Ambulances services, taxis, pizza delivery and vehicle tows have in common a sub-process of gathering the requests, usually by call-centers, and a sub-process of execution, consisting on dispatching a vehicle to the site. In this article we model those services in an integrated way, identifying...

This work analyses the problem of defining when to diploid a new distribution center. The decision model considers the usual logistic cost drivers such as shipping, inventory, infrastructure and administration, focusing in the first one. The shipping cost driver is determined by the client...

We develop an agency model subject to moral hazard to evaluate whether delivery prices reward carriers for their performance, or arbitrarily benefit some carriers and harm others. From the model, we derive several propositions that we test on a panel data of 58 carriers that work for a shipper...

This article examines a company whose distribution operation is carried out by a loading Dock and a Fleet of trucks. For a number of reasons, each department optimizes its operation locally, with no concern for the operational alignment of the overall system. To resolve this problem, a contract...

This paper studies a single-product distribution channel where a manufacturer produces goods, some of which are defective, and a retailer, detecting only a subset of the defective goods, passes the rest along to customers, who end up discarding them. Conjecturing the structure of the demand and...

The purpose of this article is to analyze the main operational causes of conflict between shippers and carriers, and to evaluate the opportunity of improvement. We classify these problems according to whether they are related to the operations at the distribution centers, the configuration of...

Empowerment (giving others, within operative levels, a certain degree of decision-making power) is one of the requirements to execute quality management programs. The autonomy afforded by empowering others could be detrimental to systems where complexity and variability is high, as local...

Queuing theory studies the behavior of systems subject to different working conditions, which sometimes force clients to wait for service. It has a vast applicability, since it quantifies the dilemma of many companies and institutions between efficacy (provide a good service) and efficiency...

This article proposes a model to characterize national innovation systems, and applies it to four outstanding countries in this respect (Germany, Spain, Finland and Ireland) and also to four Latin American countries which have declared their interest in these systems (Argentina, Brazil, Chile...

An organization is said to be operationally aligned when the local objectives of each of its units is coherent with its own strategic objectives. This paper presents a methodology for achieving such an alignment,which is based on four stages: Strategic Planning, Organization Structuring,...