi-criteria portfolio modelling has been extensively employed as an effective means to allocate scarce resources for investment in projects when considering costs, benefits and risks. Some of these modelling approaches allow the grouping of projects into organisational areas, thus also supporting the decision of resource allocation among organisational units in a way that is collectively efficient for the organisation. However, structuring in practice a portfolio model using this latter type of approach is not a trivial task. How should areas be defined? Where should new projects be included? How should one define the criteria to evaluate performance? As far as we know, there is very little indication in the operational research and decision sciences literatures on how to structure this type of model. This paper suggests different ways to structuring portfolio models where projects are divided into areas and evaluated by multiple criteria, and illustrates their use in two action-research projects. Drawing on these experiences it then suggests a general framework for the structuring of such models in practice. Directions for future research are also identified.     

Project scheduling in optimizing integrated supply chain operations

A Supply Chain (SC) requires undertaking considerable number of activities covering the flow of information and goods among multiple production and distribution cells over several tiers. The successful implementation of a SC hinges on the optimum integration and synchronization of these activities.     

Assessment and improvement of employee job-satisfaction: a full-scale implementation of MUSA methodology on newly recruited personnel in a major French organisation

During the last 20 years, a large number of studies have investigated the relationship between employee satisfaction and specific job characteristics, with often contradictory results. The aim of this paper is the assessment of job satisfaction of recent recruits in a large French company. The approach adopted here is to view employees as internal customers of an organization, and their satisfaction as an important driver for business success. Using the MUSA multicriteria methodology for customer satisfaction evaluation, the study aimed (1) to identify and measure satisfaction criteria of newly recruited personnel, and (2) to determine new organisational policies based on the findings.     

Heavy-traffic limits for an infinite-server fork–join queueing system with dependent and disruptive services

We study an infinite-server fork–join queueing system with dependent services, which experiences alternating renewal service disruptions. Jobs are forked into a fixed number of parallel tasks upon arrival and processed at the corresponding parallel service stations with multiple servers. Synchronization of a job occurs when its parallel tasks are completed, i.e., non-exchangeable. Service times of the parallel tasks of each job can be correlated, having a general continuous joint distribution function, and moreover, the service vectors of consecutive jobs form a stationary dependent sequence satisfying the strong mixing (\(\alpha \)-mixing) condition. The system experiences renewal alternating service disruptions with up and down periods. In each up period, the system operates normally, but in each down period, jobs continue to enter the system, while all the servers will stop working, and services received will be conserved and resume at the beginning of the next up period. We study the impact of both the dependence among service times and these down times upon the service dynamics, the unsynchronized queueing dynamics, and the synchronized process, assuming that the down times are asymptotically negligible. We prove FWLLN and FCLT for these processes, where the limit processes in the FCLT possess a stochastic decomposition property and the convergence requires the Skorohod \(M_1\) topology.     

Heuristic and stochastic methods in optimization

The shifting bottleneck (SB) heuristic is among the most successful approximation methods for solving the job shop problem. It is essentially a machine based decomposition procedure where a series of one machine sequencing problems (OMSPs) are solved. However, such a procedure has been reported to be highly ineffective for the flow shop problems. In particular, we show that for the 2-machine flow shop problem, the SB heuristic will deliver the optimal solution in only a small number of instances. We examine the reason behind the failure of the machine based decomposition method for the flow shop. An optimal machine based decomposition procedure is formulated for the 2-machine flow shop, the time complexity of which is worse than that of the celebrated Johnson’s rule. The contribution of the present study lies in showing that the same machine based decomposition procedures which are so successful in solving complex job shops can also be suitably modified to optimally solve the simpler flow shops.     

An alternative framework to Lagrangian relaxation approach for job shop scheduling

A new Lagrangian relaxation (LR) approach is developed for job shop scheduling problems. In the approach, operation precedence constraints rather than machine capacity constraints are relaxed. The relaxed problem is decomposed into single or parallel machine scheduling subproblems. These subproblems, which are NP-complete in general, are approximately solved by using fast heuristic algorithms. The dual problem is solved by using a recently developed “surrogate subgradient method” that allows approximate optimization of the subproblems. Since the algorithms for subproblems do not depend on the time horizon of the scheduling problems and are very fast, our new LR approach is efficient, particularly for large problems with long time horizons. For these problems, the machine decomposition-based LR approach requires much less memory and computation time as compared to a part decomposition-based approach as demonstrated by numerical testing.     

Putting soft OR methods to work: The case of the business improvement project at PowerGen

In 1994 PowerGen, a UK electricity generating company, conducted a business improvement project. The project used a participative approach involving soft OR and systems thinking, an approach that was developed in earlier projects in food retailing and mining. The aim of the project was initially to conduct a benchmarking exercise and develop an information systems (IS) strategy. As the project progressed the emphasis moved to business process redesign and downsizing in the light of new perceptions of business prospects. The paper describes the design and implementation of the intervention, the evolution of the project, the problems encountered, and the outcome. Throughout it describes in some detail the interaction that took place. Although many improvements to current operations were identified for implementation, it proved difficult to obtain agreement to a fundamental change in the organisational structure. Two years after the project finished a new organisation based on the project's analysis has been adopted. The case is discussed drawing on a number of recent theoretical themes that have emerged from the debate about the process of OR. Conclusions are drawn about the value of the methods used in the intervention, the practicalities of mixing several methods, and the future direction the research programme should take.     

Operational competitiveness analysis on software development

The focus of this study is the application of a non-parametric model called operational competitiveness rating analysis (OCRA), to obtain ratings that gauge the relative operational performance of the application software development teams of a large bank in Hong Kong. The computed ratings would be the basis of important management decisions relating to the connection between personnel performance and benefits. This application of OCRA requires the values of resources consumed and outputs generated. Cost figures were used to measure the teams' resource consumption. The value of the teams' software output was measured by function point analysis. The performance ratings obtained by OCRA are compared with data envelopment analysis (DEA) ratings and ratio scores. Comments are offered on the implementation of the proposed approach.     

Job Shop Scheduling: Is Manual Application of Dispatching Rules Feasible?

Many computerized production scheduling systems have been implemented in order to make use of job dispatching rules for sequencing work on facilities. Few attempts have been made to implement such rules using manual systems, and it seems to be generally accepted that the use of a "good" dispatching rule is impossible without a computer system. The experimental evidence, however, supports the view that only under very exceptional circumstances would a computerized dispatching rule be worth implementing in preference to a manual system. This paper discusses the relative merits of the more popular dispatching rules with regard to their implementation requirements and their performance characteristics. A manual sequencing system which can be implemented at very little cost is described and the conditions required for successful use are discussed.     

A Quantitative Method for Determining Proper Job Rotation Intervals

Job rotation is a useful tool that can be used in many work settings to produce task variety for workers and to reduce worker fatigue and injuries. Developing a job rotation plan requires determining the set of jobs to be included in the rotation, the rotation sequence, and the proper length of the rotation interval. Previous research has considered both the jobs to include in a rotation plan and how to sequence the rotation plan but no work has been conducted to quantitatively examine different rotation interval lengths. Using different rotation interval lengths may result in different stresses for the workers performing a particular set of tasks and therefore affect the quality of the job rotation implementation. This paper proposes a quantitative method based on mathematical programming to obtain a proper job rotation interval length. The merit of the method is determined by examining its effectiveness in reducing worker stress and the potential for injury as well as its applicability for use in real settings.     

On the domino-parity inequalities for the STSP

One method which has been used very successfully for finding optimal and provably good solutions for large instances of the symmetric travelling salesman problem (STSP) is the branch and cut method. This method requires knowledge of classes of useful valid inequalities for the polytope associated with the STSP, as well as efficient separation routines for these classes of inequalities. Recently a new class of valid inequalities called the domino-parity inequalites were introduced for the STSP. An efficient separation routine is known for these constraints if certain conditions are satisfied by the point to be separated. This separation routine has never been implemented or tested. We present several performance enhancements for this separation routine, and discuss our implementation of this improved algorithm. We test our implementation and provide results which we believe demonstrate the practical usefulness of these constraints and the separation routine for the STSP within a branch and cut framework. This research was partially supported by grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada     

Using Inquiry to Improve Pedagogy through K‐12/University Partnerships

This article focuses on the impact a collaborative project between university graduate fellows and K‐12 classroom teachers had on improved pedagogy in the classroom and in the future at the university. Nine teams participated in a yearlong professional development project to improve pedagogy and communication skills of the participants. This study shows that the participants, the fellows and the K‐12 teacher partners, made changes in planning, implementation, and even motivation for using inquiry‐based methods in their classroom. External observations of the teams further support the individuals' claims of improved pedagogy using inquiry and impact on student conceptual understanding. The Horizon Classroom Observation instrument was used for these observations. The teams showed an overall increase in scores, as well as overall effective and exemplarily implementation of their planning. The program design, the implementation, and the results of this three‐year study will be elaborated in this article.