Improving Information Alignment and Distributed Coordination for Secure Information Supply Chains

Industries are constantly striving to incorporate the latest technology systems into their operations so that they can maintain a competitive edge in their respective markets. However, even when they are able to stay up to speed with technological advancement, there continues to be a gap between the workforce skill set and available technologies. Organizations may acquire advanced systems, yet end up spending extended periods of time in the implementation and deployment phases, resulting in lost resources and productivity. The primary focus of this research is on streamlining the implementation and integration of new information technology systems to avoid the dire consequences of the process being prolonged or inefficient. Specifically, the goal of this research is to mitigate business challenges in information sharing and availability for employees and managers interacting with business tools and each other. This was accomplished by first interviewing work professionals in order to identify gap parameters. Based on the interview findings, recommendations were made in order to enhance the usability of existing tools. At this point, the research setting was shifted from network operations to supply chain operations due to the restrictive nature of network operations. The research team succeeded in developing a user-centered methodology to implement and deploy new business systems to mitigate risk during integration of new systems as the transition is made from the classic way of performing tasks. While this methodology was studied in supply chain operations, it enabled the identification of a common trend of challenges in operations work settings, regardless of the business application. Hence the findings of this research can be extrapolated to any business setting, besides the ones actually studied by the team. In addition, this research ensures that operational teams are able to maximize their benefit out of the technology available, thus enabling them to keep up with the rapidly evolving world of technology while minimizing sacrifices in resources or productivity in the process

Integrated Logistics and Transport Planning in Disaster Relief Operations

Decision making in the area of humanitarian logistics and supply chain management often suffers because of the interrelations between planning horizons, tasks, and crisis management lifecycle phases. In this paper, we present a method, an exemplary prototypical implementation and its evaluation within a relief organization. Based on a structured literature analysis, a review of existing information systems as well on a consideration of ongoing research projects, basic requirements for an integrated logistics and transport planning approach were derived. Together with end-user involvement, these results were used to design and prototype a concept of an appropriate information system, which was applied and evaluated in a tabletop exercise. The generated results are promising in terms of having a positive impact on the logistics effectiveness. In combination with the identified limitations, our results promise to have an impact on future ISCRAM research