This dissertation is concerned with decision making in retail operations management. Specifically, we focus on pricing, variety, and inventory decisions, which are at the interface of the marketing and operations functions of a retail firm. We consider two problems that relate to two major types...

The slow rate of corporate improvement is not due to lack of knowledge of six sigma or lean. Rather, the fault lies in making the transition from theory to implementation. Managers need a step-by-step, unambiguous roadmap of improvement that leads to predictable results. This roadmap provides...

Software firms can use open source development model combined with proprietary development model to increase their profitability. Open source development models can help software firms create products with better technical features at a lower price. Since open source development is a community...

We study the resource investment decision faced by a firm that offers two demand-classes (i.e., products, services),while incorporating the firm's pricing decision into the investment decision.For this purpose, we consider a monopolistic situation and model the demand curve of each demand-class...

Realistically, organizational and/or system efficiency performance is dynamic, non-linear, and a function of multiple interactions in production. However, in the efficiency literature, system performance is frequently evaluated considering linear combinations of the input/output variables,...

In todays worlds of industry and academia, teamwork is becoming more and more prevalent and is becoming more and more desirable when addressing certain tasks. Intensified and growing competition in the global marketplace is forcing businesses to produce better products, thereby, requiring the...

Recent research indicates that teams are an essential element of most leading organizations (Mohrrnan, Cohen, & Mohrrnan, 1995). With the proliferation of team use comes the need for research to better define the design and management requirements unique to specific types of teams. This research...

The objective of the research was to establish a scientifically-based decision makingprocedure for determining the amount of cash to be held at a cash pointat any time without compromising the customer service level or incurring unduecost. To reach the objective, the problem was divided into the...

Inventory management under uncertainty is a widely researched field and many differenttypes of inventory models have been used to address inventory problems in practice [1,10, 11, 26, 50, 35]. However, there is a lack of published studies focusing on inventoryplanning in environments, such as...

The full text of this thesis/dissertation is not available online. Please <a href="mailto:upetd@up.ac.za">contact us</a> if you need access Economic and productive utilization of natural resources are central to fundamental Industrial Engineering science, whereas capitalistic corporate strategy is aimed at growth of shareholders...