Academic Material Program (AMP)

Starting Fall 2024, required undergraduate course material is included in a program called Academic Material Program (AMP). Under AMP, the entirety of required course materials for each student is delivered for a single charge of $239.99 per semester. The majority of required course material will be available as digital content delivered to students on the first day of class through Brightspace course shells. The AMP includes physical copies of selected titles, lab manuals and kits, all available for pick up at the University Bookstore. This program applies to undergraduate courses only. Graduate course materials, as well as winter and summer undergraduate session courses will continue to be billed individually. This program offers substantial savings for most students while providing an OPT-OUT option for those who prefer to obtain course material on their own. The bookstore spent 18 months preparing for AMP with the involvement of the Faculty Senate, Student Government, Bursar\u27s Office, and CITL. Communication in the form of individualized postcards will be mailed directly to students. A dedicated informational website, accessible to students through MaineStreet and will provide a comprehensive explanation of the program

The Future of Retail Operations

Retailing consists of all the activities associated with the selling of goods to the final consumer. In this article, we review the research on retail operations published in Manufacturing & Service Operations Research (M&SOM) since 1999. We then discuss the current retail landscape and the new research directions it offers, in which M&SOM can play a prominent role

Empirical Studies In Retail Operations

This dissertation contains three essays. The first essay, entitled \textit{ Does Inventory Increase Sales? The Billboard and Scarcity Effects in U.S. Automobile Dealerships } looks into the relationship between inventory and demand beyond the obvious stockout effect. Inventory might signal a popular, and therefore a desirable, product, thereby increasing sale. Or, inventory might encourage a consumer to continue her search, thereby decreasing sales. In this paper we seek to identify these effects in U.S. automobile sales. Our primary research challenge is the endogenous relationship between inventories and demand. Hence, our estimation strategy relies on weather shocks at upstream production facilities to create exogenous variation in downstream dealership inventory. We find that the impact of adding a vehicle of a particular model to a dealer\u27s lot depends on which cars the dealer already has. If the added vehicle expands the available set of sub-models (e.g., adding a four-door among a set that is exclusively two-door), then sales increase. But if the added vehicle is of the same sub-model as an existing vehicle, then sales actually decrease. Based on this insight, given a fixed set of cars, they should be allocated among a group of dealers so as to maximize each dealer\u27s variety. The second essay, entitled \textit{ Severe Weather and Automobile Assembly Productivity }, is related to the first one in that presents a detail analysis of the exogenous shock presented there: The weather impact on vehicles assembly lines. It is apparent that severe weather should hamper the productivity of work that occurs outside. But what is the effect of extreme rain, snow, heat and wind on work that occurs indoors, such as the production of automobiles? Using weekly production data from 64 automobile plants in the United States over a ten-year period, we find that adverse weather conditions lead to a significant reduction in production. Across our sample of plants, severe weather reduces production on average by 1.5\%. While it is possible that plants are able to recover these losses at some later date, we do not find evidence that recovery occurs in the week after the event. Our findings are useful both for assessing the potential productivity shock associated with inclement weather as well as guiding managers on where to locate a new production facility. The third essay, entitled \textit{ Integration of Online and Offline Channels in Retail: The Impact of Sharing Reliable Inventory Availability Information }. In this essay we focus the attention on the impact of inventory information disclosure. Increasingly, retailers are integrating their offline and online channels to reduce costs or to improve the value proposition they make to their customers. Using a proprietary dataset, we analyze the impact of the implementation of a buy-online-pickup-in-store project. Contrary to our expectations, the implementation of this project is associated with a reduction in online sales and an increase in store sales and traffic. We interpret the results in light of recent operations management literature that analyzes the impact of sharing inventory availability information online. The implementation of a buy-online-pickup-in-store project provides an exogenous shock to the verifiability of the inventory information that the firm shows to their customers. Our analysis illustrates the challenges of drawing conclusions about complex interventions using single channel data

Carrier licence conditions (networks supplying superfast carriage services to residential customers) declaration 2014

Minister for Communications Media Release: The Government has today asked for industry and public submissions on a draft carrier licence condition for networks that supply superfast carriage services to residential customers. Following the announcement by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) on 11 September 2014 on TPG\u27s plan to roll out a fibre-to-the-basement (FTTB) network, the Government announced it would consult on a draft licence condition. The draft licence condition would require owners of high-speed networks servicing residential customers to functionally separate their wholesale and retail operations, and to provide access to competing service providers on the same non-discriminatory terms as those provided to their own retail operations. The carrier\u27s wholesale company would also need to supply a Layer 2 Wholesale Service to other carriers and service providers, with the price of that service set at $27 per month. The Government\u27s aim is to ensure that carriers provide wholesale access to FTTB network infrastructure and remove the ability to favour their own downstream retail operations over other retailers on the network. Without such arrangements competition and consumers can suffer. These are equivalent issues to those addressed by the structural separation of Telstra and NBN Co\u27s wholesale-only operation. The Government is conscious that the ACCC has announced a declaration  inquiry under Part XIC of the Competition and Consumer Act 2010, which is relevant to the issue of access. However, such inquiries take time and cannot provide for functional separation. The licence condition would remain in place for two years, allowing long-term regulatory arrangements for the sector to be settled

The Effect of Labor on Profitability: The Role of Quality

Determining staffing levels is an important decision in retail operations. While the costs of increasing labor are obvious and easy to measure, the benefits are often indirect and not immediately felt. One benefit of increased labor is improved quality. The objective of this paper is to examine the effect of labor on profitability through its impact on quality. I examine both conformance quality and service quality. Using longitudinal data from stores of a large retailer, I find that increasing the amount of labor at a store is associated with an increase in profitability through its impact on conformance quality but not its impact on service quality. While increasing labor is associated with an increase in service quality, in this setting there is no significant relationship between service quality and profitability. My findings highlight the importance of attending to process discipline in certain service settings. They also show that too much corporate emphasis on payroll management may motivate managers to operate with insufficient labor levels, which, in turn, degrades profitability.Labor Capacity Management, Quality, Retail Operations

Essays in Retail Operations and Humanitarian Logistics

This dissertation introduces and analyzes research problems related to Retail Operations and Humanitarian Logistics. In Retail Operations, the inventory that ends up as unsaleable at primary markets can be significant (up to 20% of the retail product). Thus retailers look for strategies like selling in secondary markets at a discounted price. In such a setting, the decisions of how much to order for a product of limited shelf life and when (if at all) to start selling the product in the secondary market become critical because these decisions not only affect the retailer's cost of procurement and sales revenues obtained from the product but also affect utilization of shelf space, product rollover and assortment decisions of the retailer. Apart from using secondary markets, retailers that sell seasonal products or products with sales horizons shorter than the typical production/procurement lead time also enter into contractual agreements with suppliers. These contracts are in place to share risks associated with unknown or uncertain demand for the product. Presence of such contracts does affect a retailer's order quantity as well as the time to start selling in the secondary market. In our two essays on retail operations, we analyze a retailer's optimal order quantity and when he/she starts selling in the secondary market. We refer to the former as the 'ordering decision' and the latter as the 'timing decision.' These two decisions are studied first without risk sharing contracts in Essay 1, and then in the presence of contracts in Essay 2. In Essay 1, we build a two-stage model with demand uncertainty. The ordering decision is made in the first stage considering cost of procurement and expected sales revenue. The timing decision is made in the second stage and is conditional on the order quantity determined in the first stage. We introduce a new class of aggregate demand model for this model. We study the structural properties of the retailer's timing and ordering problem and identify optimality conditions for the timing decision. Finally, we complement our analytical results with computational experiments and show how retailer's optimal decisions change when problem parameters are varied. In Essay 2, we extend the work in first essay to include the contracts between the retailer and a supplier. In this essay, we introduce a time-based Poisson demand model. We define three di®erent types of contracts and investigate the effect of each of these contracts on the retailer's ordering and timing decisions. We investigate how the analytical structure of the retailer's decision changes in the presence of these contracts. For a given order quantity, we show that the timing decision depends on the type of contract. Our analytical results on the timing decision are complemented with computational experiments where we investigate the impact of contract type on the optimal order quantity of the retailer. In Humanitarian Logistics, non-profit organizations receive several-billion-dollars-worth of donations every year but lack a sophisticated system to handle their complex logistics operations; the absence of expertly-designed systems is one of the significant reasons why there has been a weak link in the distribution of relief aid. The distribution of relief aid is a complex problem as the goal is humanitarian yet at the same time, due to limited resources, the operations have to be efficient. In the two essays on humanitarian logistics, we study the distribution of aid using homogeneous fleet, with and without capacity restrictions. In Essay 3, we discuss routing for relief operations using one vehicle without capacity restrictions. Contrary to the existing vehicle routing models, the key property of our routing models is that the nodes have priorities along with humanitarian needs. We formulate this model with d-Relaxed Priority rule that captures distance and response time. We formulate routing models with strict and relaxed forms of priority restrictions as Mixed Integer Programs (MIP). We derive bounds for this problem and show that this bound is attained in limiting condition for a worst-case example. Finally, we evaluate the optimal solutions on test problems for response time and distance and show that our vehicle routing model with priorities captures the trade-off between distance and response time unlike existing Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) models without priorities. In Essay 4, we extend the problem dealt in third essay to consider fleet consisting of multiple vehicles (homogeneous) with capacity and route length restrictions. First, we show that the humanitarian aspect imposes additional challenges and develop routing models that capture performance metrics like fill rate, distance traversed, response time and number of victims satisfied. Proposed routing models are formulated as Mixed Integer Programs and are solved to optimality for small test problems. We conduct computational experiment and show that our models perform well on these performance metrics