Market research with the aid of a smartphone application – a case study

We discuss using the presumed ‘wisdom of the crowd’ to reduce the bullwhip effect in supply chains by enhancing the accuracy of demand forecast. Our case study describes a joint project of a leading European technology company (We chose RAGD as a pseudonym for the company throughout the study.) and the University of Kassel on a smartphone application for end customers to gather early information for this producer’s forecast. Our results confirm the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ hypothesis: A group of experts, in our case technicians who install and maintain RAGD-products, is capable of anticipating market fluctuations six weeks in advance. This only holds true if the ‘crowd’ of technicians is large enough. Our business climate index outperforms the company forecast in the first six months, when on average 22 technicians took part per week. We discuss successes and limitations of the cooperation and provide recommendations for similar projects.     

Do Business Cycles Have Long‐Term Impact for Particular Cohorts?

Do business cycle fluctuations and changes in employment produce cohorts with permanently different labour market attachment? Taking an explicit cohort perspective and based on Danish register data, we find noticeable age dependent persistence in employment rates at the cohort level. Younger workers tend to be more exposed to business cycle fluctuations than older workers, but importantly they recover more quickly than older workers for whom persistence is stronger. Moreover, following the employment trajectories of cohorts, no cohorts have been permanently ‘scarred’ in terms of employment due to a sequence of adverse shocks. Finally, an explicit account of overlapping cohorts is shown to affect assessments of persistence in aggregate employment rates.     

Forecasting the market demand for waste paper

In a recent article in this journal, Livesey and Barcena supplied an interesting but necessarily superficial analysis of the market for waste paper. Their essential conclusion was that, faced with future shortages, and hence increased prices of wood pulp, the paper and board industry would be forced to rely more heavily on secondary fibre. In turn, they felt that ‘in order to ensure an adequate supply of waste paper, governments may need to exert a greater degree of influence over the market than they do at present’.This paper seeks to provide a more rigorous analysis of the ‘waste paper problem’ in terms of future demand and fluctuations in that demand. It also corrects some misconceptions in the paper by Livesey and Barcena as to the likely sources of future supply and the economics of securing those supplies.     

Union–Firm Bargaining as a Repeated Game and the Behaviour of Wages over the Business Cycle

This paper studies a repeated game between a union and a firm in the presence of revenue fluctuations. The simple setup, mainly based on Schultz’s (1995) model, gives support to the idea that the existence of a long-term relationship may change the predictions of the static one-shot model of wage and employment determination in unionized labour markets. In particular, when revenue is fluctuating and the discount factor is moderate the players can commit themselves to some ‘second best’ strategies, rather than playing non-cooperative strategies. As a consequence of the enforcement problems a flat wage over the business cycle may arise. This analysis suggests that ‘second best’ strategies allowing for a pro-cyclical wage as well as for a counter-cyclical wage are feasible. However, when the discount factor decreases and approaches a certain threshold value the parties cannot do better than play a wage constant over the cycle. Moreover, the resulting wage varies less than the employment level, in accordance with the empirical evidence.     

European high technology manufacturing: Choices on the path to manufacturing excellence

The author is concerned to point out that advanced manufacturing technologies have their main impact on ‘manufacturing deliverables’, particularly quality, delivery and cost. It is these deliverables that interest companies in their attempts to compete globally by using high technology strategies.The technologies themselves - computer aided design, computer numerical control, or optimised production technology, for instance, can be categorised into ‘high-tech’ or ‘lo-tech’. But the division is somewhat artificial, and the way forward may be pragmatic.     

Winning the Export War: British, Japanese and West German Exporters' Strategy Compared

A comparison of pricing policies, price and volume volatility, and investment in distribution, sales and marketing systems across 462 product categories identifies important differences in the strategies of British, Japanese and West German exporters towards the US market. The impact of these strategic choices on the evolution of market share is tested. The results suggest that many British manufacturers' export strategy has been dominated by UK supply and demand considerations. A large proportion of British exports are therefore confined to niches where sensitivity to price fluctuations and ‘stop-start’ supply is low and local distribution support is less important. Products where ‘pull marketing’ dominates are the key exception. Japanese exporters have invested heavily in US distribution and channel support, combined with a policy of stable US prices, aiding long term penetration. West German exporters have built share on technological advantage and direct sales support supplied from Germany to a limited number of customers.     

Governing the Circular Economy in the City: Local Planning Practice in London

ABSTRACT

There is interest in the circular economy as a framework for transition from a linear take-make-dispose model of production and consumption, to a circular model which decouples economic growth from resource consumption. However, there is limited understanding of how that applies to the city through governance lens. This paper examines evidence from 28 municipalities in London to unpack the ‘government’ and ‘governance’ of circular economy in the city. It examines the ‘governmentality’ of circular economy in planning practice and reflects on what austerity localism and scalar politics might mean for the planning and governance of circular economy in cities.     

Analysing and Forecasting Business Cycles with the Aid of Economic Indicators

This paper provides a survey of the development and role of economic indicator analysis in measuring and analysing business cycles. Our major objective is to highlight the usefulness of leading and coincident indexes of economic activity, both for forecasting purposes and as an aid to macroeconomic policy. We show that the analysis of business cycles can be facilitated by distinguishing between classical cycles (which involve fluctuations in the level of aggregate economic activity) and growth cycles (recurring fluctuations in the rate of growth of economic activity around its trend). Many recent theoretical and empirical studies have concentrated on deviations from trend (that is, growth cycles) to the exclusion of classical cycles. We also argue for the use of a range of indicators, combined in a composite index, rather than using a single series such as gross domestic product as a proxy for the business cycle. We illustrate our survey with empirical evidence on the business cycles of the United States and Australia.     

Fuzzy Overall Equipment Effectiveness (FOEE): capturing performance fluctuations through LR Fuzzy numbers

The paper focuses on the Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), a performance indicator that is extensively used in the industry. The aim is to extend the capabilities of the OEE, so as to capture the day-to-day fluctuations to which manufacturing performances are subjected. To this aim, manufacturing losses are decomposed into elementary causes and modelled as LR fuzzy numbers. Next, in order to compute the Fuzzy Overall Equipment Effectiveness (FOEE), single losses are aggregated using the ‘fuzzy transformation model’. This approach limits the fuzzy overestimation phenomenon and assures both results’ accuracy and robustness. An industrial application, part of a lean project carried on by an important Italian manufacturing firm, is finally presented. Results are encouraging, since the FOEE made it possible to trace back the share of the overall fluctuations that is ascribable to each cause of loss. In this way, it provided the basis for setting improvement priorities and directed the lean team toward the selection of appropriate corrective actions.     

The Emergence of Flexible Networks in the UK Television Industry

‘Flexibility’ became a management buzz word in the mid-to-late 1980s. Environmental pressures drove firms in many industries towards more flexible structures – away from internal, classical hierarchies towards agent networks brought together on individual project-task grounds. The goal of many organizations, according to proponents of this trend, became that of seeking ‘flexible specialization’– integrating specialist resources in a dynamic, flexible fashion. Critics of the drive towards flexibility argue that the phenomenon has been overemphasized, and that large-scale bureaucracies geared for mass production are still the dominant structural form. This paper overviews the arguments concerning flexibility and related arguments concerning the emergence of networked forms of organization. Flexibility trends within the UK television industry are then explored to illustrate the emergence of ‘flexible specialization’ and a ‘dynamic network’ form of organization. Television thus serves as an important counter-factual to the dismissive claims of the critics of flexibility.     

Supply chain coordination with reverse logistics: A vendor/recycler-buyer synchronized cycles model

In this paper, we develop a synchronized cycles vendor-buyer coordination model where the single vendor is both a producer and recycler/remanufacturer, and there are multiple buyers. This model is an extension of the general single-vendor multi-buyer synchronization model to incorporate reverse logistics, and it includes costs associated with production, remanufacturing, transportation and holding inventory. The reverse logistics in the model is achieved by having the vendor pick up returned products from the buyers and then reprocess them for resale. Similar to the original synchronization model, the synchronization of our model is attained by coordinating the vendor's production cycle with both new products’ delivery cycles for transportation from the vendor to the buyers and used products’ pick-up cycles for transportation from the buyers to the vendor/recycler. A genetic algorithm is used for solving the problem. Numerical results show the benefits from this new synchronized cycles model compared to independent optimization with reverse logistics. Our findings further show that under low levels of returning products, the synchronized cycles coordination model with reverse logistics can reduce total system costs when compared with the independent optimization model without reverse logistics. Examples also show how the model with reverse logistics can perform economically better than the model without reverse logistics.     

Engineering education on production management. Different levels and degrees in five European countries: a comparison

The paper summarizes the results of the work-session ‘Education on Production Management’, organized during the Workshop and Summer School ‘Advanced Topics in Production Systems Design and Management’, held in Varenna (Lecco, Italy), from 1–4 June 1994. The organization of studies in the production management field in Denmark, France, Germany, Italy and Norway is outlined. A comparison between them shows a range of different solutions that must be understood to reach the goal of an effective exchange of production management people throughout the European Community.     

Supply chain scheduling optimisation in mass customisation based on dynamic profit preference and application case study

Traditionally, the ‘postponement strategy’ is a better way to solve the contradiction between ‘scale production effect’ and ‘customised demand level’ in mass customisation (MC). In higher customisation situation, the conflict between the role of postponement and the higher level of customised demand must be outstanding. When MC operates in supply chain, the excellent flexible characters of the supply chain system will create better conditions to solve the conflict from a new perspective, but the operating combination of MC and the supply chain with uncertain characters will lead to various complicated contradictions and bottlenecks. In this article, we discuss the supply chain scheduling optimisation in MC based on dynamic profit preference to solve these contradictions and bottlenecks, establish a special optimisation model to implement the scheduling. We make a computational industrial case study to illustrate the method application and show the benefits of solving the key contradiction in MC by the supply chain scheduling.     

Short-term foreign exchange risk management: Zero net exposure models

By balancing the relevant end of period assets and liabilities (i.e. a zero net exposure approach to foreign exchange risk management) the multinational corporate treasurer can, conservatively, protect against parity fluctuations without requiring exchange rate forecasts. This paper presents two goal programming formulations for short-term money management and evaluates the resulting strategies (via simulation) in terms of their impact on corporate profits. A hypothetical multinational corporation with headquarters in the US and subsidiaries in Canada, West Germany, and the United Kingdom serves as the experimental unit. The results suggest that the zero net exposure approach is no better than a naive ‘dart-throwing’ approach.     

Measuring effectiveness of production in the public sector

Key concepts in efficiency analyses are efficiency and effectiveness. Efficiency is popularly connected to ‘doing the things right’ and effectiveness to ‘doing the right things’. The paper elaborates upon the latter concept within a setting where resources are transformed into outputs under the control of a public provider, while outcomes with outputs as inputs represent higher social goals, but this production is outside the public provider׳s direct control. A new measure of overall preference effectiveness is introduced and its decomposition into output-oriented efficiency and output-mix efficiency is shown. The monumental task of getting the necessary information for calculating effectiveness is highlighted.     

Optimal mixed-model sequencing for balanced assembly lines

This paper describes an algorithm for solving optimally, the mixed-model sequencing problem when assembly line stations are balanced for each model. An optimal sequence is obtained with the minimization of the overall assembly line length for zero station idle time.The algorithm incorporates two basic steps. The first involves a search procedure that generates all cycle sequences; i.e. sequences having identical ‘start’ and ‘finish’ positions and whose work content can be executed within a defined station length. The second step uses integer programming (IP) to determine the number and combination of the various cycle sequences, such that the production demand is satisfied.     

Budgets for integrating decentralized investment and production planning

Planning for an economic enterprise can be dichotomized into short-run production planning and longer-run investment planning. Usually these problems are treated as if they were separate, if not independent. This paper briefly reviews the separate approaches to optimal production decision making and investment planning, ‘fusing’ these models in order to consider the two issues simultaneously. The resulting ‘fused’ model is used to illustrate several difficulties which result from an intuitive synthesis of the independent solutions of the production problem and the investment problem. An integrated model is presented representing a centralized simultaneous solution for decision variables from the two functional fields. The paper compares and contrasts the synthesis of separate functional models to the decomposition of a simultaneous model of those functional areas. A result of this comparison is a theoretical justification for operating budgets and revenue targets as organizational mechanisms for achieving coordinated plans among decentralized planning units. Further, the set of conditions are identified under which the two approaches to simultaneous decision making are equivalent.     

Does valuing androgyny and femininity lead to a female advantage? The relationship between gender-role,transformational leadership and identification

The notion of ‘think manager–think male’ has been demonstrated in many studies. The current study examines whether leaders are perceived as more effective when they have ‘feminine’, ‘masculine’ or ‘androgynous’ characteristics, and how this relates to the leader's and followers' sex. Using carefully matched samples of 930 employees of 76 bank managers, we studied the relationship between managers' gender-role identity (perceived ‘femininity’, ‘masculinity’ and ‘androgyny’) and how this relates to leadership effectiveness in terms of transformational leadership and personal identification with the leader. Our findings show that among both male and female leaders, ‘androgyny’ was more strongly related to transformational leadership and followers' identification than ‘non-androgyny’, and that leaders' ‘femininity’ was more strongly related to leadership effectiveness than ‘masculinity’. Furthermore, the results show that women paid a higher penalty for not being perceived as ‘androgynous’ (mixing ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’), in comparison to men with regard to personal identification. When examining same- versus cross-sex relationships, we found that ‘non-androgynous’ male managers were rated higher by their male employees than by their female employees. Our findings suggest that women and men who are interested in being perceived as effective leaders may be well advised to blend ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ behaviors, and even more so when they are in situations of non-congruency (i.e., women in leadership roles and leading in cross-sex relationships). We discuss the implications of these findings for both theory and practice.     

Alternative marketing systems for the apparel wool textile supply chain: filling the communication vacuum

Analysis of secondary data and information gathered from interviews with downstream wool supply chain members suggests that problems exist with the sourcing of raw wool for the apparel textile industry. Specific problems relate to ‘hard’ attributes, such as contaminated fibres and fibre diameter, as well as ‘soft’ attributes, such as origin of the wool and the nature of wool production systems. These problems may arise due to inadequate communication of quality attributes between chain members. The authors argue that more effective communication in the apparel wool supply chain requires the removal of ‘functional silos’, where supply chain members fail to look outside (upstream and/or downstream) their specific sectoral interests, and the continued dominance of the auction as the primary marketing system. The authors conclude that the apparel wool industry needs to co-operate to compete in dynamic, global markets increasingly dominated by synthetic fibres, in which vertically co-ordinated supply chains are the norm, auctions non-existent and communication is seen as a strength, rather than a weakness.     

Sticky Price Models of the Business Cycle: Can the Contract Multiplier Solve the Persistence Problem?

We construct a quantitative equilibrium model with firms setting prices in a staggered fashion and use it to ask whether monetary shocks can generate business cycle fluctuations. These fluctuations include persistent movements in output along with the other defining features of business cycles, like volatile investment and smooth consumption. We assume that prices are exogenously sticky for a short time. Persistent output fluctuations require endogenous price stickiness in the sense that firms choose not to change prices much when they can do so. We find that for a wide range of parameter values, the amount of endogenous stickiness is small. Thus, we find that in a standard quantitative model, staggered price‐setting, alone, does not generate business cycle fluctuations.