Customized goods and services occur when their respective supply and demand chains are managed in a simultaneous and real-time manner. From a research perspective, we classify the methods that are employed in the management of these chains, based on whether supply and/or demand are flexible or...

In this paper, we develop a unified model to study the inventory management problem of a product and the coordination of the associated supply chain consisting of a single supplier and considerably many retailers in the presence of a secondary market. Specifically, consumer returns are allowed...

Organizations that provide health services are increasingly in need of systems and approaches that will enable them to be more responsive to the needs and wishes of their clients. Two recent trends, namely, patient-centered care (PCC) and personalized medicine, are first steps in the...

The aim of this paper is the analysis of contemporary concepts used in production management in relation to the paradigms which accompanied their appearance and development. The first chapter contains a definition of the term 'paradigm', discusses the importance of the paradigms for the...

We live in an era when a remarkable number of new information and other technologies are successfully bypassing the main obstacle to technological advance: technology support network (TSN). Technology support net, when fully established and fixed, erects significant barriers to innovation....

A chosen case study house forms the basis of this paper, which is a pilot energy-efficient social housing project, completed by one of the largest housing developers in the UK. The main aim of this study is to inform the redesign of flexible energy-efficient housing units. The housing, designed...

The demand for improving business processes has a very wide range of literature and even very popular not only in academic life, but also among business experts. The topic is particularly actual even today as there is a lot of debate and confusion regarding to the boundaries and scope of...

This paper presents results on mass customization of wireless communications services and tariffs. It advocates for a user-centric view of wireless service configuration and pricing as opposed to present-day service catalog options. The focus is on design methodology and tools for such...

Those who solve more of a given type of problem tend to get better at it---which suggests that problems of any given type should be brought to specialists for a solution. However, in this paper we argue that agency-related costs and information transfer costs ("sticky" local information) will...

We study competition between two multiproduct firms with distinct production technologies in a market where customers have heterogeneous preferences on a single taste attribute. The mass customizer (MC) has a perfectly flexible production technology and thus can offer any variety within a...