Entries from March 2007
“Bad management” is the topic of many movies and even has its own cartoons. There seems to be a general consensus that there was a high price to pay for “bad” management. The question has even been debated whether “no management” was better than “bad management”. And bad management has also been linked to causing stress.
Indeed, it does - also for the researcher, struggling with a non-implementation of ideas, concepts, new developments in practice. Research is often criticised for its detachment from practice. But whom are we conducting research for? Numerous journals have as their aim to contribute to management practice. (As for the (bad?) management of research, there is an open-access journal or research practice…)
But is research (generally, not just SCM research) to be seen an answer to bad management? Or should we keep on pushing the envelope, developing new ideas and concepts?
Gyöngyi
Categories: Research & Methodology
Today is the deadline for submission of final papers for the 2007 Nofoma conference. This explaines the silence on our blog during the the last five days.
And I cannot blog about the paper since it will be peer reviewed through a double blind review process (Google!). Based on citation analysis, this paper concludes that “authors may be identified anyway based on their citations.” (And now readers know that I expect to submit a paper to the conference).
Citations also relate to reward structures — the The Impact Factor — which “…is a measure of the citations to science and social science journals. It is frequently used as a proxy for the importance of a journal to its field”. The Impact Factor is though only one of several measures, cf. this paper from Elsevier.
Alt+Tab and back to Word - this blog started as a sentence on paper deadlines!
Árni van de Google
ps. More information about peer review on Wikipedia.
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Forthcoming book: How to stop browsing through Google.
Categories: Research & Methodology
Frequent flyer miles do allow us to give travel opportunities to family members, upgrade to business class…and access VIP lounges at airports around the world. Or, these miles can be donated to charity.
But frequent flyer programs may bite back.
This company is using furniture miles as a category of environmental grading of their products. An attempt to articulate some of the logistics content of the product, which is often intangible when we inspect the product itself, but can be judged on the basis of the time and place dimensions of logistics value creation.
Here is how House of Commons (UK) defines product miles: “total distance produce is transported from the place of growth or production to the place of consumption”.
Now, back to our frequent flyer cards — what do they signal?
One of the emerging questions from customers to suppliers may be: How many miles do your products/services contain?
Árni
Categories: Sustainability
Johnston (2005) offered a list of activities for self-diagnostics whether someone is a service operations junkie. This list includes the following:
- you ask the resort hotel manager to peek at the reservation system
- you go out to visit theme parks in Korea just to benchmark them against Disneyland
- you are more interested in the planes and taxis you got to a factory than you are in the factory
- you provide unsolicited feedback to your dentist on how the scheduling and appointments system could be improved
- you debrief your children on your way home from a theme park…
Sounds familiar? Here’s the chance to admit it, I’m a service operations junkie. My case involves primarily airports and airlines. There are some issues I will probably never understand:
- why there are no prioritisation rules for luggage (i.e. loading the aircraft in a manner that transit flight luggage can be retrieved first)
- why airports stores have to close before the last flight is boarding
- why you can buy items in airport stores that you aren’t allowed to take on a flight (and will probably have to throw away the latest when you switch flights)
- why airports don’t have general rules of employment regarding the service-mindedness and language knowledge of their personnel (after all this is the first impression people might get of a country)
- why services such as the possibility to take a shower, massage, or get a haircut are not a well-established standard in transit areas
- why it is so difficult to display expected times to get from A to B (e.g. to get through passport control without missing your flight)
- why the overbooking of flights isn’t evident till you are boarding (what about looking at the probabilities of particular flights being overbooked, not just the general over-capacity rules)
- how there can still be airlines that need to recount their passengers at the time of boarding (though they do have electronic readers of your ticket)
- why some operators can only accept credit cards issued in a particular country…
Let me know if you can explain some of these issues…
Gyöngyi
Categories: Service management
SCM research seems to follow the same logic as e-business research - strongly focusing on where the money is. Thus we focus on MNCs instead of SMEs, b2b relationships instead of the difficult b2c aspects, and the streamlining of material flows till the last business customer. And this, though innovative start-up companies are typically SMEs. Retailing and material flows through distribution channels have been researched enough - last-mile problems of delivery to people are still unresolved. Funnily though, e-tailers seem to undergo a revival, including a revival of problems related to going the last mile. But last-mile problems also affect the delivery of humanitarian aid…
The question is - should we focus on large volumes, or on large challenges in SCM research?
Gyöngyi
Categories: Humanitarian supply chains
…or managing carbon through supply chain relationships.
Of course “carbon management” has already been related to the concept of supply chains. See for example this report from November 2006 by The Carbon Trust:
Carbon footprints in the supply chain: the next step for business.
I would be very surprised not to see papers (journals, conferences) within supply chain management containing the word carbon in their title in near future. Here, we must though distinguish between popularity and relevancy.
What Google says about this as of today:
“carbon management” and “supply chain” = 16.900 hits
“carbon management” and “supply chain management” = 501 hits
This is hereby added to the SCM index 
Árni
Update: Wikipedia on carbon footprint
Categories: Sustainability
News headlines are full of the UK’s expected policy on carbon emissions, talking even of private carbon budgets. Transportation is indeed the sector in which also Finland wants to cut back on emissions. As Árni pointed out, this is the new low carb(on) economy.
There are many ways of cutting down on transportation emissions, ranging from new types of cars (see the electric cars of the Geneva motor show this week - maybe as a response to the documentary “Who killed the electric car“) to new types of fuels, to modal shifts, cutting down on speed limits, transportation as a whole etc. It is interesting to look at maps regarding carbon emissions - for the UK, or globally. Yet what they usually lack is a link to the development index of a country, number of cars per capita, state of transport infrastructure etc. Agreed, this will raise the complexity of the matter - but who wants to step in the footsteps of the Chinese economy, where pictures in Beijing are always blurry from the smog?
Gyöngyi
Categories: Sustainability
Network economy. Knowledge economy. Information economy. Global economy. Creative economy. Information age. Network society. (I must be forgetting something).
And now: Low carbon economy.
Environmental issues have been discussed eagerly by politicians in the UK press this week; low carbon economy is the “buzz-phrase” according to this piece from BBC. Not without a reason according to these pictures, which project dramatic changes in surface temperature over the next century. Human activity is quoted as a “very likely” cause for this change.
In the literature on supply chain management we find the word green as one of the labels for environmental concerns. This recent paper by S. K. Srivastava “Green supply-chain management: A state-of-the-art literature review” (The latest issue of International Journal of Management Reviews) presents a comprehensive review of the literature within the realm of “green supply chain management”. (A useful overview for those who are working on reverse logistics, waste management, recyling and remanufacturing).
One of the conclusions in this paper is that:
“One of the biggest challenges facing the field of GrSCM is extending the historical ‘common wisdom’ about managing operations. Much research, management education and many practical applications have focused on buffering the operations function from external influences, including the natural environment, in order to improve efficiencies, reduce cost and increase quality. When the natural environment is considered, it is typically recognized or modelled as an external constraint, requiring operations to work within prescribed limits. Once this basic assumption is relaxed, a fundamental question arises about how to pursue research on green issues in operations: should this be considered a separate research stream with its own strategic framework or should green issues be integrated into existing operations management research frameworks and areas? While the complexity of green issues might favour the former approach, the greatest contributions can be achieved by pursuing opportunities within a more integrative framework.” (our emphasis in bold).
Environmental responsibility is considered as one of the operations challenges in a textbook I am using as a core text in a Operations Management course. It is presented on five pages at the last chapter of the book as a part of The operations challenge. I decided to include this chapter (and topic) at the beginning of the course to emphasise the environmental issue that relates to Operations Management. Still, I have found it difficult (or rather complex, cf. the notion made by Srivastava) to integrate this aspect into the current models and approaches in such textbook.
Can we expect a textbook that provides an integrative framework on environmental issues?
Árni
Categories: Reverse Logistics · Sustainability
A year ago, I gave a presentation on the Ph.D. course “Publish or Perish: Preparing, writing and reviewing business research” arranged by my colleague Jan Arlbjørn, University of Southern Denmark
The title of the presentation was:
Publish or perish A process of…seeking provocations, getting angry, frustrated, confused, troubled…writing a conference paper as therapy…and publish to save the world, change current practice, and make your boss happy.
This session presented and discussed the review process of one the papers Jan Arlbjørn and I wrote together few years ago. Included into this were the discussions we had with editors and reviewers (yes, in plural!). I was told that the students found this useful, and I admittedly found it quite interesting to reflect upon these comments.
So why not discuss the peer-review of journal articles in the open space?
Scholars in economics are bringing this developent further by experimenting with a “market-driven” research evaluation process. This new e-journal in economics suggests a change to the conventional peer review process:
“The peer review process is substantially supplemented by a “public” peer review process in which the community of active researchers from all over the world has a hand in the evaluation process.”
See further discussion at Organizations & Markets, the blog which brougth this issue to our attention.
Árni
Categories: Education & Management Development · Research & Methodology
Further to the yesterday’s blog on ranking of academic journals, here is a paper by Kumar and Kwon (2004) in International Journal of Physical Distribution & Logistics Management that ranks a sample of 19 “leading journals” in logistics and transportation.
The list is interesting, but the ranking and the numbers do not necessarily speak for themselves.
It would be interesting to know what is considered as being interesting and relevant to use in teaching, and what journals (a sensitive question!) are read by practitioners.
Árni
Categories: Education & Management Development · Journal ranking · Research & Methodology
