Doctor of Nursing Practice, Mount St. Joseph University , 2020, Department of Nursing

Executive Summary Lack of a standardized patient report from the emergency department nurses to the patient flow coordinators provided insufficient information to place patients correctly and efficiently. Incomplete information resulted in multiple phone calls to retrieve additional information, incorrect patient placement, and delayed decision-making. Delayed inpatient admissions contributed to overcrowding in the emergency department (ED), nurses pulled away from patient care to seek clarifying information, inefficiency of the flow coordinator in planning for inpatient admissions, and delayed inpatient care. A standardized ED patient report form was developed to decrease repetitive phone calls, improve efficiency of decision-making, and decrease the time patients spend in the ED. The purpose of this Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) project was to create a standardized report form to guide the ED nurses in providing sufficient patient information to the patient flow coordinators for accurate and efficient patient placement. The Epic Software program was used to identify time stamps for tracking the flow of patients throughout the hospital. These metrics included the time stamp for requesting admission, floor assigned, and arrival to the floor.This DNP project determined if a standardized patient placement report would decrease the time to place a non-critical care patient from the ED to the inpatient area. Findings of this project revealed that although nurses were more informed about what information was needed for patient placement, the approach to improving patient placement is multi-factorial. Recommendations from this project included establishing a standardized report for patient placement in Epic that could be reviewed by multiple teams, thereby removing verbal report between the ED nurse and patient flow coordinator.

Committee: Laura Valle DNP, APRN-CNM (Advisor) Subjects: Health Care Management; Nursing

Doctor of Philosophy, University of Toledo, 2015, Business Administration

Hospitals are under fierce pressure from the Medicaid and insurance companies to cut the cost of their services. Operating rooms are among the biggest cost centers in any hospital, and a huge part of their cost is related to purchasing implantable medical devices (IMDs) and services related to IMDs. Among all different types of IMDs, orthopedic and cardiac IMDs constitute an enormous proportion of the cost. A recent Medicaid report reflects the poor performance of hospitals with regard to purchasing orthopedic and cardiac implants. One of the main factors that results in such a poor performance is the relationship between physicians and the vendors of IMDs. This relationship helps IMD vendors to impose higher prices on hospitals, and enjoy high bargaining powers as key or sole suppliers of IMDs. This is the main motivation behind conducting this research. In other words this study proposes a remedy for this poor performance of hospitals through a comprehensive research that investigates this situation and propose solutions for this problem. This study examines this problem from the lens of service triads, agency theory, social network theory, and balance theory. Based on previous conceptual works in this field, this study proposes that a service triad forms when the hospital intends to purchase IMDs. This service triad is constituted of the hospital as the buyer, the manufacturer of implant as the vendor, and the physician as the customer. This study first explores the factors that lead to the strength of ties in the mentioned triad. Secondly it proposes mechanisms that the hospital could utilize to change the balance of relationships and achieve better performance. This study examines the following research questions: How cooperation mechanisms initiated by vendor and/or hospital affect the physician's agency role for either party? How monitoring mechanisms initiated by hospital affect the relationship between hospital and vendor? How does physician's agency ro (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Ananad Kunnathur PhD (Committee Chair); Amal Said PhD (Committee Member); Thomas Schwann MD (Committee Member); Rong Liu PhD (Committee Member); Yue Zhang PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Business Administration

Master of Information and Telecommunication Systems (MITS), Ohio University, 2015, Information and Telecommunication Systems (Communication)

This thesis addresses certain technical and financial challenges associated with the deployment and operation of relay spacecraft using the Internet Protocol as the primary routing protocol. Though IP in space has been a hot topic for nearly a decade, few studies address the capabilities of management protocols being used to operate a geostationary fleet. Likewise, few have addressed the real-world cost structure of replacing a traditional bent-pipe fleet with an IP-enabled fleet. Within our research, we investigate whether SNMP, TFTP, and SCP are capable of meeting the Tracking, Telemetry, and Command requirements set by a real-world geostationary relay service provider. We also investigate the driving forces of relay deployment and operational costs, identify Rough Order of Magnitude costs for a geostationary IP-enabled relay, and define a financial profile categorizing the costs of replacing a bent-pipe fleet with an IP-enabled fleet.

Committee: Hans Kruse (Advisor); Shawn Ostermann (Committee Member); Philip Campbell (Committee Member); Wesley Eddy (Committee Member) Subjects: Aerospace Engineering; Communication; Information Science; Information Systems; Information Technology; Technology

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2014, Business Administration

The leakage of an organization's proprietary, digital assets to unauthorized parties can be a catastrophic event for any organization. The magnitude of these events have been recently underscored by the Target data breach, in which 70 million consumer credit card accounts were compromised, and financial costs are expected to exceed $1 billion. Digital assets have steadily progressed beyond low-value data and information, and into high-value knowledge-based domains. Failures to protect these latter types of digital assets can have even greater implications for firms or even macroeconomic conditions. Using the Target event as an illustrative motivation, we highlight the importance of two relatively-unexplored topics within the domain of digital asset protections - (1) vendor management, and (2) worker adherence to standard, well-codified procedures and technologies. We explicitly consider each of these topics through the separate empirical efforts detailed in this dissertation. Our first empirical effort examines the effects of sourcing and location decisions on the confidentiality of digital assets. We frame our study within a product-development dyad, with a proprietary, digital asset being shared between partners. We treat confidentiality as a performance dimension that is influenced by each organization accessing the asset. Specifically, we empirically investigate the realm of electronic video game development and the illegal distribution activities of these products. We employ a series of web-crawling data collection programs to compile an extensive secondary dataset covering the legitimate development activities for the industry. We then harvest data from the archives of a major, black-market distribution channel, and leverage these data to derive a novel, product-level measure of asset confidentiality. We examine the interacting factors of industrial clustering (agglomeration) and national property rights legislations in affecting this confidentiality m (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: John Gray (Advisor); Kenneth Boyer (Advisor); James Hill (Committee Member); Elliot Bendoly (Committee Member) Subjects: Business Administration

Doctor of Philosophy, University of Toledo, 2011, Manufacturing and Technology Management

Several operations management researchers have considered the role of knowledge integration (KI) activities in coping with uncertain environments and improving organizational performance. The previous research focused on investigating and defining KI conceptually and ignored the need to investigate and define KI operationally. Therefore, there are doubts about how to develop effective KI capability and implement it at the organizational level. This study provides detailed explanations and guidelines for researchers and practitioners about KI, its antecedents and consequences. This research meets the needs of manufacturing management practitioners and researchers by providing an operational definition of how to integrate internal and external knowledge to manage environmental uncertainty and enhance a firm's overall performance. This research is built on an integrated perspective of operations management and knowledge management using a number of theories that include Knowledge Based View (KBV), Dynamic Capability (DC), and Contingency Theory (CT). This integrated perspective helps clarify how the implementation of internal integration and external integration practices can lead to effective development of knowledge integration capability. This study offers an in-depth understanding of knowledge integration (KI) capability and its related activities. Hypotheses of this research are developed on the relationships among the antecedents of KI (internal integration and external integration), knowledge integration capability, and the consequences of KI capability (mass customization, operational performance and the firm‘s performance). The study provides five significant contributions to manufacturing management research. First, it explores the antecedents (or the facilitators) that an organization should implement before developing a successful KI capability. Second, it provides an operational definition of KI that was not available in the manufacturing literature. (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Mark Vonderembse PhD (Committee Co-Chair); T.S Ragu-Nathan PhD (Committee Co-Chair); Stephen Callaway PhD (Committee Member); Iryna Pentina PhD (Committee Member); Mohammad Elahinia PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Business Administration; Management

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2004, Business Administration

The relationship between lean manufacturing management practices and business financial performance is examined through the use of empirical surveys and archival accounting data from Compustat and stock return data from CRSP. A sample frame of small to medium sized discrete product and process manufacturing companies reporting participation in only one four-digit SIC was identified as the sample frame. The five-year (1998-2002) financial performance for these companies was analyzed at the operations and business levels using a median z-score comparing median firm performance with the median performance of a matched portfolio of firms. Operations measures included asset and employee productivity, gross margin ratio and two measures of aggregate cycle time. Business measures included return on equity (ROE), sales growth, and stock return. A web-based survey was used to collect data on seven lean practices including just-in-time production management, statistical process control, total productive maintenance, group technology, employee involvement, supplier communication, and customer involvement. Forty-two responding firms were classified as being either lean or non-lean based on a cluster analysis of factor scores. The results demonstrated that lean practices act as a synergistic, mutually supportive set rather than linearly additive individual practices in affecting operations financial performance. Lean classification was associated with better total and cash-to-cash cycle times, but was not related to either better or worse asset or employee productivity. Lean firms also tended to have narrower grow margins than non-lean firms. With respect to business level performance, lean firms tend to have better ROE, but no relationship was found with respect to either stock return or sales growth. Of all the lean practices tested only employee involvement demonstrated a significant relationship to business level performance. Firms with high ROE tend to have high employee in (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Peter Ward (Advisor) Subjects:

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, Business Administration

This dissertation centers on exploring social sustainability, the human and societal elements of sustainability, in operations management. In the first essay, I particularly focus on the health and safety dimension in the context of warehouse operations. I study how managers can jointly promote safety and completion time through managerial implementations such as performance feedback and best practice sharing. I adopt a time and motion laboratory experiment, where safety is measured as a reduction of musculoskeletal disorder risk, captured through markerless motion capture technology. My findings suggest that the tradeoff between safety and completion time can be mitigated even in the presence of time-specific priorities. In the second essay, I expand my research scope to various dimensions of social misconduct, such as forced labor, child labor, discrimination, harassment, violations of health and safety, and wage working hour conditions. I empirically explore whether news articles on each social misconduct dimension negatively impact the firm market value. Text mining is applied to classify the articles published from 1990 to 2019 on social misconduct within publicly traded firms and their supply chains. I find that the magnitude and the significance of the impact of social misconduct differ across dimensions and whether it occurs at the focal firm or the supply chain. While the effect is overall short-lived, my findings hint that policies geared toward specific social misconduct may mitigate its loss of penalization. Finally, in the third essay, I conduct a literature review on corporate social responsibility and sustainability, to distinguish social sustainability as an independent domain. This work is motivated by studies often mixing social sustainability with other close concepts such as corporate social responsibility. I suggest that recognizing the unique domain of social sustainability would facilitate future scholars' contributions to this research in ope (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: James Hill (Advisor); Elliot Bendoly (Committee Member); Christian Blanco (Committee Member) Subjects: Business Administration

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2022, Business Administration

This dissertation addresses the relative importance of price and non-price criteria in sourcing decisions from three distinct perspectives. Each essay is motivated by the same problem: that organizations tend to unintentionally overweight cost minimization objectives in their sourcing decisions. In the first of three essays, I show that excessively price-based decision-making is a widespread problem in sourcing. To do this, I combined two sources of data on contract awards by the US federal government. I applied coarsened exact matching to identify cases where contracts were awarded using different criteria in similar situations. I then used logistic regression to show that when non-price criteria are weighted more heavily, the same contractor is more likely to receive awards for similar work in the future. This relationship is absent when there is a requirement for the decision-maker to provide written justification for the use of the more price-based approach, allowing me to infer a solution to the problem identified. In the second essay, I investigate whether the procurement profession's identity influences the relative importance of price in supplier selection decisions. I first conducted a series of semi-structured interviews with current practitioners, eliciting their comments on: their level of identification with the procurement profession; procurement's group image; others' perceptions of procurement's group image; and, procurement's status within their organization. Drawing from the observed variation in responses, I designed and conducted a scenario-based experiment. I find that strong identification with the procurement profession can contribute to more price-based sourcing decisions. In the third essay, I expand my focus from procurement professionals to a broader set of professions that commonly contribute to sourcing decisions: supply management, engineering, and marketing. Seeking to understand how these different perspectives influence (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: John Gray (Advisor); James Hill (Advisor); Christian Blanco (Committee Member) Subjects: Business Administration; Management; Operations Research

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Wright State University, 2021, Computer Science and Engineering PhD

A significant issue in cognitive systems research is to make an agent formulate and manage its own goals. Some cognitive scientists have implemented several goal operations to support this issue, but no one has implemented more than a couple of goal operations within a single agent. One of the reasons for this limitation is the lack of knowledge about how various goals operations interact with one another. This thesis addresses this knowledge gap by implementing multiple-goal operations, including goal formulation, goal change, goal selection, and designing an algorithm to manage any positive or negative interaction between them. These are integrated with a cognitive architecture called MIDCA and applied in five different test domains. We will compare and contrast the architecture's performance with intelligent interaction management with a randomized linearization of goal operations.

Committee: Michael T. Cox Ph.D. (Committee Co-Chair); Mateen M. Rizki Ph.D. (Committee Co-Chair); Matthew M. Molineaux Ph.D. (Committee Member); Michael L. Raymer Ph.D. (Committee Member); Michelle A. Cheatham Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Artificial Intelligence; Computer Science

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2019, Industrial and Systems Engineering (Engineering and Technology)

Control of costs and quality of patient care are both important concerns for healthcare systems. Improved management of supplies and instruments for operating rooms provides an opportunity to reduce costs while still maintaining the current level of patient care. Operating rooms are a main cost center within hospitals and previous research has shown that improved management of disposable supplies and sterile instruments, which are requested by surgeons through preference cards, provides an opportunity for significantly reducing surgical costs. Primarily, this means not opening or exposing items that aren't needed, which requires the items to be disposed or resterilized, even if they haven't been used. Additional improvements can be achieved by reducing duplication of instruments in inventory due to the variations in preference cards. In this research, various optimization models and solution methods are developed for managing surgical supplies and sterile instruments. The optimization models deal with the decision of configuring trays of instruments, as well as determining the quantity of surgical supplies to be stored in different locations in such a way that ensures: (1) surgeons' requirements are met, (2) inventory and reprocessing costs are minimized. The models also captures historical usage pattern of instruments and supplies and allow surgeons to make better decisions about the items included on the preference cards, and which items can be opened at the time of need as opposed to being opened before a procedure.

Committee: Dale Masel (Advisor); Gary Weckman (Committee Member); Ashley Metcalf (Committee Member); Kristin Schuller (Committee Member); Benjamin Sperry (Committee Member) Subjects: Health Care; Industrial Engineering; Operations Research

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1967, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Business Administration

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2016, Business: Business Administration

In healthcare services, the goal is to provide timely and high-quality care. However, given the high costs of healthcare, resource shortages, and increasing demand, efficiency is also crucial. High variability, together with cost pressures, make matching capacity and demand challenging for healthcare systems. Despite the need for being maximally efficient, health centers need to be responsive to patients as well, especially if there are patients who need emergent (immediate) care. Examples are operating rooms, with both elective (low-priority) and emergency (high-priority) patients, and emergency departments in which patients are prioritized into five classes based on medical urgency and resource requirements. The focus is to match supply and demand to ensure smooth patient flow in the system. This requires careful capacity and flow decisions, which involves balancing the tradeoff between efficiency and responsiveness in the presence of multiple priority classes of patients. Thus, we study two major operational decisions that arise when serving multi-priority streams of patients: 1) resource allocation, and 2) flow allocation. These decisions are interrelated and have a direct effect on system performance measured by many different metrics, such as patient wait time, patient flow time, and throughput. We start from a two-priority system motivated by operating room systems with emergency and non-emergency patients (Chapter 2). Then we explore the more complicated case of multi-priority systems motivated by emergency departments with several priority classes of patients (Chapters 3 and 4). For measuring the performance of different policies, we use patient waiting time as a proxy for system responsiveness. Using simulation and optimization methods, we identify capacity and flow allocation policies that minimize wait time, thus maximizing system responsiveness. We capitalize on statistical methods and data-mining techniques to help inform the operational and theoretica (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Craig Froehle Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Michael Magazine Ph.D. (Committee Member); Uday Rao Ph.D. (Committee Member); Denise White Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Operations Research

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2014, Leadership and Change

This theoretically oriented scholarly personal narrative (SPN) explored how the constructionist view of relational leadership might be applied in a post-PC technological era marked by fast-paced innovation and an always on technology organization and infrastructure. Through reflecting on my personal and professional experience, I hope to offer the reflective scholar-practitioner new ways of thinking, present relational practices and suggest ways of being a leader participating in the fast-paced technology driven world. This new way of being combined both relational leadership and new DevOps practices that reduce organizational friction, break down departmental silos, and increase employee engagement in technology operations. Through this inquiry, I uncovered several practices and ways of being that are grounded in philosophical, theoretical, and social domains. In challenging the taken-for-granted reality of managing technology, I am attempting to produce practices for higher performance, humane, sustainable, and inspiring corporate information technology (IT) departments. For information regarding full-text access, please contact the author at: moudye@gmail.com.

Committee: Carolyn Kenny Ph.D (Committee Chair); Mitchell E. Kusy Ph.D (Committee Member); Ann L. Cunliffe Ph.D (Committee Member); Brian Kolo Ph.D (Committee Member) Subjects: Business Administration; Management; Technology

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Wright State University, 2008, Engineering PhD

This research addresses the equipment scheduling problem under disruptions in United States Postal Service mail processing and distribution centers. These facilities contain a large variety of equipment and employ a non-homogeneous workforce that work on shifts of various lengths and start times. The scheduling of equipment (the determination of the configuration and usage of equipment to match mail arrivals) and the scheduling of workforce (the determination of the optimal size and composition of the workforce, their days off / lunch assignments, and overtime usage) to meet processing service commitment with a constantly changing demand are some of the most challenging problems. Over the years, there have been many research studies that focused on solution of the postal equipment and staff scheduling problems. A comprehensive review of these studies is conducted. In the most general sense, each of the equipment and staff schedule problems can be decomposed temporally so and hierarchical analytic approaches have been adopted. Along the time axis, these studies can be classified into strategic, tactical and operational levels. This thesis focuses on the operational equipment scheduling problem or equipment scheduling under disruptions and addresses the adjustment of production plans and workforce schedules through the use of overtime and flexible employees in the face of disruptions such as demand fluctuation and absenteeism that happen on a daily basis and may significantly change demand and the size of workforce. This problem is modeled as a large-scale integer program, which contains equipment scheduling, shift scheduling and overtime management, and break assignment modules. Comprehensive experiments have been designed to investigate the effects of the use of overtime, the control of absenteeism, and the importance of integrating equipment and workforce scheduling simultaneously. The model integrates seamlessly with other research studies and provides the necess (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Xinhui Zhang PhD (Advisor); George Polak PhD (Committee Member); Yan Liu PhD (Committee Member); James Moore PhD (Committee Member); S. Narayanan PhD, PE (Committee Member) Subjects: Management; Operations Research

Doctor of Philosophy, University of Toledo, 2010, Manufacturing and Technology Management

Unprecedented scientific and technological advancements now enable people to live longer, and with this increase in the aging population comes increased demand for healthcare services (IOM, 2001). These shifts have contributed to disturbing trends related to cost, quality, and even competition among healthcare providers. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is estimated to spend more than $2.5 trillion for healthcare services in 2009, or about $8,160 per U.S. resident compared to $75 billion, or $356 per resident in 1970 (Kaiser, 2009). Healthcare spending is estimated to represent 17.6% of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2009, compared with only 7.2% in 1970 (Kaiser, 2009). Concomitant to these cost increases has been a decrease in consumer confidence regarding access to quality care (Cogan et al., 2004). Such quality concerns have been substantiated by reports that each year nearly 2 million people acquire infections during hospital stays resulting in death for almost 99,000 patients (Klevens et al., 2007). Consequently, interest in improving cost, quality, and other outcomes has increased in recent years, highlighting the need for better operational coordination during healthcare delivery (Gittell et al., 2000; Fredendall et al., 2009). As such, practitioners and scholars are directing their attention toward the benefits that can be realized by efficient and effective supply chain management in healthcare (Schneller and Smeltzer, 2006). However, while a fair amount of supply chain management research exists in the manufacturing context, generalizing these findings in healthcare has proven thorny (Smeltzer and Ramanathan, 2002). As such, researchers have identified the need for new studies exploring supply chain management in the uniquely decentralized context of healthcare delivery (Shah et al., 2008). This research study conceptualizes the healthcare delivery supply chain focusing on the information and resource flows between admitting/attending physic (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Mark Vonderembse PhD (Committee Co-Chair); T.S. Ragu-Nathan PhD (Committee Co-Chair); Michael Bisesi PhD (Committee Member); Stephen Callaway PhD (Committee Member); Joseph Shapiro MD (Committee Member); Monideepa Tarafdar PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Business Administration; Health Care; Health Care Management; Information Systems; Information Technology; Operations Research; Systems Design; Systems Science

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2006, Business Administration

The main objective of this dissertation is to study the role of Six Sigma programs in deploying effective continuous improvement. Through three related essays we address three areas of inquiry focused on Six Sigma: (1) the place of Six Sigma in the evolution of continuous improvement programs, (2) organization level infrastructure that is critical for institutionalizing Six Sigma, and (3) practices used in Six Sigma projects for discovering process improvements. The first essay uses concepts from Nelson and Winter's (1982) theory of evolutionary economics to present a conceptual model for the emergence of new continuous improvement programs such as Six Sigma. Based on its descriptions in the literature, Six Sigma appears to be a logical next-step in the evolution of continuous improvement programs. There are apparent differences compared to previous programs in the way Six Sigma is structured in organizations and in the way its team-projects target improvements. In the second essay we employ the lens of the behavioral theory of the firm (Cyert and March, 1963) to derive a list of critical elements of organizational infrastructure for continuous improvement. Further, we analyze whether and how organizations that have deployed Six Sigma programs for continuous improvement cover these elements. We use empirical observations from interviews conducted with continuous improvement executives from five organizations that have deployed Six Sigma programs. We find mixed results regarding coverage of infrastructure in these organizations. Although the prescriptive practitioner-targeted literature on Six Sigma covers most of the infrastructure elements, organizations are neglecting some important elements that are critical for effective continuous improvement. The third essay empirically addresses the question of how knowledge creation activities (Nonaka, 1994) used in Six Sigma team-projects result in process improvements. Adapting existing scales for knowledge creation constr (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Peter Ward (Advisor) Subjects: Business Administration, Management

PHD, Kent State University, 2012, College of Business and Entrepreneurship, Ambassador Crawford / Department of Management and Information Systems

Timely identification and reporting of rare infectious diseases has important economic, social and health implications. In this study, we investigate how different stakeholders in the existing reporting system influence the timeliness in identification and reporting of rare infectious diseases. Building on the vision of the information supply chain (Marinos, 2005; Sun & Yen, 2005) and drawing upon co-ordination theory to investigate inter-organizational dependencies, this dissertation treats information processing and transfer as an information supply chain system whose key performance indicator is timeliness. Jajosky and Groseclose (2004) identified that information reporting lead time is related to the number of layers of reporting. In this dissertation, we look at three layers of reporting rare infectious diseases in the Ohio Disease Reporting System (ODRS), and identify factors that influence the delay in processing and reporting of these diseases. The three layers considered are those for which the county public health system is responsible for the preventive and control measures of any event of rare infectious diseases and is also responsible for entering the confirmatory information into the state reporting system i.e. ODRS. This dissertation investigates the rare infectious disease reporting system in a way different from traditional approaches. Our view of a reporting system is an information supply chain, just as any product supply chain, with different layers in reporting, in which exist interactions between the members (hospitals, laboratories and public health system). We no longer treat the rare infectious disease information supply chain system as point-to-point, but instead as layer-to-layer relationships and examine in detail the factors influencing the delay in these layers. We use simulation based modeling to represent in a more natural way the individual interactive entities in the information supply chain system and to investigate the lead tim (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Murali Shanker PhD (Committee Co-Chair); Michael Hu PhD (Committee Co-Chair); Eddy Patuwo PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Business Administration; Epidemiology; Health Care; Health Care Management; Health Sciences; Information Systems; Management; Operations Research; Public Health; Public Health Education

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2005, Operations Research

Since the service is an economic good, imposing an admission price often provides an efficient means for matching supply and demand. On the other hand an important dimension of providing a service is the time the customer has to wait, especially in situations where the time of delivery is the single factor apart from price that determines whether the customer will do business with the firm. These issues arise in a variety of situations in practice, ranging from manufacturing, to pure service systems, telecommunications, call centers and high bandwidth lines for data transfer. The problem becomes more involved when the potential customers differ in their sensitivity to waiting. In the first part of this work we classify customers into two classes, based on their sensitivity to delay and study the effects of price discrimination on revenue. Next, we consider a system without the ability to price discriminate. We suggest splitting the available capacity into two servers and advertising different entrance fees. Finally, we propose a mechanism that employs options for service as means to increase system flexibility, customer satisfaction and revenue generation. It is typical in this line of research to assume that, upon arrival to the system the customer is given the opportunity to select the mode of service and the corresponding price without any restrictions, and, in many cases, is informed about the level of congestion in the system before he makes this selection. Although this is beneficial to the customers, it may make it harder for the service provider to plan for the necessary service capacity. There is thus a tradeoff between customer flexibility and service provider capacity planning that is often met in supply chains of physical products. In the last chapter of this thesis we propose a mechanism that addresses this tradeoff by employing options for service. The options are offered at a fixed price per unit. A customer purchases a number of them and for a specif (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Apostolos Burnetas (Advisor) Subjects:

Doctor of Philosophy in Manufacturing and Technology Management, University of Toledo, 2013, Manufacturing and Technology Management

As global pressures to address climate change intensify, the costs of natural resources increase, public health and safety concerns grow, and diverse consumption patterns emerge, sustainability has become critical for competing in international markets (Epstein, 2008; Lubin and Esty, 2010; Wu and Pagell, 2011). The goal of sustainability is grounded in the concept of the triple bottom line, which indicates that balancing objectives related to profits, the planet, and people is essential for corporations as they grow and compete in the global economy (Kleindorfer et al., 2005). Taking advantage of a broad and systemic approach to addressing sustainability issues, researchers increasingly acknowledge that linking sustainability with the supply chain is a crucial step for operations management (Hall, 2000; Zhu and Sarkis, 2004; Koplin et al., 2007; Matos and Hall, 2007). Despite a growing number of studies on sustainability from the point of view of the supply chain (Linton et al., 2007; Carter and Rogers, 2009; Pagell and Wu, 2009; Pullman et al., 2009), few researchers have developed an empirically based integrative research framework grounded in relevant theories. In particular, the literature lacks research that empirically examines the nomological network of sustainable supply chain encompassing drivers, strategy, practices, and performance outcomes with consideration for all three dimensions of sustainability (economic, environmental, and social performance) (Elkington, 1994, 1997; Kleindorfer et al., 2005; Seuring and Muller, 2008). Drawing from the theoretical lenses of institutional theory (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983), strategic choice theory (Child, 1972), strategic orientation (Venkatraman, 1989), and the resource-based view of firms (Barney, 1991), this dissertation presents a framework, by taking a holistic view, of a sustainable supply chain aimed at explaining the relationships between the antecedents, strategic orientation, supply chain practices, an (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Mark Vonderembse PhD (Committee Co-Chair); Sachin Modi PhD (Committee Co-Chair); Paul Hong PhD (Committee Member); Stanford Westjohn PhD (Committee Member); Dwight Haase PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Alternative Energy; Environmental Management; Environmental Studies; Sustainability

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2012, Mechanical and Systems Engineering (Engineering and Technology)

As two major decisions in the supply chain management, both resource management and sourcing strategies decide ‘which product goes where at what amount and what time', in order to redeploy outbound/inbound resources to synchronize product flow and eventually fulfill customers' requirements. Nowadays, the difficulties in making such decisions are brought by many factors such as the emergence of globalization, the increasing variety of products, and uncertainties in both demand and supply. In this dissertation, quantitative methods are developed to efficiently use of all outbound/inbound resources for solving a multi-level and multi-period supply chain system design and planning problem. Stochastic resource management model is a five-phase quantitative approach to decide facility location, capacity allocation, and production/shipping volume of the good flow in a multi-stage manufacturing supply chain. In the proposed model, manufacturing system in each facility is configured (forming manufacturing cells) at the same time when designing the supply chain network. In order to handle highly fluctuating demand, a layered mini-cellular system is developed, where product families with relatively stable demand are grouped and assigned to their dedicated cells while shared and remainder cells handle the product families with unstable demand. In addition to strategic and tactical decisions, phases IV and V also decide the production plans and shipping plans to further study the operational decisions. Once the assignment of inbound resources has been determined by the resource management model, the long-term sourcing model provides a dynamic framework to decide the quantity allocation of outbound resources. The goal of sourcing model is to capture supply uncertainties where supplier performance changes along the time or based on purchasing decisions. The proposed framework integrates simulation module and single-period optimization module. The former module simulates various (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Gursel A. Suer PhD (Advisor); Dusan N. Sormaz PhD (Committee Member); Cynthia Marling PhD (Committee Member); Faizul Huq PhD (Committee Member); Ana Rosado Feger PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Industrial Engineering