Sue Abdinnour-Helm

Pre-implementation attitudes and organizational readiness for implementing an Enterprise Resource Planning system

Abstract Implementing an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system is expensive and time consuming. A substantial cost is associated with pre-implementation involvement and training designed to encourage acceptance and effective implementation of the system. The results of this study indicate that, contrary to conventional wisdom, extensive organizational investments in shaping pre-implementation attitudes do not always achieve the desired effects. Despite extensive time, money and effort, length of time with the firm and position had a greater impact on attitudes toward ERP capabilities, value, acceptance and timing than high levels of pre-implementation involvement.

A hybrid heuristic for the uncapacitated hub location problem

Given n interacting nodes in a network, the Uncapacitated Hub Location Problem (UHP) determines the number of hubs, the location for the hubs, and the assignment of the spokes to hubs that minimizes the overall transportation cost. The hubs are interconnected and each spoke is assigned to a single hub. A new heuristic method is developed based on a hybrid of Genetic Algorithms (GAs) and Tabu Search (TS). The new heuristic yields much improved results when compared to applying GAs alone. In all but one of the cases tested, the results matched the best solutions found in the literature so far.

Solution approaches to hub location problems

The hub location problem involves a network of origins and destinations over which transport takes place. Any distribution system falls into this type of category. In this paper, we present a new quadratic integer formulation for the Uncapacitated Hub Location Problem (UHP), which is based on the idea of multi-commodity flows in networks. This new formulation lends itself well for using a branch-and-bound procedure to find optimal solutions. The branch-and-bound procedure is not implemented in a traditional fashion, where bounds are obtained by linearizing the objective function and relaxing the integrality constraints. Instead, a more sophisticated approach is used where bounds are obtained by employing the underlying network structure of the problem. In addition, an artificial intelligence-based technique (Genetic Search) is designed to find solutions quickly and efficiently. The two solution approaches assume that the number of hubs is a variable, each spoke is assigned to a single hub, and all hubs are interconnected. The model and the algorithm can be applied even when all the hubs are not directly linked.

Using simulated annealing to solve the p‐Hub Median Problem

Locating hub facilities is important in different types of transportation and communication networks. The p‐Hub Median Problem (p‐HMP) addresses a class of hub location problems in which all hubs are interconnected and each non‐hub node is assigned to a single hub. The hubs are uncapacitated, and their number p is initially determined. Introduces an Artificial Intelligence (AI) heuristic called simulated annealing to solve the p‐HMP. The results are compared against another AI heuristic, namely Tabu Search, and against two other non‐AI heuristics. A real world data set of airline passenger flow in the USA, and randomly generated data sets are used for computational testing. The results confirm that AI heuristic approaches to the p‐HMP outperform non‐AI heuristic approaches on solution quality.

Network design in supply chain management

The distribution function in a supply chain is an important internal service function for any firm, and has been increasingly recognized as playing a strategic role in achieving competitive advantage. This paper proposes improving the distribution function of the supply chain by employing hub‐and‐spoke network designs. Such designs have proven to be effective with third party logistics carriers such as Federal Express, UPS, Norfolk Southern, and Yellow Freight. Several models and heuristic solution techniques have been introduced in the literature in the past ten years. However, the performance of such heuristics, under different transportation environments, has not been examined. This paper acts as a first step in this direction. The performance of two heuristics to solve a hub‐and‐spoke network is compared against the performance of an optimal technique, for various configurations of data. With the results of this study, business managers can, by analyzing the structure of their data, assess the “risk” associated with applying one of the two heuristics. Heuristic developers can also exploit the results of this study to give them insight into areas where heuristics can be developed or strengthened in order to give rise to more robust heuristics.

A balanced usability checklist approach to evaluate Palestinian hotel websites

This paper introduces a Balanced Usability Checklist (BUC) approach to assess the usability of ten Palestinian hotel websites. The BUC is a modified version of the known checklist analysis technique of user interfaces and includes dimensions for User Friendliness, Attractiveness, Marketing Effectiveness, and Technical Aspects of a website. Eight participants with experience in website design and usability were asked to evaluate each of the ten websites using the BUC approach. Overall, the hotel websites faired poorly on three out of the four dimensions. A relative ranking, based on the total score, was used to rank the hotels from 1 (highest) to 10 (lowest). This study has numerous implications, mainly for hotel managers wanting to improve the delivery of their services on the Internet. Results, limitations, and future research are discussed.

Using the Analytic Hierarchical Process to Create a Single Usability Score for Website Interfaces

We propose a new approach to create a single score metric to compare and rank the usability of website interfaces. The approach is based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process. We built the model and validated it using four usability studies, two of which are on a manufacturing firm website and the other two are on a service firm website. The results revealed a difference in domain between manufacturing and service. Still, this approach to creating a single score for usability is new in the literature for website evaluation and can help explain the ranking of website interfaces to non-experts. This is especially true for clients with the need to repeat website evaluations yearly or with clients who need a comparative analysis for their website against others in the same business. Future research is necessary to develop this approach further and validate it using a more comprehensive data set from an identical domain.