Tackling the steep increase in drug costs is an especially important issue among many health care providers and insurers. To entice the clinics to become more cost efficient, the U.S. federal government, as well as many HMOs, have developed various cost containment initiatives recently. However,...

This paper presents a model of a bottleneck facility that performs two distinct types of operations: "regular" and "rework." Each job is subjected to a test after completing the regular operation at the bottleneck. If the job passes the test, then it continues its process downstream. Otherwise,...

Many companies have embarked on initiatives that enable more demand information sharing between retailers and their upstream suppliers. While the literature on such initiatives in the business press is proliferating, it is not clear how one can quantify the benefits of these initiatives and how...

Short delivery time and the efficient management of component inventories are two crucial elements that determine the competitiveness of many contract assembly manufacturers, especially in the electronics industry. In this paper, we develop and analyze an optimization model to determine the...

We consider a contract manufacturer who procures multiple components from independent suppliers to produce an assemble-to-order customized product for a client. The unit price of the product depends on the manufacturer's delivery lead time. We explore how the manufacturer can use a...

This paper presents a model of a bottleneck facility that performs two distinct types of operations: "regular" and "repair." Both switch-over time and cost are incurred when the facility switches from performing one type of operation to a different type. Upon the completion of a batch of jobs in...

This paper studies the impact of supply reliability on a retail firm's performance under joint marketing and inventory decisions. The firm sells a product in a single selling season and can exert marketing effort to influence consumer demand. We develop a modeling framework to quantify the value...

Many service firms use delivery time guarantees to compete for customers in the marketplace. In this research we develop a stylized model to analyze the impact of using time guarantees on competition. Demands are assumed to be sensitive to both the price and delivery time guarantees, and the...

Cross-selling in telephone service centers is seen by industry as a useful means to generate profits from an existing customer base. Introducing cross-sales to a service center, however, needs to be properly managed as it could degrade customer service quality. Real-time customer and system...