The authors examine the effect of a hospital's objective (i.e., non-profit versus for-profit) in hospital markets for elective care. Using game-theoretic analysis and queueing models to capture the operational performance of hospitals, they compare the equilibrium behavior of three market...

This paper describes the staffing and scheduling of IT help desk operators for a large petrochemical company. The objective is to reduce the labour cost by determining the best staffing level and employee weekly tour schedules required to meet the workload that varies over a 24-hr operating...

We investigate the benefits of migrating from a call center, where all agents are pooled and customers are treated indifferently by any agent, toward a call center where customers are grouped into clusters with dedicated teams of agents. Each cluster is referred to as a portfolio. Customers of...

Process reengineering advocates making radical changes in how processing systems are structured, such as moving away from systems that use the principles of division of labor and division of management. Using formal system models from queueing theory, this paper explores the conditions under...

We consider the problem of quoting customer lead times in a manufacturing environment under a variety of modeling assumptions. First, we examine the case where capacity is infinite. For this case, we derive a closed-form expression for the optimal lead time quote. Second, we consider the case...

This paper describes the staffing and scheduling of IT help desk operators for a large petrochemical company. The objective is to reduce the labour cost by determining the best staffing level and employee weekly tour schedules required to meet the workload that varies over a 24-hr operating...