Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Fulfillment Decision'

Thesis (M.B.A.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management; and, (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; in conjunction with the Leaders for Global Operations Program at MIT, 2012.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 48).
Dell's Third-Party (3P) Product network uses several different order fulfillment methods, though the determination of which products are fulfilled under which method is not clearly delineated. We have developed a tool to assist in the decision making process for Dell's 3P distribution network. This tool transparently presents the results of cost modeling and forecast variance simulation while maintaining usability to achieve broad adoption and exert influence on product fulfillment method decisions. The cost model created takes into account product, overhead, logistics, and capital costs and has the capability to deal with volume uncertainties through simulation. This tool solidifies the discussion around choosing the correct fulfillment method decision process and is the first step towards quantifying the fulfillment method decision.
by Bryan Drake.
S.M.
M.B.A.

The Goal of this thesis was to gain an understanding of why people decided to leave an ICT subcontracting and consultancy company. The study was conducted by analyzing roughly 300 employment ending interview transcripts written by an employee supervisor as notes for the company HR department. Later in the theory creation process also company annual reports were used to gain statistical information on employees, such as their background education and length of career. The research is qualitative in nature and the research method used was grounded theory. The chosen research approach is relativist and constructivist, meaning that the goal is to understand the subjective truth of the employee. The reason for this is to gain theory with explanatory power from the field with mixed and sometimes even contradictory results. The transitory theory built on top of empirical data during early phase of analysis directed research towards trust discussion in an organizational setting. At the same time, contemporary career discussion was examined to find further explanations to solve contradictions in the theory created by the data alone. In the end, it was found that faith in career fulfillment was the crucial component for the employees to leave the company. Scientifically faith creates, I would argue, a long yearned bridge between trust and career discussions. Faith works inside the career context where it determines if the employee will leave a company or not. If the employee does not have faith that his envisioned career can be fulfilled in the current organization he most likely makes the decision to leave. As a qualitative study this thesis cannot be generalized into the wider population, but can be generalized into the current career and trust discussions. It supplements both of them with an insight of why people decide to change work places.

Thesis: M.B.A., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, in conjunction with the Leaders for Global Operations Program at MIT, 2017.
Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Mechanical Engineering, in conjunction with the Leaders for Global Operations Program at MIT, 2017.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (page 73).
This thesis provides a deep mathematical analysis of the diverse alternatives for routing models considering an Omni-channel supply chain. The natural evolution of supply chains from traditional brick-and-mortar stores to an omni-channel supply chain, encompassing and merging e-commerce together with a multi-channel concept, allows businesses to reach new levels of operational efficiency by leveraging inventory closer to the customer and making decisions on the fly on how to better and more cheaply provide a service/product to the final consumer. The flexibility and benefits, unfortunately, do not come without a certain dose of complexity and further development of the supply chain tactical implementation and systems. New alternatives to fulfill customer orders are available, which require greater screening among the different alternatives. An effective routing model becomes essential to make sure these alternatives are properly considered in order to satisfy both the consumer and retailer objectives, such as on-time delivery of orders, retail stores' service levels, and fulfillment costs.
by Federico Markowicz.
M.B.A.
S.M.

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, Operations Research Center, 2016.
This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.
Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 153-156).
The supply chain management for an online retailing business is centered around the operations of its fulfillment centers. A fulfillment center receives and holds inventory from vendors, and then uses this inventory to fill customer orders. Our research focuses on a new operating architecture of an order fulfillment system, enabled by new technology. We refer to it as the Semi-automated Fulfillment System. Different from the person-to-goods model in traditional warehouses, the semi-automated fulfillment system adopts a goods-to-person model for stowing and picking items from a storage field. In a semi-automated fulfillment system the inventory is stored on mobile storage pods; those mobile pods are then carried by robotic drives to static stations at which the operators conduct pick or stow operations. In the first chapter, we describe and identify three key operational decisions in the semiautomated fulfillment system, namely from which pods to pick the inventory needed (picking decision), where to return the pod to the storage field upon the completion of a pick or stow operation (storage decision), and to which pods to replenish the received inventory (stowage decision). We present a high-level capacity planning model for determining the number of robotic drives needed to achieve a given throughput level. This model highlights how the operational efficiency in this system depends on two key parameters, namely the travel time for an entire drive trip and the number of unit picks or stows per pod trip. In the second chapter, we focus on the storage decisions. The storage decision is to decide to which storage location to return a pod upon the completion of a pick or stow operation. We extend the academic results on the benefits of adopting velocity-based and class-based storage policies to the context of the semi-automated fulfillment system. We associate with each storage pod a velocity measure that represents an expectation of the number of picks from that pod in the near future. We then show that by assigning the high velocity pods to the most desirable storage locations, we can significantly reduce the drive travel time, compared to the random storage policy that returns the pod to a randomly-chosen storage location. We show that class-based storage policies with two or three classes, can achieve most of the benefits from the idealized velocity-based policy. Furthermore, we characterize how the performance of the velocity-based and class-based storage policies depend on the velocity variability across the storage pods; in particular we model how the benefits from velocity-based storage policies increase with increased variation in the pod velocities. In the third chapter, we build a discrete-time simulator to validate the theoretical models in the second chapter with real industry data. We observe a 6% to 11% reduction in the travel distance with 2-class or 3-class system, depending on the parameter settings. From a sensitivity analysis we establish the robustness of the class-based storage policies as they continue to perform well under a broad range of warehouse settings including different zoning strategies, resource utilization levels and space utilization levels. In the fourth chapter, we examine two stowage decisions, one at the zone level and the other at the pod level. The zone-level decision is to decide how to allocate the received inventory to multiple storage zones. The objective is to assure that the resulting picking workload for each zone is within its capacity. We show by simulation that a chaining-based allocation can be effective to balance the picking workload across different storage zones. The pod-level stowage decision is to decide on which pods to stow the inventory. We formulate a mixedinteger program (MIP) to find the optimal stowage profile that maximizes the number of unit picks per pod trip. We solve the MIP for a set of test cases to gain insight into the structure of optimal stowage policy. Motivated by these insights, we further propose a class-based stowage process that induces variability across the pod velocities.
by Rong Yuan.
Ph. D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, Operations Research Center, 2012.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 181-185).
As online retailing - or e-tailing - continues to grow as more and more customers buy physical goods on the internet, finding ways to reduce the cost and environmental impact of outbound shipping in this sector will become increasingly important. We investigate the impact of making poor fulfillment and replenishment decisions using data obtained from a large American online retailer. Then, we propose implementable - i.e., computationally tractable and relatively intuitive - solutions for both the fulfillment and replenishment problems, both tested either on actual data from our industrial partner or on small but realistic models. We first focus on the fulfillment problem, namely, deciding from which warehouse(s) to fulfill a customer's order when several options exist. We propose a heuristic that utilizes the dual values of a transportation linear program to estimate the opportunity cost of depleting inventory from a warehouse. This linear program values inventory at a warehouse due to both its geography and the size of its catalogue. After showing that this linear program is asymptotically optimal - using concepts developed in airline network revenue management - we then test the heuristic on industry data, showing a 1% reduction in outbound shipping costs as compared to a myopic fulfillment policy. The last part of the thesis focuses on replenishment. Every period, for each item, the network places an order to restock all the warehouses. Complicating this decision are two factors. First, the orders will not arrive immediately, but rather require a lead time to be delivered. During this time a random number of customers will place orders with the network. Second, any customer's order may be filled from any warehouse, which becomes important when warehouses stock out of an item. Therefore, it is not trivial to calculate the optimal inventory to order to each warehouse. We show that using a standard replenishment policy - popular in practice - can lead to dynamics that result in increased outbound shipping costs. We propose a replenishment policy heuristic that is intuitive and performs well on examples. This heuristic has two variants: a simpler one that assumes deterministic demand, and a more complicated one that accounts for stochasticity.
by Jason Andrew Acimovic.
Ph.D.

For most Smaller Manufacturing Enterprises (SMEs), how to manage customer enquiries at the customer enquiry stage is of great importance to maintain the competitive advantage and secure future customer orders. A lack of co-ordination between marketing/sales and production at this stage often leads to confirmed orders being delivered later than promised and/or being produced at a loss. In the paper, the problems and the solutions for managing customer enquiries faced by many SMEs are addressed. A general process for dealing with customer enquiries at the customer enquiry stage and a corresponding DSS approach are presented in detailed. The SMEs would benefit from the proposed DSS in which the considerations of current material and production capacity are given to the customer enquiry management process.
Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA)

At the time of a customer order, the e-tailer assigns the order to one or more of its order fulfillment centers, and/or to drop shippers, so as to minimize procurement and transportation costs, based on the available current information. However this assignment is necessarily myopic as it cannot account for all future events, such as subsequent customer orders or inventory replenishments. We examine the potential benefits from periodically re-evaluating these real-time order-assignment decisions. We construct near-optimal heuristics for the re-assignment for a large set of customer orders with the objective to minimize the total number of shipments. We investigate how best to implement these heuristics for a rolling horizon, and discuss the effect of demand correlation, customer order size, and the number of customer orders on the nature of the heuristics. Finally, we present potential saving opportunities by testing the heuristics on sets of order data from a major e-tailer.
Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA)

Why do carefully considered and reasoned decisions in organisational settings so often produce unintended and sub-optimal outcomes? This is an on-going and vexing question for those charged with the governance of organisations. This research focuses on one potential contributory factor - the institutionalised logics of a particular field. Taking an historical perspective, the research examines the nature of taken-for-granted ideas and understandings that might be seen to have existed amongst the communities involved in New Zealand rugby in 1985 and in 2005. It is proposed that these taken-for-granted ideas and understandings might have an impact upon the success, or failure, of initiatives and decisions made by those charged with the governance of the game. Utilising ideas emerging from institutional theory (Freidland & Alford, 1991; Meyer & Rowan, 1977; Oliver, 1992; Thornton & Ocasio, 1999; Tolbert & Zucker, 1999), and following the work of Phillips, Lawrence and Hardy (2004), these ideas and understandings are offered, conceptually, as institutionalised logics, simultaneously facilitating and constraining action in the field. Given that these understandings might be inchoate and hidden, an interpretive model of discourse analysis is employed to examine their nature. The data comes from texts created in 1985 and 2005. and from 32 in-depth interviews that were used to develop an insider's interpretation of the context. The analysis uses data from the interviews and the texts to build an interpretation of the nature of twenty such logics that might be seen to have existed in the chosen years. The results are presented as discrete understandings, explained in the context of the environment at the time. Examples of the institutionalised logics uncovered include. "The clubs are history', 'Central control is the way to go!' and 'The coach is king'. The research presents an interpretation of evolving institutionalised logics which might impact on the way decisions of the New Zealand Rugby Union are interpreted by the communities affected. The discussion highlights the implications that these understandings might have for decisions made about the game in New Zealand. It is argued that these taken-for-granted ideas and understandings, and their changing and contradictory nature, should be explicitly considered by those charged with governance of New Zealand rugby. An analysis of the institutionalised logics might contribute towards improved organisational performance, by providing another piece in the puzzle of governance.

The evolvement of digital reporting has changed the way financial information is prepared and disseminated (Debreceny and Gray, 200 1 ). Previous research has shown that digital reporting has increased, particularly in the last five years, and this usage is characterised by greater volumes of business and financial information over that traditionally provided in print-based mode (Smith, 2003). The new opportunities and benefits offered by digital reporting are matched by challenges and implications not only for the preparers and auditors but also for users. It is expected that in the near future, financial reporting will move entirely from the primarily print-based mode to digital-based mode as the primary information dissemination channel (Oyelere et aI., 2003; Fisher et aI., 2004). Research in the area of digital reporting has been conducted in the past decade. Within this research, a considerable number of issues have been raised. These issues relate to various parties, such as policy makers, preparers, auditors, system designers and users. While several research questions and hypotheses concerning these parties have been posed and investigated, most of the research questions and hypotheses have been formed from a preparers' perspective, leaving the examination of issues from a users' perspective largely unexplored. This study focuses on users. It examines the effect of presentation formats on decision makers' performance in relation to decision quality, perceptions and cognitive information processing in the digital reporting environment. It aims to extend the digital reporting literature. This study extends the existing body of knowledge on digital reporting environment in several ways. First, this study examines the effect of presentation formats on the quality of users' decision making. This study follows Kleinmuntz and Schkade (1993) who described 'decision quality' in the context of two cost-benefit dimensions in relation to decision makers' cognitive processes, namely decision accuracy and cognitive effort. Decision accuracy reflects the ability of a strategy to produce an accurate outcome while cognitive effort reflects the total cognitive expenditure incurred in completing a task. Second, this study examines users' perceptions of three digital presentation formats: PDF, HTML and XBRL. This study compares subjects' perceptions of usefulness and ease of use of the three presentation formats with their actual outcome. It also includes examining whether perceptions are an important factor in influencing preferred presentation format. Finally, this study examines whether digital presentation formats address the concern over functional fixation in the accounting context of 'recognition versus disclosure' in the reporting of financial information. This study used public accounting practitioners in New Zealand as participants. Sixty two subjects participated in the experiment, which involves an experiment exercise and a post experiment questionnaire. The results indicate that presentation formats impact on decision accuracy. This finding is consistent with previous studies conducted using non-digital presentation formats such as tabular and graphical in the psychology and information systems literature (Stock and Watson, 1984; Dickson et aI., 1986; Iselin, 1988; DeSanctis and Jarvenpaa, 1989; Mackay and Villareal, 1987; Hard and Vanacek, 1991; Stone and Schkade, 1991; Anderson and Kaplan, 1992; Bricker and Nehmer, 1995; Ramarapu et aI., 1997; Frownfelter-Lohrke, 1998; Almer et aI., 2003). The results, however, indicate that presentation formats do not impact decision makers' cognitive effort. These findings suggest that preparers, standardsetters and regulatory bodies should recognise that presentation format impacts on users' decision making processes and select appropriate formats that lead to improvement in decision making. Additionally, the results indicate that users' perceptions of the usefulness and ease of use of the reporting technologies are similar across the three presentation formats. The results also show that users' perceptions do not necessary correspond to actual performance. Users' perceptions are found to influence their preferred presentation format. The findings of this study provide useful insights on users' perceptions, performances and preferences of the digital presentation formats. Such results provide a holistic and comprehensive view of the importance of perceptions and the effect of presentation formats on decision makers' performance. This is particularly relevant since if more advanced forms of digital reporting are to be encouraged, then there is also the need for users to be made more aware of the benefits to be gained from the different forms of presentation. Finally, the results show that of the four recognised stages of information processing (i.e. acquisition, evaluation, weighting and judging information), functional fixation is found to only exist at the judgment stage. However, the effect of presentation format is only significant at information evaluation stage. The results indicate that the interaction between presentation formats and placement of information does not affect decision makers' information processing. This suggests that presentation formats do not solve the concern about recognition versus disclosure (functional fixation) in information processing stages. These fmdings are not consistent with Hodge et al. (2004) but are consistent with Luft and Shields (2001) who suggest functional fixation could not be alleviated because the accounting itself would affect the allocation of people's attention. This study extends the literature on presentation format by examining the quality of decision making arising from the use of different presentation formats in a digital reporting environment. It provides evidence that users' perceptions of ease of use of a presentation format do not necessarily correspond to their actual performance (cognitive effort) once a particular task has been performed. This study also provides evidence that the acceptance of a technology is highly dependent on the perceptions of that technology. Therefore, limited knowledge and appreciation of the capabilities of a technology may have the undesired effect of deterring use of the technology although it may improve performance.

Research to date on women in the sports-media has predominantly concentrated on comparisons of the type and amount of media coverage afforded to sportsmen and women. This substantial body of literature has consistently revealed that sports-media continues to be viewed as an exclusively masculine domain, where women remain under- and misrepresented. While content analyses are important in revealing the sexist portrayal of sportswomen in the media, they do little to provide guidance to sociologists on why this continues to occur. Looking behind the scenes into how sports-media content is produced has rarely been explored internationally, and not at all in France, yet is integral to understanding the process through which gendered coverage is sustained. The aim of this exploratory case study was to redress the deficit of sports-media research in France by undertaking a study of those responsible for the production of sports media content. It was guided by the central question: what role do sports-media producers play in perpetuating dominant ideologies in sport? The nine participants were drawn from experienced male and female sports content decision makers (editors and higher) from the major, national television and print media in France. Data was collected through individual semi-structured, audio-recorded interviews and open coded using NVivo 8. The analysis, based around five themes (ideal profile, feedback, sport selection, women’s sport, blame), revealed that the patterns of sport media decision-making in France show many similarities and some differences to those observed in other countries, but that the end result is the same: sports media content remains dominated by men’s sport. Findings indicate that women’s sport is subject to much harsher editorial selection criteria. Conclusions were drawn on what role the makers of sports media content in France have in reproducing this hegemonic masculinity so inherent in sports coverage. The findings will enable stakeholders such as sociologists, journalism academics, sport media management and sports organisations to consider ways through which hierarchical values and accepted patriarchal practices in the sports-media industry can be transformed.