Enabling flexibility through strategic management of complex engineering systems

”Flexibility is a highly desired attribute of many systems operating in changing or uncertain conditions. It is a common theme in complex systems to identify where flexibility is generated within a system and how to model the processes needed to maintain and sustain flexibility. The key research question that is addressed is: how do we create a new definition of workforce flexibility within a human-technology-artificial intelligence environment? Workforce flexibility is the management of organizational labor capacities and capabilities in operational environments using a broad and diffuse set of tools and approaches to mitigate system imbalances caused by uncertainties or changes. We establish a baseline reference for managers to use in choosing flexibility methods for specific applications and we determine the scope and effectiveness of these traditional flexibility methods. The unique contributions of this research are: a) a new definition of workforce flexibility for a human-technology work environment versus traditional definitions; b) using a system of systems (SoS) approach to create and sustain that flexibility; and c) applying a coordinating strategy for optimal workforce flexibility within the human- technology framework. This dissertation research fills the gap of how we can model flexibility using SoS engineering to show where flexibility emerges and what strategies a manager can use to manage flexibility within this technology construct”--Abstract, page iii

The Indonesian family planning program : an economic perspective

Indonesia has achieved one of the most impressive records in fertility reduction over the past two decades. The country's total fertility rate has declined froman estimated 5.5 in 1967 - 1970 to 3.4 in 1987. Population growth has been estimated at 2.1 percent during the eighties. Many observers credit Indonesia's National Family Planning Coordinating Board (BKKBN) as being instrumental in this fertility reduction and slowdown of population growth. BKKBN is a public sector organization responsible for planning and coordination of almost all family planning activities in Indonesia. The study objective is to provide BKKBN and the government of Indonesia with data that can help improve the cost-effectiveness of family planning delivery. The study examines resource allocation, cost, funding institutions, and output of the program at grassroots level in selected regencies in three provinces: West Java, the Special District of Yogyakarta, and South Kalimantan. It is based on data about the program's field operations collected during November 1986 - March 1987, and routine service statistics of BKKBN.Business in Development,Business Environment,Adolescent Health,Agricultural Research,Health Monitoring&Evaluation

The Use of Switching Point and Protection Levels to Improve Revenue Performance in Order‐Driven Production Systems

In a multiproduct order‐driven production system, an organization has to decide how to selectively accept orders and allocate capacity to these orders so as to maximize total profit (TP). In this article, we incorporate the novel concept of switching point in developing three capacity‐allocation with switching point heuristics (CASPa‐c). Our analysis indicates that all three CASP heuristics outperform the first‐come‐first‐served model and Barut and Sridharan's dynamic capacity‐allocation process (DCAP) model. The best model, CASPb, has an 8% and 6% average TP improvement over DCAP using the split lot and whole lot policies, respectively. In addition, CASPb performs particularly well under operating conditions of tight capacity and large price differences between product classes. The introduction of a switching point, which has not been found in previous capacity‐allocation heuristics, provides for a better balance between forward and backward allocation of available capacity and plays a significant role in improving TP.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/112181/1/j.1540-5915.2011.00320.x.pd

When and why does it pay to be green?

Environmental policy; innovation; Porter hypothesis; environmental regulation; pollution; capital market; green products.

Why manufacturing firms produce some electricity internally

Many manufacturers in developing countries produce their own electricity because the public supply is unavailable or unreliable. The authors develop a model of the firm in which electricity is produced internally, with scale economies. The model explains the observed behavior (prevalent in Nigeria, common in Indonesia, and rare in Thailand) that firms supplement their purchases of publicly produced electricity with electricity produced internally. To prepare an econometric estimate, they specify a translog model. In Nigeria, where firms exhibit excess capacity, generators are treated as a fixed input, whereas in Indonesia, where firms are expanding, they are variable. They confirm strong scale economies in internal power production in both Nigeria and Indonesia. Shadow price analysis for both countries shows that smaller firms would pay much more for public power than larger firms would. Instead of giving quantity discounts, public monopolies should charge the larger firms more and the smaller firms less than they presently charge. In Nigeria, the large firms would make intensive use of their idle generating capacity, while in Indonesia their would expand their facilities. In both countries, small users would realize savings by having to rely less on expensive endogenous power.Public Sector Economics&Finance,Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Energy Technology&Transmission,Markets and Market Access,Energy Technology&Transmission,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Carbon Policy and Trading,Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research

The promises of algorithmic copyright enforcement: takedown or staydown? Which is superior? And why?

Under the prevailing model of copyright liability for user-generated content, right holders and intermediaries are both involved in the enforcement of exclusive rights on the Internet. While right holders are expected to identify and notify the infringing content that they wish to remove, the intermediaries have to react by assessing the received notices and taking appropriate action, including taking the information “down” from the service in case it is infringing. This “notice and takedown” system, championed by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, became a model for many countries around the world. However, in the last few years, the right holders have begun to advocate for a fundamental re-design of the system. According to the number of initiatives, some of the right holders would prefer that intermediaries not only take down the notified content but also prevent its re-appearance in the future. This alternative model, often dubbed “notice and staydown,” is currently proposed by the European Commission as part of its upcoming copyright reform. If successful, it will constitute a huge change for the existing global online environment. This article scrutinizes the potential switch from notice and takedown policy (“NTD”) to notice and staydown policy (“NSD”) in order to answer two important questions: (1) What are the (economic) costs and benefits of two policy options and how do they compare? (2) Is NSD really superior in delivering better tools for automation? The overall goal of the paper is to offer general policy guidance for national or regional policymakers currently considering such policy change. This article concludes that algorithmic enforcement is inevitable and, under some conditions, socially desirable. First, high-quality automation of copyright enforcement that produces negligible enforcement errors offers many opportunities for improvement of the status quo and therefore should be embraced and incentivized. Second, to make such automation a reality, we need to push innovation in the right direction by conditioning acceptance of algorithmically generated notices upon their quality. Third, an enhanced notice and takedown framework can promote such automation better than notice and staydown. It provides for stronger market incentives for the development of new filtering technologies and allows area-by-area deployment as the technologies improve. Last, as a consequence, enhanced NTD can become a superior policy option from a social perspective. However, in order to realize these benefits, some changes to the NTD framework are required, too. These could take the form of standardized submission formats or interfaces for robo-notices that come with quality conditions and effective sanctions to enforce them

How public sector pay and employment affect labor markets : research issues

Structurally, the public sector has a more important economic role to play in developing countries than in industrial countries, particularly in how it affects labor markets. Evidence from many developing countries shows that public sector pay, employment, and performance are hurting the labor markets'ability to allocate workers among sectors and skill requirements. In many countries, the civil service and the public sector wage bill have grown to unsustainably high levels. The public sector is so big that interventions in the sector - with or without spillover effects into the nonpublic sector - make it more difficult for wages and employment to respond to shifts in demand and supply. Nonwage benefits are seldom related to productivity, so they can be particularly distorting. At the same time, a long-term drop in real civil service wages and the compression of wage ranges have caused critical shortages of managerial and technical workers in the civil service. The resulting skill imbalances in the rest of the domestic economy reduce international competitiveness in some countries. Policy reform has focused on the reform of large, inefficient public sectors because of their cumulative negative effects on economic growth and competitiveness. Policies to adjust relative prices from nontradables toward tradables have led to some movement of employment out of the public sector, but significant rigidities remain. Workers are attracted to the public sector because of complex economic and social incentives that are difficult to change - and the relationship between public sector interventions and the underlying political and economic forces is an important area for research. The slow progress in restructuring the public sector in many countries highlights the needto address more forcefully and more subtly how public sector policies affect the labor market.Environmental Economics&Policies,Banks&Banking Reform,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Municipal Financial Management

Employment outlooks: why forecast the labour market and for whom?

"This essay argues that experience from more than three decades of labour market forecasting shows that forecasting helps greasing the wheels of labour markets. Applied correctly - not in the sense of old fashioned manpower planning models - sufficiently disaggregated employment outlooks support individuals in making better informed decisions on human capital investments, guide policy makers, and alert firms of upcoming skill shortages. That forecasts are necessary at all follows mainly from nowadays widely acknowledged market failure arguments." (author's abstract)"In einigen Ländern der OECD werden seit mehr als drei Jahrzehnten Arbeitsmarktprognosen erstellt. Die Erfahrungen zeigen, dass Prognosen, wenn sie nicht im Stil sogenannter 'Manpower Planning' Modelle interpretiert werden, durchaus die Funktionsfähigkeit von Arbeitsmärkten verbessern können. Hinreichend detaillierte Voraussagen zum Bedarf nach Berufsgruppen und Qualifikationen helfen bei individuellen Bildungsentscheidungen, unterstützen Politik, und informieren Firmen über möglichen Fachkräftemangel. Dass Prognosen überhaupt notwendig sind, folgt aus den heutzutage doch weitgehend anerkannten Arbeiten zum Marktversagen." (Autorenreferat