Operations Management: Annotated Bibliography of 6 Articles

1. Lambert, D. M., & Cooper, M. C. (2000). Issues in supply chain management. Industrial marketing management, 29(1), 65-83.

According to the point of view of the authors in the research article, there has always been issues involved when an attempt has been made to integrate cross functional factors with marketing strategy in relations to supply chain management between different organizations. The aim of the article is to conduct a comprehensive research to define a framework to resolve the stated issues. Modern businesses cannot be treated as individual entities. In fact businesses have evolved to be business networks. Especially in case of supply chain management, there are organization at different parts of the world, some are suppliers and some are customers, which act as the same business network or entity. The researchers have identified four links in the supply chain between organizations that could help in establishing the stated framework. They are: 1. Managed business process links, 2. Monitored business process links, 3. Not-managed business process links and 4. Non-monitored business process links.

2. Bendoly, E., Donohue, K., & Schultz, K. L. (2006). Behavior in operations management: Assessing recent findings and revisiting old assumptions. Journal of operations management, 24(6), 737-752.

The main purpose of the article is to stress on the importance of human experiments in the field of operations management. The researchers discuss the past, present and future of such research and suggest that there is a need to do more extensive research in the said area. The researchers have developed and suggested a framework to identify types of behavioral assumptions that are made in operations management models. This framework has then be incorporated to gather the suggestions of the past research and suggest future research opportunities for those researchers who are interested in studying the field of operations management in relations to its co-relations to different variables of human behavior. The literature review includes research overview of articles from 1985 till 2005 from different well reputed journals.

3. Meredith, J. (1998). Building operations management theory through case and field research. Journal of operations management, 16(4), 441-454.

There has been a deficiency of case studies in the field of operations management according to the researchers in this research article. According to the authors, observational studies are heavily based on case studies that are scientifically articulated after proper observation. Observational case studies in operations management can help us understand the field from an empirical perspective. The researcher have differentiated between rationalistic research and empirical research and are of the opinion that empirical approach should be incorporated in case of operations management research and collecting facts from real life situations. The researchers have used empirical research and case study as synonyms in the research article. They suggest that in operations management case study can be used to gather scientific data and use this data (qualitative/quantitate) in standardized manner to make predictions in a logical way.

4. Samson, D., & Terziovski, M. (1999). The relationship between total quality management practices and operational performance. Journal of operations management, 17(4), 393-409.

Researcher in this study have been assessing the outcomes of the total quality management techniques in operations management. The authors suggest that there is a deficiency of empirical data to make substantial predictions on the effectiveness of the total quality management techniques in different areas of operations management. The results of the study suggested that total quality management practices have a significant impact on the performance variance. In fact some of the total quality practices had a strong positive co-relation with operations performance. Data collected for the study was from 1200 Australian and New Zealand manufacturing organizations. The results of the study are in line with what has been suggested in the previous studies for outcomes of the behavioral variables in different organizations.

5. Ni, D. (2006). Challenges and strategies of transportation modelling and simulation under extreme conditions. International Journal of Emergency Management, 3(4), 298-312.

Transportation management is an integral part of operations management. The researchers in this paper have discussed the importance and role of developing and simulating transportation models in extreme and unforeseen circumstance. These extreme circumstances could be natural disasters like floods, earthquakes and tsunamis or they can be man-made like terrorist activities like the 9/11. The research focusses on discussing three main areas of transportation in extreme circumstance. First is the requirements on scale, second is lack of tools and resources to envision traffic in extreme circumstances and lastly the deficiency of data related to extreme circumstances. The research has further gone to suggest effective frameworks to address the issues related to the above three areas.

6. Bausch, D. O., Brown, G. G., & Ronen, D. (1998). Scheduling short-term marine transport of bulk products. Maritime Policy & Management, 25(4), 335-348.

This research study has shed light on the short-term transportation of bulk products in the marine transportation industry. The main emphasis of the research article is the usefulness of using simple spreadsheets to communicate to other with whom we are doing business and who don’t speak or write the language that we do. The research article has produced an effective outline of a spreadsheet which is easy to understand and implement by the multinational companies with the help of a personal computer and can help in organizing schedules in marine transportation. Below is an image of the actual spreadsheet developed by the Naval Postgraduate School, Operations Research Department, Monterey, CA 93943, USA.