Cross-training of nursing staff has been used in hospitals to reduce labor cost, provide scheduling flexibility, and meet patient demand effectively. However, cross-trained nurses may not be as productive as regular nurses in carrying out their tasks because of a new work environment and...

We consider an inventory problem that can be translated into a two-period newsvendor setting where the day prior to sales, the newsvendor places an initial preliminary order—a semi-binding forecast—with the publisher. At the beginning of the actual day of sales, the newsvendor has a better...

Supply chain management is likely to play an important role in the digital economy. In this paper, we first describe major issues in traditional supply chain management. Next, we focus our attention on the supply chain issues of visibility, supplier relationships, distribution and pricing,...

A retailer needs to make decisions regarding how much to order and how much sales effort to exert in an environment with uncertain demand. One intrinsic complexity in a typical retail environment is caused by the fact that the retailer can obtain information about demand only based on sales, as...

Motivated by a problem faced by a large manufacturer of a consumer product, we explore the interaction between production planning and capacity acquisition decisions in environments with demand growth. We study a firm producing multiple items in a multiperiod environment where demand for items...

We study a firm that makes new products in the first period and uses returned cores to offer remanufactured products, along with new products, in future periods. We introduce the monopoly environment in two-period and multiperiod scenarios to identify thresholds in remanufacturing operations....

We present a model for forecast evolution that captures two notions related to forecasts: (1) forecasts are not exact; (2) forecasts over longer horizons are less certain than those over shorter horizons. We model the forecast of discrete demand as a band defined by the lower and upper bounds on...

In this paper we extend forecast band evolution and capacitated production modelling to the multiperiod demand case. In this model, forecasts of discrete demand for any period are modelled as bands and defined by lower and upper bounds on demand, such that future forecasts lie within the current...