Forecasting Product Returns for Remanufacturing Operations

Driven by legislative pressures, an increasing number of manufacturing companies have been implementing comprehensive recycling and remanufacturing programs. The accurate forecasting of product returns is important for procurement decisions, production planning, and inventory and disposal management in such remanufacturing operations. In this study, we consider a manufacturer that also acts as a remanufacturer, and develop a generalized forecasting approach to determine the distribution of the returns of used products, as well as integrate it with an inventory model to enable production planning and control. We compare our forecasting approach to previous models and show that our approach is more consistent with continuous time, provides accurate estimates when the return lags are exponential in nature, and results in fewer units being held in inventory on average. The analysis revealed that these gains in accuracy resulted in the most cost savings when demand volumes for remanufactured products were high compared to the volume of returned products. Such situations require the frequent acquisition of cores to meet demand. The results show that significant cost savings can be achieved by using the proposed approach for sourcing product returns.     

Adaptive versus Proactive Behavior in Service Recovery: The Role of Self‐Managing Teams

In this article, we develop a conceptual model of adaptive versus proactive recovery behavior by self‐managing teams (SMTs) in service recovery operations. To empirically test the conceptual model a combination of bank employee, customer, and archival data is collected. The results demonstrate support for independent group‐level effects of intrateam support on adaptive and proactive recovery behavior, indicating that perceptual consensus within service teams has incremental value in explaining service recovery performance. In addition, we provide evidence that adaptive and proactive recovery behavior have differential effects on external performance measures. More specifically, higher levels of adaptive performance positively influence customer‐based parameters (i.e., service recovery satisfaction and loyalty intentions), while employee proactive recovery behavior contributes to higher share of customer rates.     

Service Personnel,Technology, and Their Interaction in Influencing Customer Satisfaction*

Managing both the technologies and the personnel needed for providing high‐quality, multichannel customer support creates a complex and persistent operational challenge. Adding to this difficulty, it is still unclear how service personnel and these new communication technologies interact to influence the customer's perceptions of the service being provided. Motivated by both practical importance and inconsistent findings in the academic literature, this exploratory research examines the interaction of media richness, represented by three different technology contexts (telephone, e‐mail, and online chat), with six customer service representative (CSR) characteristics and their influences on customer satisfaction. Using a large‐sample customer survey data set, the article develops a multigroup structural equation model to analyze these interactions. Results suggest that CSR characteristics influence customer service satisfaction similarly across all three technology‐mediated contexts. Of the characteristics studied, service representatives contribute to customer satisfaction more when they exhibit the characteristics of thoroughness, knowledgeableness, and preparedness, regardless of the richness of the medium used. Surprisingly, while three other CSR characteristics studied (courtesy, professionalism, and attentiveness) are traditionally believed to be important in face‐to‐face encounters, they had no significant impact on customer satisfaction in the technology‐mediated contexts studied. Implications for both practitioners and researchers are drawn from the results and future research opportunities are discussed.     

Effective Design of Products/Services: An Approach Based on Integration of Marketing and Operations Management Decisions*

This paper presents an integrated framework for designing profit‐maximizing products/ services, which can also be produced at reasonable operating difficulty levels. Operating difficulty is represented as a function of product and process attributes, and measures a firm's relative ease or difficulty in meeting customer demand patterns under specified operating conditions. Earlier optimum product design procedures have not considered. operational difficulty. We show that optimum profit, market share, cost, and product profiles are dependent on operating difficulty level. Empirical results from the pizza delivery industry demonstrate the value of the proposed Effective Product/Service Design approach.     

基于心理契约的关系营销机制:服务业实证研究

借鉴组织行为学研究成果,本文对心理契约概念进行了界定。在关系营销研究框架基础上,加入心理契约这一变量,就心理契约与顾客信任、顾客承诺、顾客忠诚之间的关系建立了结构方程模型。通过两个服务行业的实证数据分析,基于心理契约的关系营销机制得到了验证。研究结果为营销研究和实践提供了理论指导和实证依据。     

A Design Theory Approach to Building Strategic Network‐Based Customer Service Systems*

Customer service is a key component of a firm's value proposition and a fundamental driver of differentiation and competitive advantage in nearly every industry. Moreover, the relentless coevolution of service opportunities with novel and more powerful information technologies has made this area exciting for academic researchers who can contribute to shaping the design and management of future customer service systems. We engage in interdisciplinary research—across information systems, marketing, and computer science—in order to contribute to the service design and service management literature. Grounded in the design‐science perspective, our study leverages marketing theory on the service‐dominant logic and recent findings pertaining to the evolution of customer service systems. Our theorizing culminates with the articulation of four design principles. These design principles underlie the emerging class of customer service systems that, we believe, will enable firms to better compete in an environment characterized by an increase in customer centricity and in customers' ability to self‐serve and dynamically assemble the components of solutions that fit their needs. In this environment, customers retain control over their transactional data, as well as the timing and mode of their interactions with firms, as they increasingly gravitate toward integrated complete customer solutions rather than single products or services. Guided by these design principles, we iterated through, and evaluated, two instantiations of the class of systems we propose, before outlining implications and directions for further cross‐disciplinary scholarly research.     

Assessing Markups,Service Quality,and Product Attributes in Music CDs' Internet Retailing

We investigate trade‐offs among markups, service quality, and product attributes across customer, Internet retailer, and wholesaler echelons. Research has documented the reality of retail price dispersion, but little is known about how retail markups, in particular, are related to service quality and product attributes. For example, do Internet retailers deliver superior service in return for high markups? Do product characteristics affect the relationship between service and markups for retailers? To examine these issues, we first developed a model of Internet retail profitability that separates revenues and costs related to sales from other profit sources. This framework allowed us to position our work alongside the extant literature about Internet retailing. Moreover, it led us to synthesize service quality dimensions found in Internet retailing studies. We subsequently developed a critical‐event study based on the profit model and the synthesis of service quality dimensions to delineate service aspects that retailers should emphasize to address buyers' utility. Finally, we collected data from Internet purchases across retailers to isolate markup‐service quality trade‐offs along our delineated service aspects. We find that high markups are associated with superior performance across service quality dimensions. Furthermore, this trade‐off becomes more acutely defined when products with variable popularity are transacted.     

Schedule Recovery: Unplanned Absences in Service Operations*

The U.S. service sector loses 2.3% of all scheduled labor hours to unplanned absences, but in some industries, the total cost of unplanned absences approaches 20% of payroll expense. The principal reasons for unscheduled absences (personal illness and family issues) are unlikely to abate anytime soon. Despite this, most labor scheduling systems continue to assume perfect attendance. This oversight masks an important but rarely addressed issue in services management: how to recover from short‐notice, short‐term reductions in planned capacity. In this article, we model optimal responses to unplanned employee absences in multi‐server queueing systems that provide discrete, pay‐per‐use services for impatient customers. Our goal is to assess the performance of alternate absence recovery strategies under various staffing and scheduling regimes. We accomplish this by first developing optimal labor schedules for hypothetical service environments with unreliable workers. We then simulate unplanned employee absences, apply an absence recovery model, and compute system profits. Our absence recovery model utilizes recovery strategies such as holdover overtime, call‐ins, and temporary workers. We find that holdover overtime is an effective absence recovery strategy provided sufficient reserve capacity (maximum allowable work hours minus scheduled hours) exists. Otherwise, less precise and more costly absence recovery methods such as call‐ins and temporary help service workers may be needed. We also find that choices for initial staffing and scheduling policies, such as planned overtime and absence anticipation, significantly influence the likelihood of successful absence recovery. To predict the effectiveness of absence recovery policies under alternate staffing/scheduling strategies and operating environments, we propose an index based on initial capacity reserves.     

基于顾客感知价值的服务企业竞争力探析

随着服务业在社会经济发展中的地位日益突出,服务企业竞争力问题开始引起学术界关注。本文将顾客感知价值嵌入传统的企业战略研究范式之中,阐述了顾客感知价值与企业竞争力的关系;在剖析了顾客感知价值概念及其决定因素的基础上,结合服务的基本特性提出了通过改善顾客感知价值提升服务企业竞争力的策略。     

A PROCUREMENT STAFFING MODEL: ESTIMATING THE SERVICE AND COST IMPACTS OF ALTERING OPERATIONS*

Evaluating the service and cost impacts of altering procurement configurations is a common problem whenever an organization desires to be responsive to the changing needs of the populations being served. Changes relate to the volume of the work load, the degree of responsiveness required, or the technology and processes used. In real-world situations, personnel turnovers, uneven work loads, leaves, training requirements, and use of overtime all contribute to the complexity of the task. When a range of experience over different-sized operations is available, econometric approaches are applicable to estimate economies of scaie and technical substitution possibilities. Otherwise, queuing and job-shop modeling, combined with simulation approaches, can be helpful. This paper presents a case study of the analysis of a proposed reorganization for a large procurement activity in the U.S. Navy. The actual job-shop-scheduling and task-sequencing logic used in practice was modeled. Cost comparisons of four procurement configurations were generated under the constraints that prespecified levels of service be satisfied.     

Tour Scheduling and Task Assignment of a Heterogeneous Work Force: A Heuristic Approach

The dual problem of work tour scheduling and task assignment involving workers who differ in their times of availability and task qualifications is examined in this paper. The problem is presented in the context of a fast food restaurant, but applies equally well to a diverse set of service operations. Developing a week-long labor schedule is a nontrivial problem, in terms of complexity and importance, which a manager spends as much as a full workday solving. The primary scheduling objective (the manager's concern) is the minimization of overstaffing in the face of significant hourly and daily fluctuations in minimum staffing requirements. The secondary objective (the workers’ concern) is the minimization of the sum of the squared differences between the number of work hours scheduled and the number targeted for each employee. Contributing to scheduling complexity are constraints on the structure of work tours, including minimum and maximum shift lengths and a maximum number of workdays. A goal programming formulation of a representative problem is shown to be too large, for all practical purposes, to be solved optimally. Existing heuristic procedures related to this research possess inherent limitations which render them inadequate for our purposes. Subsequently, we propose and demonstrate a computerized heuristic procedure capable of producing a labor schedule requiring at most minor refinement by a manager.     

Decision Sciences Research in China: A Critical Review and Research Agenda—Foundations and Overview*

This article focuses on decision sciences research in China, providing an overview of current research and developing a foundation for future China‐based research. China provides a unique research opportunity for decision sciences researchers, owing to its recent history, rapid economic development, and strong national culture. We examine recent economic reforms and their impact on the development of research questions in the decision sciences, as well as discuss characteristics of the diverse regions in China and their potential as sites for various types of research. We provide a brief overview of recent China‐based research on decision sciences issues relating to national culture, supply chain management, quality management, production planning and control, operations strategy, and new product development and discuss some of the unique methodological challenges inherent in China‐based research. We conclude by looking forward to emerging research opportunities in China.     

Customer Behavior in an Online Ordering Application: A Decision Scoring Model*

This research presents the development of behavioral scoring models to predict future customer purchases in an online ordering application. Internet retailing lowers many barriers for customers switching between retailers for repeat purchases; thus, retaining existing customers is a key challenge for achieving profitability. Survey data were collected from 1,089 online customers of two companies. The subjective survey data were then used to predict purchases over the ensuing 12 months based on data from the company databases. The analysis illustrates the general applicability of predictive models of future customer purchases while also demonstrating the need to develop specific models tailored for an individual company's operating and marketing environment. The models provide insight on how companies can target marketing dollars more effectively and allocate investment across multiple operational areas for maximum return. The research answers a call for rigorous research in the area of predictive marketing, an area in which many companies are excelling but where there is a scarcity of detailed knowledge regarding application of such models.     

Examining Pathways from Innovation Orientation to Patient Satisfaction: A Relational View of Healthcare Delivery*

The federal government and industry leaders view innovation as a potentially fruitful way to improve hospital performance, specifically patient satisfaction. However, translating a hospital's innovation orientation into improved performance is challenging given that important network participants—namely physicians—may possess different aims. Grounded in Relational RBV, this study tests a model linking innovation orientation to patient satisfaction through a pathway of knowledge‐sharing routines (physician partnering and customer relationship management) and complementary capabilities (hospital responsiveness). Further, this study investigates the moderating role of physician employment (a form of governance) by examining hospitals with high and low levels of employed physicians. Structural Equation Modeling results from a paired sample of primary survey and secondary data from 173 acute care hospitals in the USA reveal the following. Hospitals with high levels of employed physicians translate innovation orientation into patient satisfaction by using customer relationship management (CRM) programs to influence hospital responsiveness directly, ultimately leading to patient satisfaction. Hospitals with low levels of physician employment use CRM programs in a fully mediated fashion to inform physician partnering activities, which influence hospital responsiveness, driving patient satisfaction.     

Market Orientation,Internal Process,and External Network: A Qualitative Comparative Analysis of Key Decisional Alternatives in the New Service Development*

Scholars from different disciplines acknowledge the importance of studying new service development (NSD), which is considered a central process for sustaining a superior competitive advantage of service firms. Although extant literature provides several important insights into how NSD processes are structured and organized, there is much less evidence on what makes NSD processes successful, that is, capable of contributing to a firm's sales and profits. In other words, which are the decisions that maximize the likelihood of developing successful new services? Drawing on the emerging “service‐dominant logic” paradigm, we address this question by developing an NSD framework with three main decisional nodes: market orientation, internal process organization, and external network. Using a qualitative comparative analysis technique, we discovered combinations of alternatives that maximize likelihood of establishing a successful service innovation. Specifically, we tested our NSD framework in the context of hospitality services and found that successful NSD can be achieved through two sets of decisions. The first one includes the presence of a proactive market orientation (PMO) and a formal top‐down innovative process, but the absence of a responsive market orientation. The second one includes the presence of both responsive and PMO and an open innovation model. No single element was a sufficient condition for NSD success, though PMO was a necessary condition. Several implications for theory and decision‐making practice are discussed on the basis of our findings.     

An Operations Perspective on Product Take‐Back Legislation for E‐Waste: Theory,Practice, and Research Needs

Agrowing stream of environmental legislation enforces collection and recycling of used electrical and electronics products. Based on our experiences with producers coping with e‐waste legislation, we find that there is a strong need for research on the implications of such legislation from an operations perspective. In particular, as a discipline at the interface of systems design and economic modeling, operations focused research can be extremely useful in identifying appropriate e‐waste take‐back implementations for different business environments and how producers should react to them.     

The Dynamics of Pre‐ and Post‐purchase Service and Consumer Evaluation of Online Retailers: A Comparative Analysis of Dissonance and Disconfirmation Models*

This article explores the theoretical underpinnings of the dissonance framework in online consumer satisfaction formation process. Specifically, we suggest that any discrepancy between pre‐ and post‐purchase service performance would help determine consumers’ evaluations of online vendors. Drawing upon cognitive dissonance theory, a conceptual model is developed and tested in two different studies (preliminary and main studies). Using data from 191 college students collected longitudinally, the preliminary study demonstrates the validity and reliability of the measurements. Using a comparative analysis, the main study then tests our conceptual model as well as various competing models, including the expectation–confirmation model, with a sample of 292 online consumers. The results in both studies support our main prediction that the service encountered in different stages establishes dissonance. Specifically, we find that dissonance explains online consumers’ satisfaction process to a substantial extent, as compared with disconfirmation under the same conditions in online retailers. This study contributes to providing an alternative yet substantial approach for expectation–confirmation theory, reflecting the overarching nature of online shopping.