Advancing OSCM scientific knowledge by replicating empirical findings: Step-by-step procedure and illustration for transformative replication endeavors

Replication endeavors contribute to the accumulation of scientific evidence about previously reported findings and are crucial for scientific progress. Replication studies are, however, often discouraged and rarely published in the operations and supply chain management (OSCM) discipline. In this article, we offer a framework for replications consisting of two complementary tables. This framework recognizes two types of replications already defined in the literature (i.e., The Exact (EXT) Replication and the Methods-Only (MTD) Replication) and adds to these two new types (i.e., the Bounded-Conceptual-Extension (BCE) Replication and the Transformative (TRF) Replication). The framework clarifies what constitutes replications, forms of replication endeavors, and their purposes. Importantly, we also differentiate replication endeavors from reproducibility tests, robustness checks, and post hoc analyses. Moreover, we describe a seven-step procedure to guide the design, execution, and presentation of replication endeavors, illustrating these steps by conducting a TRF Replication that incorporates, at the same time, a BCE Replication and an MTD Replication of Polyviou et al. (2018). The proposed framework and seven-step procedure hopefully motivate OSCM scholars to embrace replications as valuable scientific endeavors that can yield corroborating evidence to bolster confidence in previously reported findings and, better yet, provide new nuanced findings to advance precise scientific understanding of past and new OSCM phenomena.     

A Performance Measure for Software Reuse Projects

The efficient development of software has become a critical factor to the success of many organizations. Significant competitive advantage can be realized by reducing the time to complete software development, while maintaining or improving quality levels. Project management activities, including the measurement of performance at the level of the project, can help the organization to both control projects and learn from experience. Traditionally, the productivity of a software development project has been measured as the complexity of code produced per unit of labor involved. An increasing number of organizations, however, are adopting the practice of software reuse, and under such conditions, such a traditional measure of productivity does not fully capture all the relevant elements of the reuse-driven development environment. This research develops a new performance measure that considers four major components of performance: productivity associated with development of new code, productivity associated with the reuse of previously written code, quality of the reuse decision, and relative value of reuse to the company. To illustrate the feasibility of the measure, a real-world productivity assessment is presented for an example company, and related implementation issues are discussed.     

A Comparative Revenue Analysis of Hotel Yield Management Heuristics

Yield management is the dynamic pricing, overbooking, and allocation of perishable assets across market segments in an effort to maximize short-term revenues for the firm. Numerous optimization heuristics for allocation and overbooking exist for the airline industry, whose perishable asset is the airplane seat. When an airplane departs, no revenue is gained from the empty seat(s). In the hotel industry, the perishable asset is the hotel room-once a room is left empty for a night, that night's revenue cannot be recaptured. The literature on yield management heuristics for the hotel industry is sparse. For the hotel operating environment, no research has adequately (1) integrated overbooking with allocation, (2) modeled the phenomenon of hotel patrons extending or contracting their stay at a moment's notice, or (3) performed a realistic performance comparison of alternative heuristics. This research develops (1) two hotel-specific algorithms that both integrate overbooking with the allocation decisions, (2) a simulation model to reproduce realistic hotel operating environments, and (3) compares the performance of five heuristics under 36 realistic hotel operating environments. Seven conclusions are reached with regard to which heuristic(s) perform best in specific operating environments. Generally, heuristic selection is very much dependent on the hotel operating environment. A counterintuitive result is that in many operating environments, the simpler heuristics work as well as the more complex ones.