Von der Supervision zur Mediation und zurück

From supervision to mediation and vice versaMediation in organizations becomes more and more important because of increasing conflicts. The question is, which competencies of the counsellor are necessary, and above all, whether mediation is a particular method. The author explains the method of mediation and illustrates his concept of “patchwork-mediation”. This procedure allows to build a bridge between supervision and mediation.     

Teachers,Schools, and Academic Achievement

This paper disentangles the impact of schools and teachers in influencing achievement with special attention given to the potential problems of omitted or mismeasured variables and of student and school selection. Unique matched panel data from the UTD Texas Schools Project permit the identification of teacher quality based on student performance along with the impact of specific, measured components of teachers and schools. Semiparametric lower bound estimates of the variance in teacher quality based entirely on within‐school heterogeneity indicate that teachers have powerful effects on reading and mathematics achievement, though little of the variation in teacher quality is explained by observable characteristics such as education or experience. The results suggest that the effects of a costly ten student reduction in class size are smaller than the benefit of moving one standard deviation up the teacher quality distribution, highlighting the importance of teacher effectiveness in the determination of school quality.     

Decision Support by Interval SMART/SWING—Incorporating Imprecision in the SMART and SWING Methods

Interval judgments are a way of handling preferential and informational imprecision in multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA). In this article, we study the use of intervals in the simple multiattribute rating technique (SMART) and SWING weighting methods. We generalize the methods by allowing the reference attribute to be any attribute, not just the most or the least important one, and by allowing the decision maker to reply with intervals to the weight ratio questions to account for his/her judgmental imprecision. We also study the practical and procedural implications of using imprecision intervals in these methods. These include, for example, how to select the reference attribute to identify as many dominated alternatives as possible. Based on the results of a simulation study, we suggest guidelines for how to carry out the weighting process in practice. Computer support can be used to make the process visual and interactive. We describe the WINPRE software for interval SMART/SWING, preference assessment by imprecise ratio statements (PAIRS), and preference programming. The use of interval SMART/SWING is illustrated by a job selection example.     

Demand and Production Management with Uniform Guaranteed Lead Time

Recently, innovation‐oriented firms have been competing along dimensions other than price, lead time being one such dimension. Increasingly, customers are favoring lead time guarantees as a means to hedge supply chain risks. For a make‐to‐order environment, we explicitly model the impact of a lead time guarantee on customer demands and production planning. We study how a firm can integrate demand and production decisions to optimize expected profits by quoting a uniform guaranteed maximum lead time to all customers. Our analysis highlights the increasing importance of lead time for customers, as well as the tradeoffs in achieving a proper balance between revenue and cost drivers associated with lead‐time guarantees. We show that the optimal lead time has a closed‐form solution with a newsvendor‐like structure. We prove comparative statics results for the change in optimal lead time with changes in capacity and cost parameters and illustrate the insights using numerical experimentation.     

Evolution of Quality: First Fifty Issues of Production and Operations Management

Many contributions have been made to the field of quality since the inaugural issue of Production and Operations Management in 1992. The first issue called for more research and teaching on TQM, which resulted in two special issues dedicated to TQM. Many other articles related to quality have also been published in the first fifty issues of the journal on topics ranging from technical methods to the Baldrige Award and ISO 9000. As we review these articles, we assess their contribution and the progression of the field of quality. Although past research has advanced our understanding of quality, there still exists many research opportunities in developing more theory, using additional research methodologies, and studying emerging topics in this field.     

电子商务环境下管理理论与方法研究回顾

回顾了国家自然科学基金重点资助项目"电子商务环境下管理理论与方法研究"(70031020)的立项及实施过程,介绍了项目已取得的科研成果及经济社会效益,系统总结了项目组织实施的若干成功经验.提出的"官、产、学"一体化的研发管理模式,对于组织实施管理类大规模的重点基金项目具有借鉴价值.     

图书馆服务质量评价模型研究

图书馆服务质量是不同属性的综合体,它包括许多很难被测量的不可感知属性,这种特性给被测者在接受问卷调查时带来了一些困难.为了避免上述情况出现,在分析了图书馆服务质量综合评价中现存主要问题和影响因素的基础上,建立了基于灰色局势决策的模糊多属性决策模型,将灰色系统和模糊集理论引入定性指标值的测度中,得到了满意的结果.     

基于C/S和B/S模式的高校基建项目管理信息系统的设计与实现

通过结合华中科技大学基建与后勤管理处MIS系统的开发实例,提出了建立高校基建后勤管理信息系统建设的必要性和可能性,并给出了系统的整体结构和主要功能,最后分析了系统实现过程中的一些问题.     

Web环境下IT招标项目风险评价决策支持系统研究

分析了IT招标项目的基本风险特征,并针对因IT招标项目中风险因素多、不确定性大而导致复杂的复合决策问题,在传统决策支持系统的基础上设计了综合推理方式的.NET架构下Web环境IT项目风险评价决策支持系统,分析了系统的功能、特点和设计方法,详细讨论了系统的结构,并给出系统运作过程和实现方法.