Biopharmaceutical companies are under constant pressure to deliver double-digit growth. In traditional markets such as the U.S., Japan, and the European Union growth is stagnant, and profit margins are falling due to increased price pressure from governments. As a result companies are looking to...

As consumer products companies like P&G strive to achieve a consumer driven supply network, the value of forecast accuracy comes into question. Many companies push for faster cycle times and shorter supply chains, driving towards make-to-order production. These trends may appear to reduce the...

Essay 1: Shopping Goals, Goal Concreteness, and Conditional Promotions. We propose a two-stage model to describe the increasing concreteness of consumers' goals during the shopping process, testing the model through a series of field experiments at a convenience store. Using a number of...

The semiconductor industry is characterized by a high cost of capital equipment and fast change in process technology. Therefore Intel ® Corporation as the world's largest semiconductor company has a significant advantage over its competitors in reusing its semiconductor equipments. Not only...

One of the biggest opportunities for this consumer goods company today is reducing retail stockouts at its Direct Store Delivery (DSD) customers via pre-selling, which represents approximately 70% of the company's total sales volume. But reducing retail stock-outs is becoming constantly more...

Sikorsky Aircraft Co. currently finds itself in a critical growth period, in terms of both sales contracts and supplier agreements. Popular supply chain strategies preach reduction and simplification of the supply base, but Sikorsky encounters "must-grow" situations with their supply base, due...

Individuals are involved in daily decision making situations under varying levels of certainty and ease of gathering information, characterized by many factors such as the need to make payments, or the desire to fulfill goals. Essay 1 proposes that when individuals are faced with environments...

Many successful companies have difficulty implementing large-scale change initiatives such as Lean, Six Sigma, outsourcing or Advanced Process Control. This can often be due to the fact that they treat large-scale improvement efforts in the same way that they handle smaller improvement efforts....

This thesis derives a seven-stage methodology and presents a case study for developing an actionable innovation strategy for manufacturing firms. The methodology is based around a careful examination of their firm's circumstances, or external context and internal praxis. How a firm should...

The overriding objective of diagnostic assessment is change. Assessment processes are a mechanism to identify areas that merit change. In order to maximize the possibility that a company will adopt recommended changes following a diagnostic assessment, the assessment process itself must be...