Streamlining Acquisition Workflows Through Collaboration and Innovation

Abstract

As a selector, have you ever wondered if the resource you requested was ordered? As an acquisitions staff member, are you struggling with keeping track of your order requests from various channels? As a manager, are you finding it challenging to monitor staff work? CORAL, an open source electronic resource management system, proved to be one solution to these concerns for North Carolina State University (NCSU) Libraries. This article discusses how to manage workflows in CORAL and outlines a NCSU initiative to evolve this tool through collaboration across departments and across the CORAL community.     

Career Sidestep,Wage Setback? The Impact of Different Types of Employment Interruptions on Wages

We examined the wage implications of different types of wage employment interruptions in a sample of 44,384 Belgian employees. The employment interruption types included are family leave, unemployment, self‐employment, educational leave and a category other interruptions (for example, travel, voluntary work). We conduct separate analyses for men and women. Results indicate that unemployment spells and family breaks are penalized by lower subsequent wages, while the wage impact of self‐employment spells and educational leave is insignificant. Family breaks and unemployment spells were found to be more harmful for men than for women. Implications of the results and directions for future research are discussed.     

Interruption and Forgetting in Knowledge‐Intensive Service Environments

An increasing barrier to productivity in knowledge‐intensive work environments is interruptions. Interruptions stop the current job and can induce forgetting in the worker. The induced forgetting can cause re‐work; to complete the interrupted job, additional effort and time is required to return to the same level of job‐specific knowledge the worker had attained prior to the interruption. This research employs primary observational and process data gathered from a hospital radiology department as inputs into a discrete‐event simulation model to estimate the effect of interruptions, forgetting, and re‐work. To help mitigate the effects of interruption‐induced re‐work, we introduce and test the operational policy of sequestering, where some service resources are protected from interruptions. We find that sequestering can improve the overall productivity and cost performance of the system under certain circumstances. We conclude that research examining knowledge‐intensive operations should explicitly consider interruptions and the forgetting rate of the system's human workers or models will overestimate the system's productivity and underestimate its costs.