MODELING TIME-COST TRADE-OFFS IN CPM NETWORKS

A new type of PERT/CPM methodology is introduced whereby the individual activities within a project management network are endowed with resistive and capacitive elements. This methodology will enable us to mathematically define a completion time for the various activities and to relate the completion time to relevant cost in the completion of a particular task. It will also allow us to define the work done, and the rate at which work is being done, in an activity as a function of the applied effort and resource outlay. As a consequence, both the resource expenditure and the work done can be tracked within a network as a function of time.     

MANAGEMENT OF COLLEGE STUDENT RECRUITING ACTIVITIES USING GOAL PROGRAMMING*

A shrinking pool of potential students, due to a declining birthrate as well as uncertain economic times, is creating the need for more effective recruiting of college students. One approach using a goal programming model has been developed and is currently being used to manage recruitment activities in a small four-year college in Nebraska. The model identifies both the type and number of activities that must be completed each quarter in order to reach an enrollment goal for a given year. Factors such as budget, time, manpower, and marketing strategies are highlighted in the model. The results of the goal programming model encouraged more field activities in the first two quarters with emphasis on new-candidate identification. The third-quarter recruiting strategy is more balanced while the fourth-quarter emphasis is placed on follow-up activities that occur chiefly in the office. Use of this model will enable recruiters to meet enrollments while managing recruiting resources and activities in order to remain within the recruiting budget.     

Interorganizational Determinants of Environmental Purchasing: Initial Evidence from the Consumer Products Industries*

Environmental purchasing consists of the purchasing function's involvement in activities that include reduction, recycling, reuse, and substitution of materials. Despite the potentially important role that the purchasing function can play in a firm's environmental activities, little research has been performed to date that examines the factors that impact environmental purchasing. The authors develop and empirically test a theoretical model that examines how interorganizational factors both drive and constrain purchasing's involvement in environmental activities. The empirical findings suggest that environmental purchasing activities will be facilitated through increased coordination with suppliers as well as downstream members of the supply chain, including retailers. The results also suggest the need for increased coordination within the firm, particularly between the purchasing function on the inbound side and marketing and distribution functions on the outbound side.     

MANAGING PRODUCT RETURNS FOR REMANUFACTURING

Firms are often encouraged to offer environmentally friendly products as a demonstration of corporate citizenship. However, this may prove to be an unrealistic expectation since a rational firm will only engage in profitable ventures; those that increase shareholder wealth. We develop a framework for analyzing the profitability of reuse activities and show how the management of product returns influences operational requirements. We show that the acquisition of used products may be used as the control lever for the management and profitability of reuse activities. These activities, termed product acquisition management, affect several important business decisions. First, if a firm is to pursue reuse activities, these reuse activities must be value‐creating. Second, if a firm is to compete by offering remanufactured products, then we show how product returns management influences the overall profitability of such activities via a trial and error EVA approach. Third, we show how operational issues are strongly affected by the approach used to manage product returns. There is a need for future research specifying the mathematical relationship between acquisition price and the nominal quality of the returned product.     

A stakeholder perspective on process improvement behaviours: delivering the triple bottom line in SMEs

Abstract

The primary focus of operations management is to add value through operational processes. Considerable attention has been given to using process improvement (PI) techniques to reduce costs and time, in order to develop a competitive advantage for the wider organization. However, this narrow definition of value at times overlooks the triple bottom line (TBL) which can result in a number of unintended consequences, specifically issues related to environmental and social measures of performance. To address this, a stakeholder theory lens will be used to analyze PI activities within the context of small and medium-sized enterprises. The TBL will be used to complement the stakeholder perspective, to interpret the benefits that are realized from PI activities. This article highlights both the direct benefits from PI as well as more indirect benefits realized by involving a selection of salient stakeholders in PI. It will show how a developed view of PI can provide an important mechanism for delivering improvements to a firm’s TBL. The work concludes by highlighting the contributions made to both PI practice and stakeholder theory, while acknowledging the need for more research on PI, both from a stakeholder perspective and how it impacts a firm’s TBL.     

新世纪:中国管理科学界的挑战、机遇与对策

21世纪我们将面临什么样的社会经济环境 ?在该环境下社会经济活动的管理将具有什么新特点 ?这些特点对管理科学将提出什么新要求 ?面对这些要求 ,中国管理科学界的挑战、机遇和对策是什么 ?文章将对这些问题展开讨论和分析     

GPRs搭接网络分解优化定理在流水作业中的应用

本文发现在GPRs搭接网络传统算法中，针对某些可分解的关键工序，通过工序的分解会产生分解悖论和咖啡时间悖论。通过对这些悖论现象的分析研究，发现其存在帕累托改进。对此，提出了两个分解优化定理及网络的分解优化方法，使网络的总工期和总时差的分布都得到了优化，为项目WBS和资源优化提供了更科学的，更充足的条件。并将该分解优化定理同流水作业原理相结合，用实例证明了该方法的可操作性，为流水作业中施工段的划分提供了科学的优化方法。     

A construal level analysis of organizational change processes

To effectively manage planned change and understand differences in leaders’ and recipients’ responses to it, it is essential to understand how change is cognitively represented by organization members. In this theory-development article, we draw upon construal-level theory (CLT) and conceptually explore the role of change construal level in explaining responses to organizational change. We discuss differences between change leaders’ and recipients’ change construals, and differences in the relationships between change construal level and the response to change as a function of the change activities taking place. Specifically, we argue that high-level (i.e., abstract) construals of change will facilitate the effective initiation of change when the focus is on equilibrium-breaking activities, and that low-level (i.e., concrete) construals will facilitate the effective implementation of change when the focus is on institutionalization of the change. We further propose that leaders’ engagement in visionary leadership increases the likelihood that their generally higher level construal of change will be integrated into recipients’ change construals, elaborating and elevating them, and that recipients’ engagement in upward prohibitive voice behaviors will increase the likelihood that their generally lower construal of change will be integrated into leaders’ change construals, elaborating and concretizing them. We discuss theoretical and practical implications of our framework.     

Quality assessment tools add value

The rapid evolution of the health care marketplace can be expected to continue as we move closer to the 21st Century. Externally-imposed pressures for cost reduction will increasingly be accompanied by pressure within health care organizations as risk-sharing reimbursement arrangements become more commonplace. Competitive advantage will be available to those organizations that can demonstrate objective value as defined by the cost-quality equation. The tools an organization chooses to perform quality assessment will be an important factor in its ability to demonstrate such value. Traditional quality assurance will in all likelihood continue, but the extent to which quality improvement activities are adopted by the culture of an organization may determine its ability to provide objective evidence of better health status outcomes.     

Reporting quality of health care to the board

The reporting of quality of health care to the governing board has long been an enigma. Now we are in the midst of a revolution in health care, as we shift our focus from solely the clinical performance of individuals to a broader scope of assessing and improving all activities around patient services and patient care--i.e., management outcomes integrated with clinical outcomes to help identify opportunities to improve patient care. In addition, apprised of corporate liability for the quality of care provided in health care organizations, governing boards are raising questions and demanding more information. To maintain this high degree of interest in quality of health care, information should be restricted to what the board needs to know. This article will be confined to the hospital's organizationwide quality system of monitoring and evaluating. While medical staff credentialing and privileging are also board responsibilities and quality management activities should be used in the privileging and credentialing process, they will not be addressed in this article.     

PERT: A DYNAMIC APPROACH

This paper combines learning curves with a PERT network to produce a dynamic PERT model. The dynamic model takes cognizance of the fact that many projects are of a repetitive nature and that the network may vary between runs of the project through the addition or deletion of activities attendant to producing variations of a basic model. Thus, on any given run, the activities comprising a network will exhibit varying degrees of repetitiveness. The proposed model treats the estimated completion times of activities comprising the network as a function of (1) the number of times the various activities have been repeated on prior runs of the project, and (2) the learning rate attendant to each activity. Thus, the estimated completion time for a run through the project changes as additional units are produced. A sixteen event PERT network is simulated (using the proposed dynamic model) through twenty runs of a project. The simulation is conducted under three situations; namely, with learning taking place on (1) only noncritical activities, (2) only critical activities, and (3) all activities. In all three cases the results are compared to the static PERT model. The implications of the proposed model for improved decision making are presented in the concluding remarks of the paper.     

The new age of ethical marketing for the 21st century

The premise of this paper is that the strong trends toward ever increasing centralization in the agricultural producing sector of the United States in the 1980s will exacerbate in the middle-to-late 1990s. This, in turn, will lead to both radical changes in the consumer movement by the year 2000, and also to a completely redefined mission for the corporate marketing function as well. Specifically, the deliberate federal policies of the 1980s which led to a “shake-out” of the small family farm units in favor of large agri-business concerns in order to reduce federal subsidies will lead, in the 1990s, to the most noted of deleterious consequences of monopolization, namely ever increasing prices and lowered quality. The authors believe that by the late 1990s the American public will perceive this state of affairs as being intolerable and it will lead them to organize “Big Consumerism”, a cohesive, much strengthened version of the consumer movement of the 1980s. This movement will, among other major activities, establish consumer cooperatives as a way to control costs through the elimination of unnecessary middlemen. In addition, this new consumerism will demand a change in the ethical standards of business behavior which, in turn, will result in a reformation in the role of the “New Marketer”. This “New Marketer” function will be envisioned and practiced by incumbents as informational and educational, adhering to the highest standards of truthfulness concerning the products they are attempting to market. In this regard, the role of governmental agencies will be greatly strengthened and expanded to insure that the marketing profession lives up to these highest ethical standards and practices.     

复杂不确定环境下活动可拆分的项目资源鲁棒性调度优化

复杂不确定环境下,制定一个具有较强抗干扰能力的基准进度计划非常必要。本文研究了活动工期不确定环境下考虑活动可拆分的项目资源鲁棒性调度优化问题,旨在考虑活动可拆分,探究在活动优先关系约束、项目截止日期约束、活动拆分约束、资源流约束等条件下如何进行活动拆分决策并合理地安排各个项目活动/活动分段间的资源调配方案和时间缓冲添加策略,以制定鲁棒性最大化的基准进度计划。本文创新点如下：1)在项目资源鲁棒性调度优化问题中考虑活动可拆分,定义了资源流网络下活动自由时差的计算方法,提出了一种新的活动可拆分情形下进度计划鲁棒性的衡量方式,进而构建得到了考虑活动可拆分的项目资源鲁棒性调度优化模型;2)分析证明了问题模型的强NP-hard属性以及非线性属性,并在此基础上开发了一种内嵌资源调度安排的遗传算法进行问题求解;3)选取一个典型的实际案例对研究问题进行说明,直观展示了活动拆分执行对进度计划鲁棒性提升的重要价值,揭示了鲁棒性调度计划中资源调度方案的重要性,得到了活动拆分执行会增加项目内部资源转移次数的结论。     

Leadership competencies for implementing planned organizational change

This paper bridges the leadership and organizational change literatures by exploring the relationship between managers' leadership competencies (namely, their effectiveness at person-oriented and task-oriented behaviors) and the likelihood that they will emphasize the different activities involved in planned organizational change implementation (namely, communicating the need for change, mobilizing others to support the change, and evaluating the change implementation). We examine this relationship using data from 89 clinical managers at the United Kingdom National Health Service who implemented change projects between 2003 and 2004. Our results lend overall support to the proposed theory. This finding suggests that treating planned organizational change as a generic phenomenon might mask important idiosyncrasies associated both with the different activities involved in the change implementation process and with the unique functions that leadership competencies might play in the execution of these activities.     

Managing Interdependence: The Effects of Outsourcing Structure on the Performance of Complex Projects*

The outsourcing of complex activities has become a common organizational practice. Yet very little research has focused on the implications of how these activities are divided up among outsourcing partners. Drawing on structural contingency theory, we argue that: (1) because activities within stages of complex projects are highly interdependent, outsourcing structures where owner firms do not maintain high levels of dominance over the activities that are performed will pose control and coordination challenges, leading to poor project performance; (2) the adverse effects of poorly structured outsourcing arrangements will spill over to subsequent project stages when activities are interdependent across project stages; and (3) dividing activities among large numbers of contractors or distributing work evenly among contractors exacerbates coordination and control problems further contributing to poor project performance. Our empirical analysis of 323 capital facility construction projects supports our predictions. Overall, these results provide strong evidence that some outsourcing structures are more costly than others and that because of the nature of complex projects the detrimental effects of poorly structured outsourcing are often not completely observable at the time activities are completed. We discuss the implications of our findings for capital construction and for outsourcing more generally.     

具有时间转换约束项目网络的时差分析

在传统的网络计划模型中,当所有的紧前工序结束后,当前工序就能够马上开始。但在实践过程中,由于许多工序会受到开始时间的约束,因此工序很少能在满足优先关系约束后的任意时刻开始,而具有时间转换约束的网络则能很好地描述此类问题。本文主要研究在时间转换约束下,不同类型的工序在网络中的时间特性变化情况,并在现有研究基础上,将网络中工序的时间参数由传统的算法转换成具有时间转换约束的时间参数,提出新的机动时间计算公式。最后以案例的形式分析比较传统网络与具有时间转换约束网络的区别,从而体现时间转换约束网络模型的实践价值。     

同群效应对创业活动影响的模型构建与实证

本文从社会个体与群体行为互动的视角研究个体的创业活动决策机理，分析认为，个体因受到周围创业者冒险拼搏精神的影响而进行创业，或者通过与周围创业者交往的社会学习得到与创业相关的技术或者经验从而自身也投入创业，二者均使得创业活动具有同群效应。进一步基于中国家庭追踪调查（CFPS）截面数据进行检验的结果显示：（1）个体的创业活动存在显著同群效应，即邻里的创业活动对个体产生了明显的示范作用，带动其投入到创业活动中；（2）信息时代因电视、互联网等媒体传播应用对于传统物理意义上的同群效应存在一定程度的替代。文章采用了工具变量法解决了关联效应和反射性问题对同群效应的估计带来的影响，以确保同群效应的有效识别。上述发现说明，尽管创业活动是市场参与个体的自由选择行为，但各种途径的宣传，包括社区宣传和各种媒体宣传对于推动大众创业有不可或缺的作用。     

The Effects of Knowledge Management on Team Members' Ratings of Project Success and Impact*

Many organizations are trying to improve the generation and utilization of knowledge. The activities associated with these efforts are identified as organizational knowledge management (KM). While much has been written about knowledge management from the organizational level, the success of such efforts over the long run will depend upon on how KM activities impact important outcomes as perceived by those at the employee level who actually implement the activities. This study used the input‐process‐output framework of team effectiveness to investigate the relationship between selected KM‐related activities on integrated product and process development team members' satisfaction with their project's success and the impact they expected it to have on the organization. The results indicate that team‐level leadership and support (i.e., inputs), along with knowledge generation and dissemination (i.e., processes), are key drivers of member performance‐related ratings (i.e., outputs). Finally, and possibly most importantly, a number of interactions were evident suggesting that the KM processes moderate the effects of the KM inputs. These findings and their implications are discussed.     

关系营销在中国的文化基础

本文从中国文化或文化心理的角度讨论了中国关系营销的基础。基本结论如下:中国的人际关系行为有着丰富的文化内涵,在很大程度上体现着中国人的生活本身;关系营销是中国人人际关系活动向市场活动或经济活动渗透的一种自然取向,因此,中国的市场营销一开始就是关系营销;中国的关系营销与西方的关系营销走的是两条不同的路,有着不同的起源和文化内涵,这为关系营销理论的研究提供了一个可能的方向;关系营销的一些问题(如操作性问题),有可能通过对于中国文化中关系行为的研究得到解决。     

Governance Choices for Corporate Social Responsibility: to Contribute,Collaborate or Internalize?

Within a competitive business environment where resources are limited, it is increasingly important for senior management to make every investment count. Measuring ‘return on investment’ occurs at every level of operations—so why not also in the arena of Corporate Social activity? Until now, much research has focused on finding the link between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and increased business performance. Researchers have not examined the cost implications associated with the different forms of governance utilized by companies to implement their CSR activities, e.g., outsourcing through charitable contributions, developing an in-house program, or creating a more collaborative model, which benefits both the company and the partner nonprofit organization. Careful examination and evaluation of these costs will help senior management choose the governance structure that will maximize the benefits they reap from CSR activities.Drawing upon insights from organizational economics, this article develops a framework to compare the alternative modes of CSR governance and identifies the key drivers that affect governance choice, including associated costs. Most importantly, it provides a decision-making tool that can guide senior management in this vital choice as a way to contribute to the competitive advantage of the firm.