Gary D. Scudder

The use of electronic data interchange for supply chain coordination in the food industry

Abstract Supply chain management (SCM) is concerned with the relationship between a company and its suppliers and customers. It is characterized by interorganizational coordination: companies working jointly with their customers and suppliers to integrate activities along the supply chain to effectively supply product to customers. More developed SCM is indicated by systematic integration, i.e. standardized and automatic interorganizational interfaces. Information technology (IT) engenders such systematic integration by allowing more efficient and automatic information flow. This research focuses on electronic data interchange (EDI), an important class of IT used for interorganizational information transfers in the supply chain. Data from a survey of the food industry is used to examine the use of EDI with respect to interfirm coordination activities involving suppliers and customers. The influence of demographic characteristics on EDI use is also investigated. The results suggest that firms view EDI as a tool for improving efficiencies rather than as a tool for facilitating supply chain integration. There is also a surprising difference in firms use of EDI with customers vis-a-vis suppliers. Firms tend to be much more accommodating of the desires of their customers than of their suppliers.

Improving speed and productivity of software development: a global survey of software developers

Time is an essential measure of performance in software development because time delays tend to fall directly to the bottom line. To address this issue, this research seeks to distinguish time-based software development practices: those managerial actions that result in faster development speed and higher productivity. This study is based upon a survey of software management practices in Western Europe and builds upon an earlier study we carried out in the United States and Japan (Integrated Manufacturing Systems, vol. 7, no. 2, 1996). We measure the extent to which managers in the USA, Japan and Europe differ in their management of software projects and also determine the tools, technology and practices that separate fast and slow developers in Western Europe.

A review and classification of empirical research in operations management

Abstract The progress in the use of empirical research methods has been a topic of interest in the Operations Management (OM) area for the last 15 years. It is considered desirable to accompany traditional OM research, which develops and tests theories using mathematics, modelling, and simulation, with research that makes use of empirical data. The use of empirical research helps support the understanding of OM practices within industry. This paper expands and updates previous literature review studies dealing with empirical research in OM. The journal publications reviewed for this paper were published in the years 1986 to 1995. This is a review of the articles published in thirteen journals that are traditional outlets for OM research. These articles are classified and the results of these classifications presented. There has been an increase in the amount of published articles that make use of empirical research methods in the OM area, both in number and as a percentage of the total number of articles published in these journals.

Concurrent software development

By necessity, software development has become a critical skill for many industrial firms. Software that captures the intellectual assets of the firm in its products and services increasingly defines the critical path in development and thus governs the firm’s speed-to-market. When embedded in hardware, such as with a television or an office copier, software can be a particularly strong determinant of development cycle time. What happens when software development exceeds its time targets and is late to market? One example, widely reported in the press, illustrates that dilatory software development can devastate the bottom line and affect the boardroom. In 1994, Novell purchased WordPerfect for over

A Game-Theoretic Model of E-Marketplace Participation Growth

855 million in an effort to create an integrated software product to compete with Microsoft’s Office suite; Novell later sold WordPerfect (and Quattro) to Corel for

Use of the net present value criterion in a random job shop where early shipments are forbidden

186 million. What caused the calamitous 80% drop in market value? Simply Novell’s inability to keep apace with Microsoft in the race to bring new software features to market. Speed is obviously a key to retaining a competitive edge in these markets. Software productivity is another key development performance metric with direct financial consequences. Firms such as Microsoft recognize that software development is a fixed cost business with virtually no variable production costs; higher productivity thus results in lower input costs, and higher profit margins [6]. The twin objectives of speed and productivity raise vexing issues for a software development manager. Cycle time and productivity are not perfectly correlated because a developer can achieve a shorter cycle time even with low productivity, by adding developers to the project. Brooks [4] and others have noted that the practice of adding bodies to a project to lower cycle time may have the opposite result, since coordination complexities make larger teams more difficult to manage. With low productivity, speed is achieved at high cost. Fortunately, the pursuit of speed and productivity is not a zero-sum game. The

Time‐based software development

Despite their potential to significantly reduce transaction costs for both buyers and sellers, e-marketplaces have struggled. Recent literature has examined the value propositions of e-marketplaces and proposed conceptual frameworks for their analysis. In this research, we move beyond conceptual analysis by developing a game-theoretic model of return-on-investment (ROI)-driven e-marketplace participation growth. This model provides insights into expected e-marketplace growth and participation, and can be used to determine both the viability and expected long-run size of a given e-marketplace. Our results indicate that the pricing policy of the e-marketplace intermediary can affect the rate at which participation grows and, therefore, sentiment about its prospects. We focus on e-marketplaces that add value to buyers and sellers by increasing the efficiency of administrative tasks but also simultaneously add value to buyers and reduce value to sellers by lowering prices for goods purchased. Value to participants in these e-marketplaces is determined by the volume of transactions that can be conducted using the e-marketplace, resulting in a two-sided network effect--buyers reacting to sellers and sellers reacting to buyers. The game-theoretic model identifies an e-marketplace equilibrium at which participation growth is predicted to stop.

Scheduling rule selection for the forbidden early shipment environment: a comparison of economic objectives

Abstract Both practitioners and researchers in the field of Operations Management have suggested that shop scheduling should be an integral component in both the strategic and tactical plans for an organizations assets. This paper examines the use of an accepted measure of return on assets, net present value (NPV), in a simulated shop scheduling environment where early shipment of jobs before their due dates is forbidden. In addition, early shipment of raw materials to the shop is also forbidden. This shop environment is consistent with the prevalent practice in industry of accepting orders only on a just-in-time basis to reduce purchased parts inventories. The NPV measure provides a means of balancing a variety of performance criteria that have been treated as separate objectives previously, including work-in-process inventory, finished goods inventory, mean flow time and mean tardiness, while also providing a means of measuring monetarily the value of various shop scheduling approaches. The NPV performance of priority scheduling rules and order release policies is measured in this research through the simulation of a random job shop under a variety of environmental conditions. It is found in a comparison of priority rules that use time-based information with those that use job value information that the Critical Ratio rule provides higher average performance than the three other rules used in the study. However, in some situations that are consistent with JIT practice, value-based priority rules also perform well. The use of a mechanism for delaying the release of jobs to each work center in the shop provided higher average NPV when shop utilization was set at a low level of 80%, while immediate release of work upon its arrival to the shop provided superior performance at a higher shop utilization level of 94%. While JIT materials delivery and costing yields higher NPV, it did not alter the relative ranking of priority rule/release policy combinations. In addition, it was found that environmental factors, including average job length, average number of tasks per job and level of tardiness penalty, resulted in greater variations in NPV performance than the institution of a JIT raw materials delivery policy.

Comparing performance measures in dynamic job shops: economics vs. time

Software projects are commonly late and over budget, causing the product to be late to market. Based on questionnaires and field research with software managers in Europe, the USA and Japan, seeks to isolate the management practices that accelerate software development. The results suggest that global differences are not pronounced: Japanese software factories have development processes structured similarly to their US and European counterparts; productivity is also roughly equivalent. To reduce development time, software managers currently achieve greater leverage from the management of people and the cross‐functional process than with the use of CASE tools and technology.

Supply chain coordination using EDI with performance implications

In a recent paper, Christy and Kanet (1990) examined the performance of several dispatching rules in a forbidden early shipment environment. Their primary performance measure was time-weighted inventory value. This study re-examines their results using a new model, with a net present value (NPV) performance measure. The results show that using NPV and inventory objectives lead to different scheduling decisions. Also examined are the reasons for relatively poor performance of operation-based due date rules.