Operations Management S i m Operations A Modern Approach o n Business operations are those ongoing and recurring activities involved in the running of a s business that deal with the production of goods and services. It involves the responsibility of ensuring efficient and effective methods and processes. Management This book looks at a selection of important business management techniques from a variety of countries and types of businesses. It discusses interorganizational information systems O development, organizational performance management, activity-based cost systems, financial decision-making processes, teleworking (or telecommuting), customer-focused process p A Modern Approach improvement, the communicative nature of innovation processes and the impact of this on e innovation management, a model of ebusiness systems that allows for emergent factors, and r much more. a At i About the Editor Mo Rae Simons is a successful business manager in Binghamton, New York, who is well acquainted o n with the demands and details of management. With degrees earned in both psychology and d education (from the State University of New York), she brings practical and wide-ranging insights es r to the field of business management. She has written extensively for numerous publications on n M business and other topics, including publishers such as Barbour Books, Greenwood, and Facts on A File. pa p n r Related Title of Interest o a a • Human Resource Management: Issues, Challenges and Opportunities cg Rae Simons h e Editor m e n t ISBN 978-1-926692-90-6 00000 Apple Apple Academic Press Academic www.appleacademicpress.com 9781926692906 Press OperatiOns ManageMent A Modern Approach TThhiiss ppaaggee iinntteennttiioonnaallllyy lleefftt bbllaannkk OperatiOns ManageMent A Modern Approach Rae Simons Small-business owner and author, Vestal, New York, U.S.A. Apple Academic Press CRC Press Apple Academic Press, Inc Taylor & Francis Group 3333 Mistwell Crescent 6000 Broken Sound Parkway NW, Suite 300 Oakville, ON L6L 0A2 Boca Raton, FL 33487-2742 Canada © 2011 by Apple Academic Press, Inc. 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Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Visit the Taylor & Francis Web site at http://www.taylorandfrancis.com and the CRC Press Web site at http://www.crcpress.com For information about Apple Academic Press product http://www.appleacademicpress.com COntents Introduction 7 1. Managing Innovation as Communicative Processes: 9 A Case of Subsea Technology R&D Tone Merethe Berg Aasen and Stig Johannessen 2. Deferred Action: Theoretical Model of Process Architecture 29 Design for Emergent Business Processes Nandish V. Patel 3. The Survey of the Political Costs and Firm Size: Case from Iran 57 Reza Tehrani, Mahdi Salehi, Hashem Valipour and Mohammad Jahandar Lashky 4. An Evaluation of Inter-Organisational Information Systems 90 Development on Business Partnership Relations Elizabeth A. Williamson 5. Rational Exuberance and Revival of the U.S. Automotive Sector 113 Balkrishna C. Rao 6. A Neuroanatomical Approach to Exploring Organizational 120 Performance David Gillingwater and Thomas H. Gillingwater 6 Operations Management: A Modern Approach 7. Neural Networks and their Application to Finance 152 Martin P. Wallace 8. Implementing the Activity Base Costing System: A Case Study 164 on Dakota Office Supply Betty W. Steadman 9. Profitability of the Greek Football Clubs: Implications for 169 Financial Decisions Making Dimitropoulos E. Panagiotis 10. Teleworking in United Arab Emirates (UAE): An Empirical 183 Study of Influencing Factors, Facilitators, and Inhibitors Mohamed G. Aboelmaged and Abdallah M. Elamin 11. The Role that Personality and Motivation Play in Consumer 213 Behaviour: A Case Study on HSBC Jolene Montgomery 12. Mobile Technology and the Value Chain: Participants, 222 Activities and Value Creation Constantinos Coursaris, Khaled Hassanein and Milena Head 13. Cost Effectiveness of Community-Based Therapeutic Care 249 for Children with Severe Acute Malnutrition in Zambia: Decision Tree Model Max O. Bachmann 14. Integrating Chronic Care and Business Strategies in the 267 Safety Net: A Practice Coaching Manual Katie Coleman, Marjorie Pearson and Shinyi Wu 15. Customer Complaints as a Source of Customer-Focused 297 Process Improvement: A Constructive Case Study Kari Uusitalo, Henri Hakala and Teemu Kautonen Index 318 intrOduCtiOn Management in business pursuits and organizations can be defined as the pro- cess of coordinating people and processes in order to accomplish specific goals and objectives. Business management, specifically, includes planning, organizing, staffing, directing operations, and resourcing. Resourcing, furthermore, requires the strategic use of human, financial, technological, and natural resources in ac- complishing the goals of a business entity. Because businesses can be usefully viewed as “systems,” business management can be seen as human action designed to facilitate useful outcomes from that system. This view allows for the opportu- nity to “manage” oneself, an important factor to consider before managing opera- tions and employees. Business management is generally viewed as equivalent to “business adminis- tration”. College and university departments that teach business management are often called “business schools,” such as the Harvard Business School. Others use the broader term “schools of management” (such as the Yale School of Manage- ment), which by definition include the management of entities outside of com- merce, such as in nonprofit organizations and in the public sector. In this book, current research in one of the most important and basic aspects of business management, operations management, has been appropriately em- phasized. Business operations are those ongoing and recurring activities involved in the running of a business for the purpose of producing value for the individual owners 8 Operations Management: A Modern Approach of the business and their stockholders. The goal of successful business operations is the harvesting of value from assets owned or produced by a business. Assets can be either physical or intangible. An example of value derived from a physical asset is the profit a business makes on goods that it manufactures. An example of value derived from an intangible asset is profit derived from selling a service, such as the financial services of a bank, or a royalty derived from the licensing of a patent. The effort involved in “harvesting” this value is what constitutes business operations. There are three fundamental goals in business operation management: 1. To secure the income and value of the business 2. To generate sustainable income over the long run 3. To increase the value of business assets The competitive nature of twenty-first-century global commerce requires that businesses be managed strategically by managers who are knowledgeable in the principles of operations management. — Rae Simons Managing innovation as Communicative processes: a Case of subsea technology r&d Tone Merethe, Berg Aasen and Stig Johannessen abstraCt Exploration of the communicative nature of innovation processes and the im- pact of this on innovation management has largely been ignored in innova- tion research. This paper suggests that the adoption of a complex responsive processes perspective opens up for insight and implications that depart from the prevailing view of what it means to manage joint efforts for innovation in business organizations. A key contribution is the suggestion that a change of perspective on organizations from conceptions of “whole” to notions of joint human interaction implies a need to increase management attention to the detail of local interaction between people striving to construct meaning out of new and ongoing themes, for the company and for them. We base our claims