Rachna Shah

• University of Minnesota

In response to ever-increasing pressure from stakeholders to reduce the impact of their operations and supply chain on the natural environment, firms frequently make public commitments to improve environmental performance. However, the commitments are difficult to validate and thus of unknown quality. Understanding whether and when the commitments...

Purpose This study investigates whether a firm that has experienced an environmental accident (EA) is less likely to conduct a product recall. If true, it would indicate that EAs tempt firms to hide operational problems that need to be revealed. The logic is that both events are operational failures that damage a firm's reputation and share price....

Purpose Lean remains popular in a wide range of private and public sectors and continues to attract a significant amount of research. However, most of this research is not grounded in theory. This paper presents and discusses different expert viewpoints on the role of theory in lean research and practice and provides guidelines for future research....

The phenomenon of the Toyota Production System (TPS) and the term “Lean” have received much attention from researchers and especially practitioners over the past 40 years. As scholarly perspectives on these topics continue to evolve, we invited Wally Hopp and Mark Spearman to contribute an essay to the JOM Forum that became “The Lenses of Lean,” an...

Spill and pollution (SP) accidents cause significant damage to the natural environment. They also result in financial costs and reputational losses for the offending firm. As such, understanding how firms respond to such crises is of significant interest to firm stakeholders, such as investors, customers, regulators, NGOs, employees, and local comm...

The use of lean production methods to drive sustainable competitive advantage has been a cornerstone of worldwide manufacturing strategy since the early 1980’s. Unfortunately, success from using lean has been mixed. Some researchers suggest that contextual variables play a central role in explaining the inconsistent results. This study evaluates th...

The surgical box supply chain management can be problematic through the surgical scheduling without an effective management control of the forecast, the stock, and the pulled demand. This research study analyzes just in time application with the use of the Kanban in the surgical box supply chain management. The researchers realized this study betwe...

There is extensive academic research examining why firms adopt environmental management practices (EMPs), reflecting an increasing focus on firm environmental activity in research and practice. However, there is little understanding of why firms vary within and across industries in the number of EMPs they adopt (EMP adoption). In this study, we see...

The decision to recall a product can significantly affect an operations manager's career, the credibility and financial performance of the firm, and the safety of customers. Despite the importance of this decision, there has been little behavioral research on what influences judgment in this task. Leveraging insights from interviews with regulators...

Empirical research examining whether and how competition influences product recalls is limited. We address this important research gap by creating a novel measure of product competition using data from the Food and Drug Administration's Orange Book, and combining it with product recall data across a 12-year period. Our results show that product com...

Plant inspections enable firms to manage their quality risk in global supply chains. However, surprisingly little research examines the relationship between such inspections and future product quality. In this paper, we study how well plant inspection outcomes predict the hazard of a future recall and analyze how investigator experience affects thi...

While there is overwhelming support for the negative consequences of product recalls, empirical evidence of operational drivers of recalls is almost nonexistent. In this study, we identify product variety (measured as the number of factory installed options), plant variety (measured as the number of models per assembly line in a plant), and capacit...

The use of lean methods to drive sustainable competitive advantage has been a cornerstone of manufacturing strategy since the early 1980’s. Almost all manufacturing operations in industrialized economies leverage, or have leveraged, some aspect of lean. Unfortunately, success from using lean has been mixed. Some authors have suggested that context...

While there is overwhelming evidence of the negative consequences of product recalls, empirical evidence of plant-level drivers of recalls is non-existent. We examine potential plant-level recall causes for North American automotive manufacturers by combining production-line data over a 7-year period with auto-recall data, while differentiating bet...

Previous research on mass customization (MC) has focused on what it is and how it is implemented. In this study we examine when MC is an appropriate strategy for firms to follow by scrutinizing the effects of three environmental uncertainty variables (demand uncertainty, competitive intensity, and supply chain complexity) on the MC–performance rela...

Product clockspeed as represented by the rate of product changes has important implications for supply chain design. The literature suggests that external integration with customers and suppliers is associated with increased improvement and innovation capabilities of the focal firm. However, the way product clockspeed affects these relationships ha...

Previous literature has extensively investigated the impact of supply chain integration on mass customisation and plant performance, but little research has been conducted to examine the impact of functional integration within the focal firm on mass customisation and plant performance. This article seeks to demonstrate this impact theoretically and...

Focus in healthcare has been heralded as the next frontier in improving its efficiency and efficacy (Herzlinger 2004). Focus takes several different forms, ranging from standalone specialty centers to a hospital that places a strategic emphasis on a clinical area. We adopt this latter perspective and define focus as a disproportionate emphasis on a...

A typical approach to studying capabilities in the operations management literature is to assess the intended or realized competitive operational performance and their contribution to business and organizational objectives. While it is crucial to identify the operational performance that helps create competitive advantage, it is equally important t...

The cumulative capability or the ‘sand cone’ model (Ferdows and De Meyer, 1997 has been central in the debate on relations among dimensions of manufacturing performance. The central thesis of this model is that manufacturing performance is cumulative and sequential, with quality performance forming the foundation. An implicit assumption underlying...

Purpose – Examining the strategic contingency of plant improvement capability and innovation capability. Two forms of fit between the two capabilities and competitive priorities were empirically tested. Design/Methodology/Approach – Data collected from a sample of 238 manufacturing plants were used to test the hypotheses using regression. Findings...

Purpose Managing demand and supply uncertainties is critical for all manufacturers, but it has added importance for companies that intend to achieve mass customization (MC) ability because these uncertainties are an intrinsic characteristic of MC. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how managing uncertainties in a firm's demand and supply a...

This paper presents a conceptual framework that hypothesizes the nature of the relationships between a firm’s use of Internet-based information technology (IT), supply chain planning capability, and operational performance. Using data from 266 manufacturing sites and structural equation modeling, we show that the impact of IT on operational perform...

It is widely recognized that new product development (NPD) is a highly interdependent process, yet efforts to empirically model the interdependence and examine its effect on firm performance are scarce. Our study addresses this research gap. We model firms' abilities to collectively collaborate with suppliers, customers, and internal employee teams...

Combining Lean practices with Six Sigma has gained immense popularity in recent years. Whether a combined Lean-Six Sigma approach is the latest management fad, or leads to significant performance benefits that exceed isolated implementation is not yet apparent. Using implementation and performance data from a sample of 2511 plants, the research stu...

ABSTRACT An implicit assumption in distributing and coordinating work among independent organizations in a supply chain is that a focal organization can use financial or contractual mechanisms to enforce compliance among the other organizations in meeting desired performance objectives. Absent contractual agreement or financial gain, there is littl...

Our research addresses the confusion and inconsistency associated with “lean production.” We attempt to clarify the semantic confusion surrounding lean production by conducting an extensive literature review using a historical evolutionary perspective in tracing its main components. We identify a key set of measurement items by charting the linkage...

Researchers studying multi-level theories use homologous models to represent parallel nomological networks among similar constructs across different levels of analysis. We use the logic underlying homologous models to examine whether relationships established at the firm level of data aggregation are also evident at the economic sector level. Speci...

Mass customization has gained increasing importance in recent years due to its ability to provide customized products efficiently and effectively, and manufacturing companies are continuously searching for ways to develop their mass-customization ability. Despite extensive literature focusing on mass customization, few studies have systematically e...

Drawing on the resource/capability-based view, we conceptualize plant level capabilities as bundles of interrelated routines and develop a second-order factor model for measuring two plant level capabilities: exploitation and exploration. This study provides a new perspective on examining plant level capabilities.

This paper reviews applications of structural equation modeling (SEM) in four major Operations Management journals (Management Science, Journal of Operations Management, Decision Sciences, and Journal of Production and Operations Management Society) and provides guidelines for improving the use of SEM in operations management (OM) research. We revi...

Management literature has suggested that contextual factors may present strong inertial forces within organizations that inhibit implementations that appear technically rational [R.R. Nelson, S.G. Winter, An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1982]. This paper examines the effects of three contextual fa...

Management literature has suggested that contextual factors may present strong inertial forces within organizations that inhibit implementations that appear technically rational [R.R. Nelson, S.G. Winter, An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1982]. This paper examines the effects of three contextual fa...

Supply chain management (SCM) and interorganizational information systems (IOIS) have gained significant importance, aided by anecdotal success stories of firms obtaining competitive advantage using these systems. Historically, the two streams of research have developed relatively independently, with operations and logistics researchers studying su...