In this essay, we review the contributions economists, political scientists, and business scientists have made to an understanding of how local school districts, boards of education, school superintendents, and district offices affect student learning and other achievement outcomes of interest,...

Many organizations have very limited information about the supply networks in which they are involved. For the purpose of planning business strategies, tracing products, and assuring product quality, organizations are eager to know their entire supply networks, i.e., who are their suppliers'...

Purpose: Although software systems used to automate business processes have been becoming rather advanced, the existing practice of developing and modifying graphical process models in those software systems is still primitive: Users have to manually add, change, or delete each node and arc...

It is a common practice that people directly use the published factor values in constructing Shewhart variables control charts. Currently, the values of most of the factors are published typically with up to 4 decimal places of precision and from sample size n = 2 through 25; a number of...

Purpose: A product or service usually has multiple measurable characteristics, and its performance on different measures may vary and may change over time. Multi-criterion and multi-period performance benchmarking presents a challenge for management to determine performance gaps among comparable...

Developing sustainable business models incorporating effects on people, profit, and planet is becoming an increasingly important strategic issue. Benchmarking with peer companies can assist a company in setting goals of improving its performance. As such, developing a methodology for effectively...