Narrow Results

This paper develops two models to study the impact of trade in intermediate goods on wage inequality between skilled and unskilled labor in a developed country and a developing country. The first model assumes symmetric production technologies in the intermediate good. It predicts that trade in the intermediate good will increase wage inequality in the developed country, but decrease wage inequality in the developing country. The second model assumes asymmetric technologies in the intermediate good. It predicts that trade in the intermediate good can lead to an increase in wage inequality in both the developed country and the developing country.

Globalization has its detractors as well as supporters. Concerns have been expressed about the greater ease of fragmenting the production process so that more parts can be outsourced to a variety of countries. Highly developed regions worry about the possibility of greater unemployment or lower unskilled wage rates. Less developed regions are concerned that they may not possess a comparative advantage in the service link activities that promote fragmentation. The paper discusses these issues, with special emphasis on India and China.

This paper is a non-technical survey of the literature on offshoring and outsourcing, with special focus on the relevance of this literature for Asia. We first see how and to what extent this new literature helps us understand firms' tradeoffs between outsourcing and integration, the variation in the mixes of organizational forms and the location of outsourced activities. We also explore what plausibly triggers offshoring and thereafter what determines its dynamics. Finally, we draw inferences from the existing theory and empirical work about the developmental impact of offshoring on Asia, with special attention to issues related to inequality and poverty.

This paper examines India's role in services outsourcing within Asia. It provides a brief overview of the global as well as Indian services outsourcing industry. The core section examines India's relationship with other Asian countries such as China, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Malaysia in service outsourcing. It examines the extent to which these countries pose a competitive challenge to India and concludes that at this time, India is far ahead although it is likely to face growing competition as its costs rise. The paper highlights the need to move beyond this comparative paradigm and to examine the complementary and collaborative opportunities that exist between India and other Asian countries in services outsourcing. It concludes that there is considerable scope for such synergies and that India and other Asian countries can form different parts of a larger regional or global delivery model. Regional and bilateral agreements within Asia can also facilitate this process.

We consider m-machine permutation flow shop problems with an outsourcing option for a special case where each job's processing time equals the job's processing requirement plus a characteristic value of the machine. The objective is to minimize the sum of the performance measure for in-house jobs (the total completion time or the makespan) and the total outsourcing cost. We prove that two problems are polynomially solvable when the number of machines is fixed.

This paper addresses a scheduling problem in a flexible supply chain where the jobs can be either processed in house, or outsourced to a third-party supplier with the goal of minimizing the sum of holding and delivery costs subject to an upper bound on the outsourcing cost. The problem with identical job processing times has been proved as binary ${𝒩}{𝒫}$-hard one and a fully polynomial time approximation scheme (FPTAS) that runs in $O(\frac{n^8}{{\epsilon }^2})$ time has also been given. The aim of this paper is to derive a more effective FPTAS running in $O(\frac{n^{4}lognlogmax\{n,1/\epsilon \}}{{\epsilon }^2})$ time for this problem.

In this paper, we address a supply chain scheduling model with outsourcing and transportation. A job can be scheduled either on a single machine at a manufacturer’s plant or outsourced to a subcontractor. We assume that there are a sufficient number of vehicles at the manufacturer and the subcontractor such that each completed job can be transported to its customer immediately. For a given set of jobs, the decisions we need to make include the selection of jobs to be outsourced and the schedule of all the jobs. When the objective functions are to minimize the weighted sum of common scheduling measures and the total cost, we present their complexity analysis and a $2$-approximation algorithm for the second problem.

In recent times, sustainability has become more important for businesses. Accordingly, product remanufacturing has emerged as an interesting topic, as it is generally considered as a profitable and environmentally friendly end-of-use management option for several products. While extant literature on remanufacturing has comprehensively studied the topic of outsourcing, it has failed to recognize that retailers also have the flexibility to engage in remanufacturing. However, in recent years, several brand name retailers have established remanufacturing operations. The following question arises: Should original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) outsource their remanufacturing operations to their retailers? To answer this question, two models are developed in which an OEM interacts with an independent retailer on remanufacturing operations with the option to either remanufacture all products in-house (Model M) or outsource remanufacturing to their retailer (Model R). The result shows that although model M potentially facilitates greater economic, social, and environmental sustainability, it has costs for the retailer. Finally, a revenue-sharing contract is proposed to achieve a “win-win-win” outcome that has economic, social, and environmental benefits for all parties.

As a result of IT outsourcing and offshoring, IT professionals and educators are faced with the following question: What SE & KE skill sets will make a software engineer or a knowledge engineer immune to the impact of outsourcing and offshoring? This article summarizes the position papers from a panel held during the 2006 International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering from July 5 to 7 at the Hotel Sofitel, Redwood City in California, USA. Bringing software and knowledge engineers closer to the needs of their prospective customers and providing more value than simply pure software development and maintenance, is an open challenge at least for traditional computer science and software engineering curricula.

The outsourcing market has been growing in recent years and it is expected to keep doing so in the coming years, but this growth has been limited by the failure of many projects that, in some cases, has led organizations to take back those services (insourcing). These failures have been due mainly to problems with providers: lack of experience and capacity to take on the projects, and difficulties of communication. There are good practices frameworks for managing outsourcing projects for clients, but it is not the same for providers, who base the provision of services on their past experience and technical capabilities. The aim of this paper is to state the need of proposing a methodology that guides providers throughout the whole outsourcing life cycle and facilitates the provision of quality services and their management.

Bone Healing from Within

How Technology Helps in Care Coordination: Telehealth?

Soft Wearable Machines for Robot-Assisted Rehabilitation

Technology Can Help Patients Find Doctors and Share Medical Data

Seizing Opportunity in Asia-Pacific's Complex and Rapidly Changing Medical Device Market

How Logistics Technology Can Treat Tomorrow's Life Sciences & Healthcare Complications

This article investigates the market reaction to a sample of announcements of business service outsourcing arrangements made by UK quoted companies between 1991 and 1997. Event study methodology is applied to daily stock returns to measure the reaction, in the form of excess returns, immediately prior to and at the date of an outsourcing contract announcement. The conclusion is that initial announcements tend to enjoy positive and significant reaction and that the larger companies in the sample show a more positive reaction than smaller companies. Overall outsourcing announcements appear to be associated with excess returns but the absence of any recognized basis for disclosure prevents a complete analysis of such events.

In this paper from the Xiangshang Forum 2006, we propose the Wisdom project, an international network initiative on developing the next generation of management and entrepreneurial systems based on knowledge and wisdom rather than data and information. This is a major challenge especially for China which must aspire to become wise and ethical rather than just efficient or effective. Major topics of the project include knowledge management, wisdom systems, added value measures, entrepreneurial university, and management as a profession. These topics are the key ones for developing sustainable competitive advantage of any globally aspiring economy or enterprise.

The practice of solely relying on the human resources department in the selection process of external training providers has cast doubts and mistrust across other departments as to how trainers are sourced. There are no measurable criteria used by human resource personnel, since most decisions are based on intuitive experience and subjective market knowledge. The present problem focuses on outsourcing of private training programs that are partly government funded, which has been facing accountability challenges. Due to the unavailability of a scientific decision-making approach in this context, a 12-step algorithm is proposed and tested in a Japanese multinational company. The model allows the decision makers to revise their criteria expectations, in turn witnessing the change of the training providers' quota distribution. Finally, this multi-objective sensitivity analysis provides a forward-looking approach to training needs planning and aids decision makers in their sourcing strategy.

This paper extends a previous study that proposed an integrated model to test knowledge sharing (KS) motivation among information technology (IT) workers. While the previous study focussed on the differences in KS between internal and external IT workers, the perspective of the current paper is broader; it proposes additional hypotheses, and uses both inferential statistics and data mining techniques to detect further practical aspects of the integrated model findings. Because data mining techniques are useful in extracting patterns and gaining insights from data, they are implemented here alongside inferential statistics. The present study also looks into the employment-contract factor, to better capture the differences between internal and external IT workers. The study reveals that external workers score significantly lower than internal workers in almost every component of the integrated KS model. This gives rise to five practical implications of knowledge management (KM) and employment policies, including factors and practises that should be taken into consideration while employing external workers, to help motivate collaborative behaviour in IT departments.

In this paper, a new mathematical model is presented for a cellular manufacturing system into tactical planning of a closed-loop supply chain to build a sustainable manufacturing enterprise. On the manufacturing side of the model, a comprehensive cellular manufacturing system is designed considering dynamic cell configuration, alternative process routings, lot splitting, sequence of operations, multiple units of identical machines, machine capacity, machine adjacency requirements, and cell size limits. On the closed-loop supply chain side of the model, different activities are considered including acquiring returned products, setting up the system for the implementation of disassembly operations, inventory holding of the returned products, remanufacturing the parts having high quality, and disposing of the returned products that cannot be economically recovered. The mathematical model in this paper, to the best of our knowledge, is the first model reducing the total costs of the cellular manufacturing system while considering the alternative process routings and subcontracting of the part demands. A detailed economic analysis is done on the large-sized example problem of the mathematical model to investigate the impacts of adopting different production policies such as internal production, inventory holding, and subcontracting as well as different manufacturing attributes such as dynamic reconfiguration and alternative process routings. The mathematical model is also solved for different instances to investigate the effects of incorporating subcontracting, alternative process routings, and dynamic reconfigurations in the model. Sensitivity analyses are also conducted to investigate the effects of the recovery rate of returned products on the objective function value and the number of returned products to be acquired. The effect of taking alternative process routings into consideration on the objective function value is also investigated.

Research on outsourcing normally focuses on outsourcing of production and often uses large firms as samples. Only a few studies address the outsourcing of services or knowledge-intensive activities such as new product development (NPD), and especially in the context of medium-sized firms. Our earlier research in medium-sized firms indicates that outsourcing of NPD is frequent in medium-sized firms, and that there is a lack of knowledge about the phenomenon.

This article offers a theoretical framework to study the outsourcing of NPD, and includes the results from a longitudinal case study carried out in six Swedish medium-sized firms to help understand the rationales behind outsourcing of NPD. Results from the present study indicate that 'good enough' is the keyword for medium-sized firms with limited resources. This means that it is considered more important with proximity and trust than world class competence, since close and frequent contacts are crucial, when outsourcing knowledge-intensive activities such as NPD. A conceptual model and a definition of the good enough concept are also presented.

Various important benefits can be achieved through the successful management of offshore outsourcing. Numerous studies exist on outsourcing in general, yet the vast majority of extant literature on offshore outsourcing has dealt with information technology (IT) outsourcing from the client's perspective. Several frameworks, focusing on guiding information systems managers in relation to IT outsourcing, have been developed. However, none of these frameworks attempted to provide a holistic guideline to manage the entire process of offshore outsourcing of software production. There is a significant lack of studies dealing with the management of offshore outsourcing of software production from both the vendor's and client's perspectives. Thus, there is a great need to study such a multifaceted and complex phenomenon more deeply for both scenarios to find out the best practices for managing the unified process. In this study, we utilize the conceptual framework of The ICT-supported Unified Process Model of Offshore Software Production Outsourcing as our research model. We then validate this model by reviewing the vast extant literature, and by conducting multiple case studies from both the vendor's and client's viewpoints, where professionals with extensive experience in managing offshore outsourcing of software production are interviewed. The implications of the findings are discussed for both practical and research purposes.

Organizations need to share and acquire new information to sustain competitive advantage in complex environment. They communicate through IT-based integrated systems to fasten communication and knowledge sharing for the creation of innovative products. Firms are, thus, extending their operations to integrate strategic knowledge from partners in the product development process. In this paper, we present a case study related to process innovation in an aerospace firm integrating its information systems with one of its partners to facilitate the design of the models of a complex product. We investigate on the strategy followed to integrate the information systems, the types of these latter, on their success factors and their impact on the product development. The case study provides important insights on the integration of information systems for product design outsourcing.

Many researchers and industrial professionals recognize new product development (NPD) as a potential alternative for improving and sustaining competitive position in the market and made attempt to identify factors and variables that contribute to the capability of a firm in new product development. However, it is necessary to quantify these factors and variables in order to establish their relationships with the capability of NPD of a firm. Quantification of the factors is essential in order to achieve adequate control over the NPD activities. In this research work, a methodology is developed to quantify the factors and to establish empirical relationships of capability of NPD of a firm with its various main and support functions of new product development. In each of the selected function, the variables which contribute to NPD capability are identified by respondents/experts participated in a questionnaire survey. Out of the variables identified, three best variables are selected based on the importance assigned by the respondents. Utility functions and fuzzy analytical method are used for establishing the relationships between variables and the capabilities of the functions. The methodology is applied to an industrial product of a construction equipment-manufacturing firm that actively involves all the main functions and support activities as required for new product development. This methodology based on regression analysis may be used to monitor the product development process over a planning period on a continuous basis in a manufacturing firm.