The financial impact of ISO 9000 certification in the United States: an empirical analysis.

The ISO 9000 series of quality management systems standards, introduced in 1986, has been adopted at over 560,000 locations worldwide. Anecdotal evidence suggests that firms can achieve internal benefits such as quality or productivity improvements or that certification can help firms maintain or increase their market share, or both. Others argue that the standard is too generic to cause performance improvement but can be seen as a signal of good management. In this paper, we track financial performance from 1987 to 1997 of all publicly traded ISO 9000 certified manufacturing firms in the United States with SIC codes 2000–3999, and test whether ISO 9000 certification leads to productivity improvements, market benefits, and improved financial performance. We employ event-study methods, matching each certified firm to a control group of one or more noncertified firms in the same industry with similar precertification size and/or return on assets. We find that firms’ decision to seek their first ISO 9000 certification was indeed followed by significant abnormal improvements in financial performance, though the exact timing and magnitude of this effect depend on the specification of the control group. Three years after certification, the certified firms do display strongly significant abnormal performance under all control-group specifications. The degree to which the precise results vary across control-group specifications indicates that event studies should always include extensive sensitivity analysis, for instance matching by size and performance separately and jointly, using both single firms and portfolios as controls.ISO 9000; Quality management; Standards; Financial; Empirical; Event study; Compustat;

The value of SKU rationalization: the pooling effect under suboptimal inventory policies

Managing product variety is a widely recognized challenge. Several approaches to this rely on the "pooling effect", the reduction of uncertainty that occurs when individual demands are aggregated. This can occur through reduction of number of products orSKUs, through postponement of differentiation, or in other ways. These approaches are by now well-known and widely applied in practice. However, theoretical analyses of the pooling effect always assume that one has an optimal inventory policy before and after pooling. If this is not the case, how does that affect the value of pooling? This paper analyses the benefits of pooling in terms of costs and service level under optimal and suboptimal policies and proposes a simple framework to analyze the trade-off between implementing pooling and improving inventory policy. We show there is always a range of current inventory levels within which pooling is better and beyond whichoptimizing inventory policy is better. We analyze how this range varies with the problem parameters and illustrate these findings using highly erratic empirical demand data

The Time–Money Trade-Off for Entrepreneurs: When to Hire the First Employee?

For many early-stage entrepreneurs, hiring the first employee is a critical step in the firm’s growth. Doing so often requires significant time and monetary investments. To understand the trade-offs involved in deciding when to hire the first employee and how hiring differs in entrepreneurial settings from more established firm settings, we present a simple growth model that depends on two critical inputs for revenue generation: the entrepreneur’s time and money. We show that without hiring, the entrepreneur’s time eventually becomes more valuable than money in contributing to the firm’s growth. In that context, the value of the employee is driven by how much relief he provides to the entrepreneur. We characterize the optimal timing of hiring in terms of the firm’s cash position and how the firm is affected if it requires an upfront fixed investment in time and/or money. We find that the upfront investment in time needed for hiring cannot be converted to an equivalent upfront investment in money and that mistiming hiring can be very costly, especially when these upfront investments are high

La certificación ISO 9000, ¿es rentable?

Ayuda económica recibida del Programa de Investigación de la Región del Pacífico de la Universidad de California y del Centro Harold Price para Estudios Empresariales

Aerogel Scattering Filters for Cosmic Microwave Background Observations

We present the design and performance of broadband and tunable infrared-blocking filters for millimeter and sub-millimeter astronomy composed of small scattering particles embedded in an aerogel substrate. The ultra-low-density (< 100 mg/cu cm) aerogel substrate provides an index of refraction as low as 1.05, removing the need for anti-reflection coatings and allowing for broadband operation from DC to above 1 THz. The size distribution of the scattering particles can be tuned to provide a variable cutoff frequency. Aerogel filters with embedded high-resistivity silicon powder are being produced at 40-cm diameter to enable large-aperture cryogenic receivers for cosmic microwave background polarimeters, which require large arrays of sub-Kelvin detectors in their search for the signature of an inflationary gravitational-wave background