For decades, Army Engineers have utilized the systems of the Critical Path Method (CPM) and multi-level Gantt chart planning system for its construction projects. While these methods are well accepted, they are not without their flaws. Research and literature in project management has given weight to several viable alternative options to planning projects. One such option, Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM), was developed to address the flaws of CPM by offering a holistic approach to project management based on strict resource control and the use of time buffers. This method attempts to eliminate multitasking and procrastination that can plague efficiency and offer managers more flexibly on tasks that otherwise had no leeway. CCPM may give project managers more flexibility and control while at the same time shortening the overall length of a project, saving time and money. The purpose of this thesis was to address the time saving and resource management benefits of utilizing CCPM over CPM and analyze the viability of those benefits being applied to U.S. Army Corps of Engineers construction project planning. Through the use of surveys of Army Engineer project supervisors, several key factors that cause delays because of CPM were identified and rated. The validity of CCPM based solutions to the same issues were also assessed by Army project supervisors in the survey. Analysis of the survey results indicated that CCPM may offer solutions to major issues that Army project supervisors face.

Sustainable farms are critical to United States’ food independence and they positively contribute to the global economy. Farms in the United States are not sustainable without profitable supplemental income. The purpose of this case study was to explore the historic profitability of farm income supplementation methods. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory served as the conceptual framework. A purposive sample of 25 farmers from 5 regions of the continental United States completed semistructured interviews and described their personal experiences. Archival supplemental income data came from the United States Department of Agriculture census. All the data were analyzed using coded keywords, phrases, and concepts to identify the following profitable supplemental income themes: (a) government subsidies, (b) custom work, (c) sales of other products, (d) patronage dividends, (e) insurance payments, (f) cash rent, and (g) agtourism. The implications for positive social change include new insights that farmers may use to improve farm business practice, increase farm sustainability, and improve quality of life for farm families.

To remain competitive in a global market, many organizations are transforming their operations from traditional management approaches to the lean philosophy. The success of the Toyota Production System in the automotive industry serves as a benchmark that organizations continually seek to emulate in search of similar results. Despite the abundance of lean resources, many organizations struggle to attain successful lean transformation. To facilitate investigation of the failure mechanisms and critical success factors of lean transformation, this dissertation addresses the following research questions: (1) Why do transformations from traditional organizational philosophies to lean fail? (2) What are the critical factors for lean transformation success? (3) What is the role of an organization’s human resource performance management system during the lean transformation journey? This dissertation utilizes a multi-method, multi-essay format to examine the research questions. First, managers from organizations in various stages of lean transformation are interviewed to establish a foundational research framework. Subsequently, a theoretical model is empirically tested based on data gathered from a survey of industry professionals with expertise in lean transformation. Data analysis techniques employed for this dissertation include: Partial Least Squares (PLS) regression, case descriptions, and case comparisons. Very few studies of lean transformation investigate behavioral influences and antecedents. This dissertation contributes to practitioners and researchers by offering a refined understanding of the role that human resource performance management can play in the overall lean transformation process. In an effort to characterize organizational outcomes resulting from lean transformation, this research introduces a new construct, Lean Transformation Success, to the literature.

Supply chain management is a complex process requiring the coordination of numerous decisions in the attempt to balance often-conflicting objectives such as quality, cost, and on-time delivery. To meet these and other objectives, a focal company must develop organized systems for establishing and managing its supplier relationships. A reliable, decision-support tool is needed for selecting the best procurement strategy for each supplier, given knowledge of the existing sourcing environment. Supplier segmentation is a well-established and resource-efficient tool used to identify procurement strategies for groups of suppliers with similar characteristics. However, the existing methods of segmentation generally select strategies that optimize performance during normal operating conditions, and do not explicitly consider the effects of the chosen strategy on the supply chain’s ability to respond to disruption. As a supply chain expands in complexity and scale, its exposure to sources of major disruption like natural disasters, labor strikes, and changing government regulations also increases. With increased exposure to disruption, it becomes necessary for supply chains to build in resilience and robustness in the attempt to guard against these types of events. This work argues that the potential impacts of disruption should be considered during the establishment of day-to-day procurement strategy, and not solely in the development of posterior action plans. In this work, a case study of a laser printer supply chain is used as a context for studying the effects of different supplier segmentation methods. The system is examined using agent-based modeling and simulation with the objective of measuring disruption impact, given a set of initial conditions. Through insights gained in examination of the results, this work seeks to derive a set of improved rules for segmentation procedure whereby the best strategy for resilience and robustness for any supplier can be identified given a set of the observable supplier characteristics.

This dissertation investigates how firms embedded in an increasingly technology-based industry change their vertical integration and product development strategies in order to remain competitive and increase value capture. The first essay is a theoretical development integrating concepts of industry structure, organizational governance form and innovation in order to disentangle past research’s disagreements and guide future studies. Firms are seen as proactive actors that also have their decisions strongly shaped by structural (architectural) factors. The second essay focus on analyzing how module suppliers achieve a sustained competitive advantage by increasing their focus on modular products and innovations as well as managing their vertically related operations. Results from the global automotive industry reveal that suppliers are capable of capturing more value from modules when investing in modular innovations, integrating manufacturing operations via M&As and strengthening downstream relationships through strategic alliances. Lastly, the third essay investigates the great complexities involved in the manufacture of automobiles. By acknowledging the important strategic implications of managing product failures to the overall performance and reputation of organizations, this essay attempts to fill a gap in the literature by investigating how increased product, process and supplier changes affect product failure rates, and how firms manage product redesigns and learning from past product failures to increase quality reputation. Results indicates that in complex product industries such as automotive, firms find it very difficult to increase product changes without incurring also in more product failures. The results also highlight the importance of strong supplier involvement and integration as a means to reduce product failure rates. This study also demonstrates that quality reputation is better assessed by consumers when manufacturers invest more in model redesigns. Yet, it shows that experience with voluntary recalls helps firms to learn how to improve their new products and increase quality reputation.

We consider a two-level supply chain involving a manufacturer and a retailer who serves as the quality gatekeeper. The manufacturer determines a wholesale price and a defective rate and announces his decisions to the retailer, who then makes her decisions on the retail price and identification rate that means the percent- age of the defects identified by the retailer and reflects the retailer’s gatekeeping effort on her quality assurance. We accordingly develop a leader-follower game and solve it to find Stackelberg equilibrium for the manufacturer and the retailer. In order to examine whether or not the supply chain benefits from the retailer's quality gatekeeping effort, we also develop and solve another leader-follower game where the manufacturer still announces its wholesale pricing and defective rate decisions but the retailer only decides on the retail price. We show that the manufacturer’s equilibrium defective rate for the game with the retailers gate-keeping is higher than that for the game without the retailer’s gatekeeping. The ratio of the manufacturers profit to the retailer’s profit is increased when the retailer serves as the gatekeeper. Moreover, the retailer reduces her price when she acts as the gatekeeper, if and only if the supply chain-wide cost decreases as a result of the retailer’s gatekeeping effort. We also perform sensitivity analysis of each parameter in our game models to further examine the impacts of the retailer’s gatekeeping on the manufacturer’s and the retailer’s decisions and profits. We find that the retailer’s penalty cost per defect has more significant impacts than the manufacturer’s unit penalty cost. The paper ends with a summary of managerial insights.

With an annual growth of almost 20% since the year 2000, Indian merchandise exports exceeded 300 billion U.S. dollars in 2012. The country is becoming a major supplier to the world. However, companies sourcing products and operating in India are experiencing a variety of supply chain disruptions that impede their operations and finances. The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate the frequency, impact and severity of supply chain risks experienced by companies in India, as well as assess the usefulness of mitigation methods and enquire about future expected disruptions. It is hoped that the results will prepare managers to better prioritize their supply chain risk management efforts and investments. The scope of this study is upstream (sourcing and operations) disruptions that affected Indian supply chains over the past three years, including the areas of logistics and transportation. The methodology is a quantitative, empirical study, using a survey instrument in the form of a questionnaire distributed electronically to thousands of members of four prominent trade associations in India. The platform for the questionnaire is a modification of a traditional risk analysis progression: mapping, identifying, assessing, mitigating and improving, also dubbed "MIAMI". The main findings are that there are major and significant differences in severity (frequency and impact) between the thirteen risk categories presented. There are also significant group differences among the respondents. Traditional mitigation methods differ with respect to usefulness, and expected risks are somewhat different than past risks. Conclusions reached are that chronic risks such as inadequate transportation, logistics and utilities infrastructure, supplier and labor problems, and bureaucracy/red tape are more severe than highly publicized and visible risks such as natural disasters, terrorism and crime. Traditional mitigation methods are useful for many of the disruptions, but ineffective for non-physical risks. There is a certain optimism with respect to future infrastructure related disruptions. Limitations of the study include a relatively low response rate, the classic difficulty in risk analysis of comparing and scaling the impact of disruptions, and that it is not fine grained enough to fully describe any specific industry sectors. This study contributes to the field of supply chain risk management by adding crucial empirical information from a heretofore unexplored market.

This study reviews the competition and productivity of the U.S. freight transportation industry for the past 41 years. This study investigated the trends of HHI market concentration index values and labor productivity values of rail and truck sectors and tried to find any relationships between the two values in the separate periods before and after the abolishment of the ICC. This study also investigated how the existence of a regulatory body impacted productivity of the freight transportation industry by using a Cobb Douglas production function on annual financial statement data in the U.S. stock exchange market. This study found that: while the truck sector became more competitive after the abolishment of the ICC, the rail sector became less competitive, both sectors had a strong positive correlation between HHI and labor productivity, and the ICC’s abolishment resulted in positive changes of total factor productivity for the truck sector only.

Leadership plays a vital role in any industry. Therefore, a positive relationship between the management and the employees is very crucial for any organization to get better turnover and recognition. The current study discusses the leadership styles used in the Construction Industry in India. The development of construction industry in India requires suitable leadership approaches of the management. In the condition of such requirement, this research paper has three-fold objectives: first, to study the leadership styles used by the higher-management levels of Indian construction companies, and second, to examine the impact of leadership styles on job satisfaction, and third, to analyze the impact of the leadership styles onorganizational commitment. A survey was designed and carried to assess the objectives of the research. A total of sixty employees were selected for the study. The survey participants were the three working groups of the three construction companies; (1) senior managers, (2) construction engineers, (3) worker supervisors. The questionnaire has a total of 25 questions that includes demographics, leadership styles assessment, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment. Confidence level, Mean, and Standard Deviation was used to analyze the results of the respondents. The results show that the higher-management of company A uses good leadership styles and the employees are satisfied with the job and committed to the organization. However, employees of company B and C were not happy with the leadership styles used by the management and unsatisfied with the job and less committed to the organization.

Supplier development (SD) has been intensively and increasingly used in practice and studied in academia. Many studies find that SD can generate operational, capability-based, attitudinal, and financial performance measures for both the supplying firm (supplier) and the buying firm (buyer), but very few studies systematically explain why SD yields supplier’s performance improvements and, in turn, buyer’s performance improvements. Using a meta-analysis approach, this dissertation finds that SD does lead to positive outcomes, but SD is found to have very weak or even negative relationship with performance improvements in some cases. Such findings further support the importance of examining the main research question: why SD works. In order to answer the main research question, this dissertation adopts a multiphase triangulation approach: theoretical construction, conceptual examination, and empirical examination. Doing so, this dissertation constructs and validates a knowledge management (KM) view of SD. The purpose of theoretical construction (Chapter 3) is to develop a KM view of supplier development via a systematic view of previous studies. Presented in Chapter 4, conceptual examination reveals that all SD activities can be subsumed into KM activities, and further conceptually supports the feasibility of the KM view in SD. Empirical examination, including a survey of 39 SD scholars and a survey of 295 SD practitioners (156 complete responses), is presented in Chapters 5 and 6. Most hypotheses are strongly supported, demonstrating the importance of the knowledge-management view of SD. Overall, this dissertation has both theoretical contributions for KM and SD sides, and practical contributions for researchers, practitioners, and educators/students. First, it contributes by supporting the addition of KM variables to other theories when explaining why SD works, confirming the role of KM in SD, providing a complete KM view of SD, and revealing why SD works. Second, it contributes by implementing mixed research methods, integrating multiple disciplines, and exemplifying collecting data on LinkedIn. Third, it contributes by offering a catalog of SD activities and guidance for designing, implementation, and evaluation of SD initiatives. Fourth, it contributes by advancing a mental model to understand SD literature. Conclusions, limitations, and future research directions are also discussed.