A Just and Sustainable Solution to the Boat People Predicament in Australia?

Since the year 2000, there have been close to two thousand deaths of asylum seekers at sea as a result of foiled attempts to travel to Australia in order to seek protection under the United Nations Convention and Protocol on the Status of Refugees.[1] Many thousands more have made it to shore. Growing numbers of irregular or unauthorized migrants attempting to reach the United States and the European Union has long been known as a contentious policy issue in these states, but perhaps less known is the situation on the other side of the Pacific. Australia is the eight-largest recipient of asylum seekers in the industrialized world, receiving around 4% of the global applications for asylum, a relatively minimal amount considering that the state has the capacity to take on a much greater burden of the international refugee crisis.[2] In addition, the policies that are currently in place are primarily seeking to deter the arrival of ‘boat people’ and associated people smuggling activity, rather than to constructively manage the flow while upholding the individual rights of those seeking refuge under international law. This paper deconstructs the restrictive policies of the Australian government and proposes a more sustainable solution, drawing widely from research literature, government publications and media reports that use both primary and secondary sources to build a strong case for an alternative program. The policy that I found best balances the costs and benefits for both the asylum seekers in question as well as the Australian government is a combination of short-term onshore detention and community-based processing and integration. There is a robust debate in Australia over refugees and asylum policy, but in order for such a bill to be feasible in the Australian context, a major transformation of the public’s attitude is essential. [1] The study sponsored by Monash University has compiled a database of border deaths, and has found that 1911 deaths have occurred at sea since 2000, how the true numbers are not known as there is no official government database that has been published. See: Macleod, Kenneth. Deadly Voyages: Border Related Deaths Associated with Australia. SBS News. April 23, 2015, and Australian Border Deaths Database. Monash University: The Border Crossing Observatory. October, 2014 and Bullock, Chris. Asylum Seekers: Drowning on Our Watch. ABC Radio National. September 1, 2013.[2] Australia Asylum: Why Is It Controversial? - BBC News. BBC News. December 5, 2014

A Call Center Simulation Study: Comparing the Reliability of Cross-Trained Agents to Specialized Agents

Call centers are an important function of most companies’ day to day business activities. They are often the link between a company and its customers and hugely impact the customer’s perspective or point of view (POV) of a company. A call center in the most general sense is a place, representing a business, which receives inbound calls from customers and/or makes outbound calls to customers, the latter being most commonly referred to as telemarketing. There was a time when a typical call center strictly consisted of agents who handled inbound/outbound calls; these agents are considered specialized agents. Generally speaking, a specialized agent is one trained, in-depth, in a particular area of knowledge. Most businesses have transgressed from your typical call center into contact centers. Contact centers operate essentially the same as a call center but interact with the customer in a variety of ways including, but not limited to: Phone, Mail, Fax, Email, and Internet (via online chat and instant messaging applications). The dynamics of these kinds of call centers has caused an increase in the need for agents to become more diverse in their talents and abilities to handle different types of calls. This has lead to specialized agents becoming general or “cross-trained” agents in which they are trained, broadly, over several areas of knowledge. The purpose of this thesis is to compare specialized agents to cross-trained agents and through the use of simulation, determine which of the two are more efficient and reliable in their ability to service the customer. This thesis has three major components: Simulation, Reliability Analysis, and Comparison. The results indicate that a cross-trained model is more reliable and efficient than a specialized model. Performance metrics common to call center literature, simulation, and Lean reliability systems were used to determine the effectiveness and reliability of the two models

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

Data-driven Service Operations Management

This dissertation concerns data driven service operations management and includes three projects. An important aim of this work is to integrate the use of rigorous and robust statistical methods into the development and analysis of service operations management problems. We develop methods that take into account demand arrival rate uncertainty and workforce operational heterogeneity. We consider the particular application of call centers, which have become a major communication channel between modern commerce and its customers. The developed tools and lessons learned have general appeal to other labor-intensive services such as healthcare. The first project concerns forecasting and scheduling with a single uncertain arrival customer stream, which can be handled by parametric stochastic programming models. Theoretical properties of parametric stochastic programming models with and without recourse actions are proved, that optimal solutions to the relaxed programs are stable under perturbations of the stochastic model parameters. We prove that the parametric stochastic programming approach meets the quality of service constraints and minimizes staffing costs in the long-run. The second project considers forecasting and staffing call centers with multiple interdependent uncertain arrival streams. We first develop general statistical models that can simultaneously forecast multiple-stream arrival rates that exhibit inter-stream dependence. The models take into account several types of inter-stream dependence. With distributional forecasts, we then implement a chance-constraint staffing algorithm to generate staffing vectors and further assess the operational effects of incorporating such inter-stream dependence, considering several system designs. Experiments using real call center data demonstrate practical applicability of our proposed approach under different staffing designs. An extensive set of simulations is performed to further investigate how the forecasting and operational benefits of the multiple-stream approach vary by the type, direction, and strength of inter-stream dependence, as well as system design. Managerial insights are discussed regarding how and when to take operational advantage of the inter-stream dependence. The third project of this dissertation studies operational heterogeneity of call center agents with regard to service efficiency and service quality. The proxies considered for agent service efficiency and service quality are agents' service times and issue resolution probabilities, respectively. Detailed analysis of agents' learning curves of service times are provided. We develop a new method to rank agents' first call resolution probabilities based on customer call-back rates. The ranking accuracy is studied and the comparison with traditional survey-driven methods is discussed.Doctor of Philosoph

Qualitative Strategy for Inbound Call Center Outsourcing

An analysis of the various challenges of the call center industry, together with the challenges of outsourcing, revealed a need for developing a strategy that acts as a guide for organizations that are willing to outsource their call center operations. This research therefore develops a strategy for this purpose. The research first provides mitigation strategies for the challenges of outsourcing and the challenges of the call center industry, followed by a strategy for the outsourcing of call center services. Telephone call centers are an integral part of today‘s business world, serving as a primary channel for customer contact for organizations in many industries. Globalization, the advancements in the telecommunication and technology industries, and the availability of cost effective work forces around the world are compelling organizations to outsource their functions (call center services) to reap the benefits that come with outsourcing. Organizations outsource functions, especially a function that is not their core competence, for a multitude of reasons. These reasons may include cost savings, quality enhancement/improvement, reduced time to market, tax benefits, and risk management. Outsourcing also comes with its share of issues. A few examples of the challenges involved in outsourcing include cultural differences, knowledge transfer to suppliers while protecting intellectual property (IP), knowledge retention, language barriers, ethics, norms of behavior, distance and time zones, infrastructure, privacy and security, skill set/quality, objectivity, geopolitical climate, labor backlash, communication, end-user resistance, and governance. There are also many challenges associated with the call center industry, such as, but not limited to, deploying the right number of staff members with the right skills to the right schedules in order to meet an uncertain and time-varying demand of service, forecasting traffic, acquiring capacity, deploying resources, and managing service delivery. Therefore, despite the advancements in telecommunications and information technology, the challenges faced by client organizations that outsource their inbound call center services abound. While choosing outsourcing/offshoring as their strategy, an organization can avoid many of the disadvantages that arise due these risks/issues by adapting a proactive and careful approach such as the strategy developed in this research

Analysis of the impact of globalization on performance of Ethiopian Airlines

Globalization drives people to change their ways of living and caused dramatic change to changes to business practise. As part of the global community various organizations in our country Ethiopia has also been affected positively as well in the negative aspect. Among the best organizations Ethiopian Airlines one of the well knows airlines in Africa. Despite the escalation of fuel cost and intensive competition from neighbouring airlines and the international aviation industry it has maintained its reputation in the business. It has been growing each year in its capacity to compete in the aviation industry since its establishment. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to investigate the impacts of globalization on the performance of Ethiopian Airlines. The qualitative data were collected by using questionnaires which were administered to the management, international flight customers and non-management staff of the airlines within the population of above 6000 Ethiopian airlines employees 200 employees were selected by judgment sampling method. The quantitative data for 10 years were collected from the airlines annual report. After critically examining both the qualitative and quantitative data, the researcher found that, the impact of globalization is enormous in the different aspects of the organizations performance. The positive impacts include increased customers and income, increased technology leading to more comfort and increased destination of flight worldwide. The negative side is basically related to competitors and factors associated with Ethiopia’s economic status that can make the organization of lesser preference by its customers due to the fact that competing giant organizations present better service by investing more. That is, as different literatures show globalization has a significant role in promoting as well challenging organizational performance. In general, the research led to the conclusion that more of the positive effects of globalization prevail than the side effects. This being said, it also showed that even the challenges posed by this process of globalization can be used as an opportunity that will enhance the organizational performance through fierce competition. As a recommendation the researcher mentioned that the organization should be alert in assessing its surrounding business environment and plan accordingly. The management in particular should make decisions affecting the organizational performance by taking the international aviation industry in to consideration. It is a good opportunity despite some of the hazards presented hence Ethiopian airlines should make use of it at its maximum ability

Russian Migration Policy and Its Impact on Human Development

For Russia, migration policy – in terms of internal or/and international migration flows management – was an ever-important element of the State activities. Concentrated on State interests, the policy also resulted in human development. The paper presents a historical overview of the Soviet and Russian migration policies with special emphases on the impact on human development and the driving forces behind the changing policies. The Soviet period can be characterized as contradiction between strict limitations on the freedom of movement provided by the propiska system, and large-scale population movements, both voluntary and involuntary, that were inspired by economic and administrative policy measures to meet labor demand of an industrializing economy. In the post-Soviet period, international migration is the major focus of the Russian migration policy. The Russian Federation is the major receiving country in the vast former USSR territory. The evolution of Russian migration policy in the post- Soviet period is a good example for getting a better understanding of how the everlasting conflict between the need for additional human resources and anti-immigrant public moods (typical of all receiving countries), combined with the opportunistic considerations of political elites, that hampers the elaboration of a reasonable long-term migration strategy. Russian migration policy has been drifting from a relatively open immigration regulation based on a laissez faire approach in the early 1990s to restrictive immigration laws in the early 2000s and to an ‘open door’ migration policy in respect to CIS citizens in 2007.Human development, internal migration, international migration, migration policy, Russia