Inventory pooling is at the root of many celebrated ideas in operations management. Postponement, component commonality, and resource flexibility are some examples. Motivated by our experience in the aftermarket services industry, we propose a model of inventory pooling to meet differentiated...

Operations reversal is a process design principle that involves switching two consecutive stages of the manufacturing process to improve process performance. In this paper we investigate conditions under which operations reversal can be used to reduce the variability---as measured by the...

An important feature of emergency ambulance systems is that the probability of any given unit being busy is dependent upon which of the other units are busy. An analytical model incorporating this feature is developed and found to be reliable in predicting the entire response time distribution...

A unique B2C e-commerce is emerging in Japan. When the internet arrived in Japan, much of the early work just imitated what was happening in the USA. Gradually the Japanese incorporated the internet into their daily lives and created a unique business model that works in their culture. This...