The Role of Maintenance and Facility Management in Logistics: A Literature Review

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to provide a literature review on the different ways of carrying out Facility Management and related topics in order to uncover that there is limited research regarding the impact of Facility Management on the logistics and operational performance of warehouses. Design/methodology/approach - Four different focus areas have been identified and for each one different methodologies and streams of research have been studied. Findings - The study underlines the importance of Facility Management for the logistics operations; therefore it supports the notion that investments aiming at preserving the status of the building and service components of warehouses are crucial. Originality/value - This paper aims to suggest to Facility Management managers that they can contribute to enhance business performance by designing effective Facility Management strategie

Feasibility of Warehouse Drone Adoption and Implementation

While aerial delivery drones capture headlines, the pace of adoption of drones in warehouses has shown the greatest acceleration. Warehousing constitutes 30% of the cost of logistics in the US. The rise of e-commerce, greater customer service demands of retail stores, and a shortage of skilled labor have intensified competition for efficient warehouse operations. This takes place during an era of shortening technology life cycles. This paper integrates several theoretical perspectives on technology diffusion and adoption to propose a framework to inform supply chain decision-makers on when to invest in new robotics technology

Data Mining in Health-Care: Issues and a Research Agenda

While data mining has become a much-lauded tool in business and related fields, its role in the healthcare arena is still being explored. Currently, most applications of data mining in healthcare can be categorized into two areas: decision support for clinical practice, and policy planning/decision making. However, it is challenging to find empirical literature in this area since a substantial amount of existing work in data mining for health care is conceptual in nature. In this paper, we review the challenges that limit the progress made in this area and present considerations for the future of data mining in healthcare

SODA: Generating SQL for Business Users

The purpose of data warehouses is to enable business analysts to make better decisions. Over the years the technology has matured and data warehouses have become extremely successful. As a consequence, more and more data has been added to the data warehouses and their schemas have become increasingly complex. These systems still work great in order to generate pre-canned reports. However, with their current complexity, they tend to be a poor match for non tech-savvy business analysts who need answers to ad-hoc queries that were not anticipated. This paper describes the design, implementation, and experience of the SODA system (Search over DAta Warehouse). SODA bridges the gap between the business needs of analysts and the technical complexity of current data warehouses. SODA enables a Google-like search experience for data warehouses by taking keyword queries of business users and automatically generating executable SQL. The key idea is to use a graph pattern matching algorithm that uses the metadata model of the data warehouse. Our results with real data from a global player in the financial services industry show that SODA produces queries with high precision and recall, and makes it much easier for business users to interactively explore highly-complex data warehouses.Comment: VLDB201

E-commerce, Warehousing and Distribution Facilities in California: A Dynamic Landscape and the Impacts on Disadvantaged Communities

This work addresses the distribution of warehouses and distribution centers (W&DCs) influenced by e-commerce, through spatial analysis and econometric modelling. Specifically, this work analyzes the concentration of W&DCs in various metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) in California between 1989 and 2016-18; and studies the spatial relationships between W&DC distribution and other demographic and environmental factors through econometric modeling techniques. The work conducts analyses to uncover common trends in W&DC distribution. The analyses used aggregate establishment, employment, and other socio-economic information, complemented with transportation related variables. The results: 1) confirm that the weighted geometric centers of W&DCs have shifted slightly towards city central areas in all five MPOs; 2) W&DCs show a non-decreasing trend between 2008 and 2016; and 3) areas with more serious environmental problems are more likely to have W&DCs. A disaggregate analyses of properties sold and leased in one of the study regions shows a trend where businesses are buying or leasing smaller facilities, closer to the core of consumer demand. Among other factors, the growth of e-commerce sales, and expedited delivery services, which require proximity to the customers, may explain these trends. The study results provide insights for planners and policy decision makers, and will be of interest to practitioners, public and private entities, and academia. Caltrans, MPOs, and affiliated institutions of the National Center for Sustainable Transportation will directly benefit from the results as they want to avoid equity issues brought by the fast development of e-commerce, and its potential impact on W&DC distribution