How to use benchmarking to reduce planning and purchasing costs

Each year at budget time, the standard question asked of the materiel management group is "Why do you have so many people?" Our answer had been that we do not have enough people. With more people, we could lower total cost and manage inventories better. The inevitable standoff occurs with each side feeling that the other does not understand the need for materiel management services. In early 1993, we decided to be prepared to answer the famous question of Dr. W. Edwards Deming, "How do you know?" We wanted to show people we really did know our business and thus initiated a project to benchmark planning, purchasing, and scheduling services of other companies. This article shares not only the results of the benchmarking efforts, but also the techniques for getting started.     

A contingent view of e-collaboration and performance in manufacturing

Manufacturers are increasingly utilizing Internet-based tools to more readily conduct collaborative activities with key business customers. While the emerging conventional wisdom suggests that the greater the extent to which manufacturers engage in Internet-enabled commerce with downstream business customers the better the performance, we espouse an alternative view. Consistent with the relational view of competitive advantage and contingency theory, we develop a model and a series of hypotheses that specify how various product and market characteristics may influence the nature of the expected positive relationship between e-collaboration and performance.To test the model, we collected data from 50 manufacturers using a Web-based survey. Our partial least squares (PLS) analysis results do indeed support the notion that e-collaboration is related to better operational and business performance. However, we go on to show that the strength of the relationship between e-collaboration and operational performance diminishes as the level of environmental munificence increases. Notably, we found no such moderating effect with respect to the level of product complexity or market variability. Our findings contribute to the operations strategy literature on supply chain relationships in the e-business arena and offer managers a framework for understanding the conditions under which investments in e-collaboration may be more appropriate and therefore more beneficial.     

The role of experience in six sigma project success: An empirical analysis of improvement projects

Recent learning-by-doing research highlights the importance of examining multiple measures of experience and their relationship to the performance of work teams. Our paper studies the role of individual experience, organizational experience, team leader experience, and experience working together on a team (team familiarity) in the context of improvement teams. To do so, we analyze successful and failed six sigma improvement team projects at a Fortune 500 consumer products manufacturer with multiple business groups. Such improvement project teams focus on deliberate learning, which differs from the primary focus of work teams.Our analysis uses archival data generated by these improvement project teams over a six year time span. Of the four experience variables we study, we find that team leader experience exhibits the strongest relationship with project success, followed by organizational experience. Further, in contrast to prior-related research on work teams, we find no relationship between individual experience or team familiarity and project success beyond that explained by team leader and organizational experience. These results suggest that a well-developed and deployed structured problem-solving process—characteristic of effective six sigma deployments—may reduce the importance of team familiarity in the context of improvement teams.     

Functional food,uncertainty and consumers’ choices: A lab experiment with enriched yoghurts for lowering cholesterol

A lab experiment was conducted in France to evaluate the impact of health information on consumers’ choices for functional food. Successive messages revealing benefits and uncertainties of consuming yoghurts with added plant sterols for reducing cholesterol were delivered. Results show a significant and positive influence of the message linked to the cholesterol reduction on willingness to pay, even for participants without cholesterol. However participants expressed little interest in information about potential risks and scientific uncertainties, since their impacts on willingness to pay are not always statistically significant. An econometric estimation shows a significant link between the change in willingness to pay and the perception by participants regarding the scientific validity linked to the sterols.     

Using FTE and RVU performance measures to assess financial viability of academic nurse-managed centers

Financial performance measures are essential to improve the fiscal management of academic nurse-managed centers (ANMCs). Measures are compared among six ANMCs in a consortium and against an external, self-sustainable, profitable ANMC and national data for family practice physicians. Performance measures help identify a center's strengths and weaknesses facilitating the development of strategies aimed at a variety of targets (business practices related to revenue and costs) to improve financial viability. Using a variety of financial performance measures to inform decision making will aid ANMCs in keeping their doors open for business.     

Christopher Leonard: The Lords of Easy Money: how the federal reserve broke the American economy

Business Economics -     

Wage Effects of Trade Reform with Endogenous Worker Mobility

In this paper, we use a linked employer–employee database from Brazil to evaluate the wage effects of trade reform. With an aggregate (firm-level) analysis of this question, we find that a decline in trade protection is associated with an increase in average wages in exporting firms relative to domestic firms, consistent with earlier studies. However, using disaggregated, employer–employee level data, and allowing for the endogenous assignment of workers to firms due to match-specific productivity, we find that the premium paid to workers at exporting firms is economically and statistically insignificant, as is the differential impact of trade openness on the wages of workers at exporting firms relative to otherwise identical workers at domestic firms. We also find that workforce composition improves systematically in exporting firms, in terms of the combination of worker ability and the quality of worker–firm matches, post-liberalization. These results stand in stark contrast to the findings reported in many earlier studies and underscore the importance of endogenous matching and, more generally, non-random labor market allocation mechanisms, in determining the effects of trade policy changes on wages.     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan</Emphasis> by Sebastian Mallaby

I agree that Sebastian Mallaby’s detailed and well-sourced The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan, will be essential for every future economic historian studying the Greenspan era. That said, Mallaby does not convey to his readers a sound understanding of monetary policy. I disagree with Mallaby’s claim that Greenspan could and should have done something about the housing and subprime mortgage bubbles. Peter Wallison makes a strong case that the affordable housing quotas did not just “encourage” but forced the GSEs to buy subprime mortgages. Information available in real time on aggregate subprime mortgage issuance was seriously flawed because the GSEs did not report accurately. Greenspan cannot be held responsible for the GSEs hiding the subprime debt on their balance sheets. These mortgages were central to the crisis. It seems improbable that any monetary policy mistake of 2001–05 was large enough to create the crisis. Mallaby could have written a final chapter emphasizing the Maestro resisting the power of a malign and evil pair of GSEs and the power of the President and Congress of the United States pursuing a disastrous housing policy. Despite the Maestro’s best efforts, Leviathan triumphed and brought ruin upon the Nation.     

Schadenfreude and product failures: the role of product deservingness and product status

ABSTRACT

This article examines the influence of product considerations on the experience of schadenfreude – taking pleasure in the suffering of another consumer. We examine how schadenfreude is affected by the extent to which the person suffering a product failure deserves to own the product and the status of the failed product. This work also explicitly considers how these factors interact with those of the person observing the misfortune. These ideas are tested across three experiments. The results show that high product status increases schadenfreude via its exacerbating effects on envy and that a lack of perceived product deservingness increases schadenfreude via both envy and deservingness. These effects differ based on the corresponding factors of the observer where the observer’s own deservingness and lack of product status are found to exacerbate schadenfreude via envy.     

What Is Personalization? Perspectives on the Design and Implementation of Personalization in Information Systems

In e-commerce and mobile commerce, personalization has been recognized as an important approach element in customer relationships and Web strategies. However, there are wide differences in how this concept is defined, characterized, and implemented in the literature. In this article we present a high-level framework for classifying approaches to personalization that delineates fundamental assumptions about personalization in the literature and relates them to strategies for developing personalization systems. The framework consists of 2 parts: (a) a set of perspectives on personalization that guide the design of personalization systems at a general level and (b) a scheme for classifying how personalization can be implemented. The personalization perspectives represent 4 distinct schools of thought on the nature of personalization distilled from the literature of several fields. These perspectives are ideal types and we discuss them in terms of the motivation they supply for personalization, the goals and means of personalization, and the ways in which they conceptualize and model users. The implementation classification scheme is constructed on 3 dimensions of implementation choices. These 3 dimensions pertain to what to personalize (content, interface, functionality, channel), to whom to personalize (individuals or categories of individuals) as well as who does the personalization (implicit or explicit personalization). The personalization perspectives represent particular concepts of personalization that guide general design choices; these choices are implemented via the options described in the implementation classification scheme. The framework contributes to the development of a common theoretical basis for the study of personalization. We discuss implications of the framework for design of personalization systems and future research directions.