ANALYSIS OF ALTERNATIVE SCHEDULING POLICIES FOR HOSPITAL NURSES

The persistent shortage of nurses adversely affects the productivity, quality of care, and operating costs in most acute care hospitals. Aggravating the shortage are high nurse turnover rates, approaching 200% in some institutions. Policies to ensure adequate staffing levels and provide more attractive work schedules are alleged to improve nurse retention. However, their cost is seldom discussed. We compared expected nursing expense and workforce requirements to staff eight medical and surgical nursing units of a large hospital for 1 month, under 12 different scheduling policies alleged to improve turnover. Using simulation and an integrated staffing and scheduling methodology, we found that the expected nursing wages and workforce requirements for some policies differed by as much as 33%. In this hospital, the expected labor costs for certain policies could erode the benefits expected from improved retention. In contrast, other policies appear to allow high utilization of nursing resources, enhancing the expected benefits of reduced turnover with significant reductions in expenses for labor, recruiting, training, and fringe benefits.     

LOAD CUBING AT R. J. REYNOLDS

R. J. Reynolds Tobacco USA (RJR) is currently implementing a microcomputer-based decision support system to computerize and optimize the selection of patterns for loading cases of finished product into truck trailers at RJR's Central Distribution Center. This system allows for the efficient loading of trucks with less supervision. Total annual savings from reduced personnel and shipping costs is approximately $850,000. In addition to these benefits, the system is a stepping stone for trailer loading automation and the integration of a comprehensive load planning system.     

Population Density is a Key Factor in Declining Human Fertility

In studying the complex determinants of human fertility, social scientists have given little attention to population density, although reproduction has been shown to be density-dependent for a wide variety of other species. Using fixed effects models on the time series of 145 countries and controlling for key social and economic variables, we find a consistent and significant negative relationship between human fertility and population density. Moreover, we find that individual fertility preferences also decline with population density. These findings suggest that population density should be included as a variable in future studies of fertility determinants.

Translators, traitors, and traducers: Perjuring Hawaiian same-sex texts through deliberate mistranslation

In the long history of the West's encounter with Hawaiian culture, which began in the late 1700s with Captain Cook, translators and translations have often been the tools of intentional falsehood, thus demonstrating the truth of the Italian proverb, Traduttore, traditore ("the translator is a traitor")--particularly with regard to same-sex texts. The standards of truth have often been subverted in translation by the demands of foreign religion, hegemony, business, and academe. This subversion continues to this day in the form of the "missionary mentality" in politics and law. The way out of this situation is a brutally honest cleaning-off of the besmirched Hawaiian texts.     

A Stochastic Goal Program for Employee Scheduling*

Deterministic goal programs for employee scheduling decisions attempt to minimize expected operating costs by assigning the ideal number of employees to each feasible schedule. For each period in the planning horizon, managers must first determine the amount of labor that should be scheduled for duty. These requirements are often established with marginal analysis techniques, which use estimates for incremental labor costs and shortage expenses. Typically, each period in the planning horizon is evaluated as an independent epoch. An implicit assumption is that individual employees can be assigned to schedules with as little as a single period of work. If this assumption violates local work rules, the labor requirements parameters for the deterministic goal program may be suboptimal. As we show in this research, this well-known limitation can lead to costly staffing and scheduling errors. We propose an employee scheduling model that overcomes this limitation by integrating the labor requirements and scheduling decisions. Instead of a single, externally determined staffing goal for each period, the model uses a probability distribution for the quantity of labor required. The model is free to choose an appropriate staffing level for each period, eliminating the need for a separate goal-setting procedure. In most cases this results in better, less costly decisions. In addition, the proposed model easily accommodates both linear and nonlinear under- and overstaffing penalties. We use simple examples to demonstrate many of these advantages and to illustrate the key techniques necessary to implement our model. We also assess its performance in a study of more than 1,700 simulated stochastic employee scheduling problems.     

Organizational Computing as a Facilitator of Operational and Managerial Decision Making: An Exploratory Study of Managers' Perceptions*

Much of the current knowledge pertaining to information technology (IT) and decision making is based on decades old technologies that revolved around a central computing function and application-specific systems. The purpose of this research is to examine the IT decision-making relationship within the emerging organizational computing (OC) environment permeated by spontaneous utilization of both application-and nonapplication-specific computing and communication technologies. Specifically, this study seeks to explore managers' perceptions of the emerging OC environment as a facilitator of their decision-making activities. To achieve a higher level of clarity than previous works, a two-dimensional research framework is developed with the IT dimension consisting of computing and communication, and the decision-making dimension differentiated between operational and managerial decisions. A survey instrument was constructed that measured the computing and communication dimensions of information technology use and their perceived effects upon operational and managerial decisions. The major findings of the study confirmed that managers recognize the value of general, nonapplication-specific information technologies in decision making, and that this recognition is highly associated with how intensively these information technologies are used. Additionally, it was found that the two dimensions of IT differ in their relationships to decision making, and that IT usage relates to managerial decisions differently than operational decisions. These study findings have significant implication for practice and research, especially in the context of information resource management in which the primary purpose of the IS function is the delivery of general information service to users rather than the development of specific IS applications.     

Solution Procedures for the Lot-Streaming Problem

Lot streaming is the process of splitting a job into sublots so its operations can be overlapped and its progress accelerated. We present a computationally efficient procedure for solving the m-machine, two-sublot problem, and we discuss the bottleneck insights that emerge from the analysis. We also examine heuristic approaches for more than two sublots and discuss computational results for these procedures.     

The ‘Dark Side’ of Social Capital: A Cross-National Examination of the Relationship Between Social Capital and Violence in Africa

Social Indicators Research - Research and policy circles often emphasize the importance of social capital in achieving social transformation and economic development. There is also, however,...