Browsing by Subject "Operations Management"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Balancing Novelty, Safety, and Availability: The Trifecta of Outcomes in Pharmaceutical Supply Chains
    (2024-05) Tyagi, Hanu
    Global pharmaceutical supply chains have garnered unprecedented attention, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite their importance, pharmaceutical supply chains are plagued by numerous challenges such as stagnating innovation, increasing drug shortages, and drugs with compromised quality reaching patients. While efforts to resolve these issues hold potential, their implementation often inadvertently leads to unintended consequences. Such tradeoffs, i.e., solutions to one problem unintentionally creating another problem, present a challenge for pharmaceutical supply chains. Despite the central role of tradeoffs in Operations Management research, their understanding within the pharmaceutical supply chain context remains limited. This dissertation serves as an exploration of the tradeoffs within pharmaceutical supply chains. Titled “Balancing Novelty, Safety, and Availability: The Trifecta of Outcomes in Pharmaceutical Supply Chains,” it delves into fundamental questions, such as What is the nature and the extent of these tradeoffs? and, How can supply chain stakeholders mitigate their impact? By concentrating on three pivotal outcomes – novelty, safety, and availability – I examine how efforts meant to improve one of the three outcomes could unintendedly impact other outcomes. Chapter 1 serves as a motivation for the topic and provides a brief overview of the ensuing dissertation essays. In Chapter 2, I show how enhanced transparency in clinical trials, intended to enhance patient safety, may hinder drug novelty. In Chapter 3, I examine the adverse effects of the expedited approval process, aimed at improving the availability of novel drugs, on drug safety. In Chapter 4, I delve into the impact of quality failures on drug availability, discerning when failures help or hurt availability. Chapter 5 concludes with insights the dissertation entails for Operations Management scholars, managers, and policymakers. These dissertation essays aim to evaluate the inherent tradeoffs within the pharmaceutical industry and propose interventions for mutually enhancing operational outcomes. While the overarching goal is to improve outcomes within the pharmaceutical supply chain, the insights from this work also inform a wider array of Operations Management questions beyond the confines of the pharmaceutical industry.
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    Essays on the Role of Network Structure in Operational Performance
    (2019-06) Chen, Kedong
    Research on supply chain networks is an important emerging field. A network perspective is essential because a supply chain is more of a network of organizations involved in various stages of manufacturing and product distribution, than independent firms or simple linear chains. In today's volatile world of interdependence and connectivity among firms and facilities, supply chain management must go beyond single organizations and embrace a holistic view of entire networks. Managers who fail to take into account firms' or facilities' relationships with respect to the rest of the network may produce biased performance evaluations and ineffective improvement strategies. In my dissertation, I investigate the effect of network structure on firms' operational performance. The dissertation consists of three inter-related essays. The first essay explores how a warehouse's inventory efficiency is affected by its structural position in the network. The second essay prescribes optimal strategies to invest resilience resources in the supply chain network against supply shocks. The third essay clarifies the learning behavior of a supply network that improves resilience through its suppliers' disruptions. The dissertation takes a multi-method approach by utilizing data analytics, stochastic optimization, agent-based simulation, multi-level analysis, etc. The dissertation is motivated by and grounded in real supply chains. The network data and the operational context are related to world-renowned manufacturing and/or logistics companies. This dissertation is informed by business practice and difficulties. Its prescriptions and implications will, in turn, inform organizations.
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    Experimental Design based on Compound Optimization Criteria: Essays on Design Construction, Analysis, and Applications
    (2021-11) Errore, Anna
    This thesis focuses on the construction of experimental designs having multiple objectives. It explores theoretical and practical applications of compound design construction and analysis in the context of problems involving statistical and practical optimization criteria. Different essays of this dissertation focus on linear or non-linear models characterizing different experimental settings. The overarching theme of the separate essays is the idea of constructing experimental designs for initial exploration of a given phenomenon - such as in the case of screening experiments - which are created with goals that are not only shortsightedly related to the initial exploratory phase of the experimentation, but that account for the potential subsequent goals of further phases. In this fashion, screening experiments are created with the double goal of initial factor screenings, but also protection from bias induced by higher-order terms not included in the initial model. This idea is applied to both linear and non-linear experimental designs construction and involved in the analysis of such types of designs when doing variables selection. Similarly, in the applied context of two-round procurement auctions, the experimental design created for bidding strategies on the first round of the auction accounts for the impact on profit maximization related to the bidding strategies involved in the second round.
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    Guaranteeing the Right to Health: The Role of Supply Chains and Access to Care
    (2022-12) Xu, Eric
    This dissertation investigates the effects of location of healthcare providers and patients within the healthcare supply chain on the delivery of healthcare. The dissertation consists of three essays that together examine the interplay between location, financing, public health interventions, and policymaking in the healthcare supply chain. Essay 1 investigates the impact of patients’ surrounding home environments on their health outcomes. Specifically, this chapter examines how access to specific forms of infrastructure impacts long term health outcomes. Patients may exhibit signs of a promising recovery while residing in inpatient care; however, when these patients return to their neighborhoods, the surrounding environment might trigger a pattern of behavior that may lead to higher chance of another inpatient stay. The analysis shows that accessibility to grocery stores within a half mile radius reduces the number of annual inpatient stays for heart failure patients. Essay 2 investigates on the impact of policy changes on healthcare supply chain utilization for insurance coverage expansion under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA). The empirical results show that patients make their decisions to access healthcare based on the distance to the nearest care delivery facility, whether it be a primary care clinic or an emergency department, and the hours of operation of the nearest primary care clinic reduces emergency department use. Our results provide a possible alternative explanation to the adage that insurance provision alone increases emergency department utilization. Essay 3 investigates the structural factors that impact the uptake of telehealth services under the expansion of broadband to primary care providers under the Rural Healthcare Program. Specifically, it focuses on physical access and broadband access to primary healthcare services. The empirical analysis shows that broadband coverage directly impacts synchronous telehealth visits in states with payment parity and service parity once the quality of providers broadband is improved through expanded funding under the Rural Healthcare Program (RHP). Notably, the effect of distance to the nearest provider is not impacted by the RHP expansion. With regards to asynchronous telehealth uptake, the analysis shows that the sole predictor of uptake is consumer broadband coverage regardless of a state’s payment parity or service parity laws related to the privately insured population. These papers collectively will contribute to the healthcare operations literature and policymakers by addressing ways to account for geographical location and the structural characteristics of the healthcare supply chain when delivering care to patients.