Tyson Browning

Neeley School of Business, Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, United States · Information Systems & Supply Chain Management

We focus on two of the many sources of uncertainty in healthcare operations, mix uncertainty – the variation in the complexity of care required by the patient mix, and volume uncertainty – the variation in the volume of care demanded by the patient population. Using an interdisciplinary perspective, we study the impact of mix and volume uncertainti...

The world is witnessing more supply-base disruptions, where multiple suppliers of a buying firm simultaneously experience disturbed operations. Compared to single-supplier disruptions, supply-base disruptions create a more uncertain situation for a purchasing manager, yet they can also reveal improvement opportunities. Hence, it is theoretically an...

This study investigates the relationship between information technology (IT) and human labor through the lens of education level, task routineness, and artificial intelligence (AI). It makes use of a comprehensive data set covering 60 U.S. industries from 1998 to 2013. The results show that a college degree may not be sufficient, especially in rout...

Economic sanctions and consumer boycotts are common tools to punish organizations for undesirable behavior and attempt to coerce them to change their actions. However, these tools occasionally spill over beyond the intended recipients and affect guiltless supply chain members, jeopardizing the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion in suppl...

Empirically grounding analytics (EGA) is an area of research that emerges at the intersection of empirical and analytical research. By "empirically grounding," we mean both the empirical justification of model assumptions and parameters and the empirical assessment of model results and insights. EGA is a critical but largely missing aspect of opera...

Supply chains must rebuild for resilience to respond to challenges posed by systemwide disruptions. Unlike past disruptions that were narrow in impact and short-term in duration, the Covid pandemic presented a systemic disruption and revealed shortcomings in responses. This study outlines an approach to rebuilding supply chains for resilience, inte...

Welcome to the 2022 edition of the International Dependency and Structure Modeling (DSM) Conference. After two years of online conference, DSM 2022 is held as a onsite event with selected online elements on October 11th to 13th 2022, hosted by the Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands. DSM (Dependency and Structure Modelling, also k...

Competitive collection affects the remanufacturing and recycling of end-of-life products, and collectors competitively invest in improving channel convenience to attract customers to return such products. We propose a closed-loop supply chain model consisting of one manufacturer and one third-party collector to investigate competitive collection an...

Front Matter of the Proceedings of the 22nd International Dependency and Structure Modelling (DSM) Conference 2020. Check out all publications here: https://doi.org/10.35199/dsm2020

Despite many uncertainties, industrial fields such as energy (eg, oil rigs), utilities infrastructure (eg, telecommunications), space systems, transportation systems, construction, and manufacturing make large and mostly irreversible investments in systems with potentially long life cycles. The life cycle value of such systems may be increased sign...

Many believe that information technology (IT) substitutes for human labor in work processes; others believe that a college degree might protect employees from tech- related job loss. This study finds that college education may not be sufficient to prevent the substitution, and that the substitution/complementarity relationship between IT and labor...

In product development (PD) organizations, coordinating technical dependencies among teams with different expertise in overlapping processes is a fundamental challenge. This article takes a more sophisticated approach than prior methodologies to improve coordination via organizational clustering, by accounting for both team structural and attribute...

Organizations operate under ongoing pressure to conduct product development (PD) in ways that reduce errors, improve product designs, and increase speed and efficiency. Often, managers are expected to respond to this pressure by implementing process improvement programs (PIPs) based on best practices elsewhere (e.g., in another part of their organi...

Organizations operate under ongoing pressure to conduct product development (PD) in ways that reduce errors, improve product designs, and increase speed and efficiency. Often, managers are expected to respond to this pressure by implementing process improvement programs (PIPs) based on best practices elsewhere (e.g., in another part of their organi...

Uncertainty, risk, and rework make it extremely challenging to meet goals and deliver anticipated value in complex projects, and conventional techniques for planning and tracking earned value do not account for these phenomena. This article presents a methodology for planning and tracking cost, schedule, and technical performance (or quality) in te...

A rigorous, in-depth analysis is a common approach in complex system design. Elsewhere, however, more iterative and agile processes and open innovation have become commonplace. We experiment with an agile hackathon-type design sprint for solving industry-provided, complex system engineering problems. In a typical complex system project, significant...

A rigorous, in-depth analysis is a common approach in complex system design. Elsewhere, however, more iterative and agile processes and open innovation have become commonplace. We experiment with an agile hackathon-type design sprint for solving industry-provided, complex system engineering problems. In a typical complex system project, significant...

The process for designing and developing complex system products—all of the activities performed and the information and other work products produced—is essential to innovative and competitive enterprises. This process is dynamic, complex, and complicated, and the people who understand it best are in short supply and may not be around for the next...

Proceedings of the 19th international DSM conference: 22 contributions and an industry DSM Design sprint with source DSM matrices.

Many product development (PD) projects rely on a common pool of scarce resources. In addition to resource constraints, there are precedence constraints among activities within each project. Beyond the feed-forward dependencies among activities, in PD projects it is common for feedback dependencies to exist that can result in activity rework or iter...

Time–cost trade-offs arise when organizations seek the fastest product development (PD) process subject to a predefined budget, or the lowest-cost PD process within a given project deadline. Most of the engineering and project management literature has addressed this trade-off problem solely in terms of crashing—options to trade cost for time at th...

Developing products that are more easily adaptable to future requirements can increase their overall value. Product adaptability is largely determined by choices about product architecture, especially modularity. Because it is possible to be too modular and/or inappropriately modular, deciding how and where to be modular in a cost-effective way is...

The design structure matrix (DSM), also called the dependency structure matrix, has become a widely used modeling framework across many areas of research and practice. The DSM brings advantages of simplicity and conciseness in representation, and, supported by appropriate analysis, can also highlight important patterns in system architectures (desi...

Global infrastructures (finance, health, energy) require the enterprises involved to have complex risk management systems. To verify that these enterprise risk management systems are working properly, external auditors are often deployed to monitor their internal controls. But the number of controls and the number of requirements, and the weighted...

Managers of product development (PD) project portfolios face difficult decisions in allocating limited resources to minimize project or portfolio delay. Although PD projects are highly iterative (cyclical), almost all of the vast literature on project scheduling assumes that projects are acyclical. This article addresses this gap with a comprehensi...

Project management theory provides insufficient insight on the effects of crashing and overlapping in product development (PD) projects. The scholarly literature largely assumes that networks of project activities are acyclical. PD projects are iterative, however, and the time-cost implications of managerial actions, such as activity crashing and o...

Many firms expend a great amount of effort to identify and eliminate waste in their processes. Much recent effort has focused on lean manufacturing. Now lean product development has become a goal as well. Yet, in product development, determining how and when value is added is problematic. The goal of a product development process is to produce a pr...

Projects should create value. That is the desire and plan, but uncertainties cloud the paths to this destination. All project work should add value in terms of both the resources consumed and the benefits provided (e.g., scope, quality, technical performance, features, and functions), yet adding value is not always straightforward. Conventional tec...

Many contemporary enterprises seek to transform their operations towards a more customer-oriented, value stream-based, end-to-end process orientation. Process integration—the act of working towards a state where information, deliverables, and work products flow smoothly among processes and their activities—is a prerequisite for this and for consist...

Understanding and dealing with the unknown is a major challenge in project management. An extensive body of knowledge − theory and technique − exists on the “known unknowns,” i.e., uncertainties which can be described probabilistically and addressed through the conventional techniques of risk management. Although some recent studies have addressed...

OVERVIEW: New product development projects are highly risky technical undertakings. Organizations frequently seek to manage the risk involved using standard risk management procedures, knowing that a company that better manages risks is less vulnerable. Nevertheless, NPD projects continue to fail to meet expectations for delivery time, budget, and...

Especially in large, complex projects, various aspects of process (activity network) information reside in separate models and diagrams that can become unsynchronized over time. Prior research has introduced the concept of a process architecture framework (PAF), which provides a solution by tying all the models and diagrams together in a single, ri...

The integrated product development (IPD) paradigm has gained recognition as a preferred approach to product development. In complex system development programs, the concurrent engineering aspect of IPD is often approached through the use of integrated product teams (IPTs), each assigned to develop various components of the overall system. Many have...

The drive towards Integrated Product Development (IPD) includes an impetus to organize around Integrated Product Teams (IPTs). The use of IPTs has brought with it many issues, including those at the IPT interfaces. Program integration (crossfunctional, upstream/downstream, customer and supplier) can exist at several levels, within IPTs and between...

Lean Aerospace Initiative Plenary Workshop presentation

Overview: - Some cycle time reduction challenges - Task-based design structure matrices (DSMs) - How DSM method meets challenges - Part 2: David Grose on applications at Boeing

The design structure matrix (DSM) is a powerful tool for visualizing, analyzing, innovating, and improving systems, including product architectures, organizational structures, and process flows. Akin to a traditional N2 chart and the System‐System matrix (SV‐3) in the DoD Architecture Framework (DoDAF), the DSM is a square matrix showing relationsh...

T his paper examines the impact of architectural decisions on the level of defects in a product. We view products as collections of components linked together to work as an integrated whole. Previous work has established modularity (how decoupled a component is from other product components) as a critical determinant of defects, and we confirm its...

This paper examines the impact of architectural decisions on the level of defects in a product. We view products as collections of components linked together to work as an integrated whole. Previous work has established modularity (how decoupled a component is from other product components) as a critical determinant of defects, and we confirm its i...

Large, complex, innovative development projects, such as many in the aeronautical industry, occur under conditions of consequential uncertainty, i.e. risk. Risk is manifest with respect to project cost, schedule, and technical performance. These risks need to be managed in relation to each other as well as to the project schedule, budget, and techn...

Every executive has heard about the importance of Lean as a means of eliminating waste and “fat.” However, when operations are novel and complex—as in product development, research, information technology, and many other kinds of projects—cutting out the “fat” turns out to be much more challenging. To understand Lean in an environment characterized...

An introduction to a powerful and flexible network modeling tool for developing and understanding complex systems, with many examples from a range of industries. Design structure matrix (DSM) is a straightforward and flexible modeling technique that can be used for designing, developing, and managing complex systems. DSM offers network modeling too...

System architecture decisions such as the assignment of components to modules can have a large impact on the system’s adaptability. We broaden systems architecting theory by considering components’ option values and interface costs when making the assignment decision. We build and test an analytical model to identify the tradeoffs between an inexpe...

Complex engineered systems tend to have architectures in which a small subset of components exhibits a disproportional number of linkages. Such components are known as hubs. This paper examines the degree distribution of systems to identify the presence of hubs and quantify the fraction of hub components. We examine how the presence and fraction of...

This chapter provides an overview of ten general steps in project scheduling, an essential component of project planning. The ten steps are: (i) define the project's scope and final deliverables, (ii) define the activity set, (iii) decompose the activities and deliverables, (iv) determine the flow of deliverables, (v) determine the activity modes a...

We examine how the architecture of products relates to their quality. Using an architectural representation that accounts for both the hierarchical and dependency relationships between modules and components, we define a new construct, system cyclicality. System cyclicality recognizes component loops, which are akin to design iterations — a concept...

Managers of multiple projects with overly constrained resources face difficult decisions in how to allocate resources to minimize the average delay per project or the time to complete the whole set of projects. We address the static resource-constrained multi-project scheduling problem (RCMPSP) with two lateness objectives, project lateness and por...

A project manager makes decisions based on what he or she sees and understands. In large, complex projects (or programs), a manager cannot see the entire “territory” between project start and completion and therefore must rely on models or “maps” to support planning and decisions. When it comes to planning and coordinating work, project managers co...

Many scheduling problems in project management, manufacturing, and elsewhere require the generation of activity networks to test proposed solution methods. Single-network generators have been used for the resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP). Since the first single-network generator was proposed in 1993, several advances have bee...

Projects are temporary allocations of resources commissioned to achieve a desired result. Since each project is unique, the landscape between the current state (the start of the project) and the desired state (the successful end of the project) is often dynamic, uncertain, and ambiguous. Conventional project plans define a set of related activities...

A product or system development process is a kind of complex system, arguably even more complex than the system it produces. Yet, the models and tools used by systems engineers and program managers to plan and manage technical work—such as process flowcharts, Gantt charts, work breakdown structures, and text-rendered procedures—are less sophisticat...

A central tenet in the theory of lean production is that the implementation of lean practices will reduce waste and thereby decrease costs. However, not all lean implementations have produced such results. Apparently, this effect is moderated by several factors, potentially even to the point of reversal. It is important to increase our understandin...

Since the early 1960s, a particular style of matrix design and analysis methods, as applied to complex product development environments (CPDEs), has been steadily growing in use and acceptance in numerous industry sectors. To date, however, the complexity inherent in these matrix-based methods has been an impediment to their wider acceptance by pro...

Systems provide value through their ability to fulfill stakeholders' needs and wants. These needs evolve over time and may diverge from a fielded system's capabilities. Thus, a system's value to its stakeholders diminishes over time. As a result, systems are replaced or upgraded at substantial cost and disruption. If a system is designed to be chan...

A goal of systems development is to produce enduringly valuable product systems— i.e., systems that are valuable when delivered to their users and which continue to be attractive to their stakeholders over time. However, quantifying the life-cycle value (LCV) provided by a system has proven elusive. In this paper, we propose an approach to quantify...

The Integrated Dynamic Planning (IDP) concept, using robust matrix design & analysis methods, within an adaptive product development process (APDP) [1], is emerging as an improved product / project management approach to better visualize and manage the uncertainty in the early stages of complex product development lifecycles. In these early stages,...

This paper reports on an exploratory study of how the architecture of a software product evolves over time. Because software is embedded in many of today’s complex products, and it is prone to relatively rapid change, it is instructive to study software architecture evolution for general insights into product design. We use metrics to capture the i...

In product design, it is critical to perform project activities in an appropriate sequence. Otherwise, essential information will not be available when it is needed, and activities that depend on it will proceed using assumptions instead. Later, when the real informa-tion is finally available, comparing it with the assumptions made often precipitat...

Complexity in product development (PD) projects can emanate from the product design, the development process, the development organization, the tools and technologies applied, the requirements to be met, and other domains. In each of these domains, complexity arises from the numerous elements and their multitude of relationships, such as between th...

Many systems of systems (SoS) occur today through the collaboration of multiple stakeholders, without any clear authority or direction at the SoS level. Examples include a supply chain, an airport, and the Internet. Because of the uncontrolled interactions, such a SoS exhibits complexity behaviors such as reflexivity, emergence, self-organization,...

Given the crucial role of process modeling in product development (PD) project management research and practice, and the variety of models proposed in the literature, a survey of the PD process modeling literature is timely and valuable. In this work, we focus on the activity network-based process models that support PD project management and prese...

This paper provides a foundation for modeling the set of activities and their relationships by which systems are engineered, or, more broadly, by which products and services are developed. It provides background, motivations, and formal definitions for process modeling in this specialized environment. We treat the process itself as a kind of system...

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, Technology, Management, and Policy Program, February 1999. Includes bibliographical references. by Tyson Rodgers Browning. Ph.D.

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 1996. Includes bibliographical references (p. 173-182). by Tyson R. Browning. M.S.

Conventional techniques for project planning make the flawed assumption that all activities and relations are known and can be planned a priori. Iteration models show that iteration is a fundamental aspect of novel projects, but they also assume all activities and interactions are known. Of course, some kind of hypothesized project baseline (plan)...

The goal of systems development is to produce enduringly valuable systems—i.e., systems that are valuable when delivered to their users and which continue to be attractive to their stakeholders over time. However, quantifying the lifecycle value (LCV) provided by a system has proven elusive. We propose an approach to quantifying a system's LCV base...

The success or failure of any design process depends crucially on finishing on time and to budget.To achieve this, a successful design process is just as important as a high-quality product.The effective and efficient execution of a design project depends on the understanding of the design managers and the quality and utility of their project plans...

The M.J. Neeley School of Business at Texas Christian University has on its rolls 1470 undergraduate and 370 graduate students, a number of whom work with local companies such as Lockheed Martin, Bell Helicopter Textron, BNSF Railroad, Fidelity Investments, Motorola, Nokia, and many others. Because the design and development of timely and affordabl...

Testing is an integral part of product development (PD), supporting the identification of design failures, validation of product requirements and verification of the deliverables. The information generated by testing facilitates learning, increases design knowledge, and thus decreases uncertainty in the product design. Although test strategy planni...

Enterprises are complex systems. As such, they should lend themselves to improvement via the application of systems engineering principles and approaches. To do so, we must first identify the system or systems underlying an enterprise. Four key systems that tend to receive attention are the product, process, organization, and information systems. P...

Abstract Many have recognized project management as the delicate task of balancing cost, schedule, and quality. Attributes in each of these dimensions contain uncertainty and

In an effort to improve company operations and their results, more firms are applying the principles of “Lean”—not only to manufacturing but also to systems engineering processes. Too often, however, this is done with a shallow understanding of Lean and/or without a systems view, in which case Lean creates new problems and tensions and may not deli...