Logistics outsourcing has been widely adopted by firms as a means to reduce costs and increase flexibility. To ensure these expected outcomes, logistics outsourcing processes must be managed with ...appropriate governance mechanisms, but their effects on firm performance have hitherto been inconclusive in the literature due to overlooking of operational mechanisms. This study aims to shed light on the effects of the outsourcing management process (OMP), which is an operational mechanism, on the following two types of logistics service outsourcing: basic outsourcing and advanced outsourcing. By drawing upon resource-based views, we validated a proposed model based on survey data collected from 250 subsidies of publicly listed manufacturers in China. The results revealed that OMP affects the effectiveness of the two types of logistics outsourcing differently. While basic logistics outsourcing affects cost and delivery directly, advanced logistics outsourcing influences the performances via interaction with OMP. This study is the first to report this relationship. This study further makes a contribution by showing the conditional utility of OMP and its service-dependent nature, which has usually been ignored in the literature.
Customer-to-Manufacturer (C2M) is a strategy in smart manufacturing where customers collaborate with manufacturers for customized product development on an online platform. The platform enables the ...shift from the traditional manufacturing process, which is driven by research and marketing, toward a customer-centric product development process. However, a challenge arises as customers lack technical knowledge to communicate their product specifications effectively, creating a semantic gap. This paper proposes a soft prompt-based network structure that utilizes pretrained language models to bridge the semantic gap on the C2M platform. To address limited customer needs data and imbalanced classes, a large corpus of product review texts is used to establish a mapping between reviews and product specifications. A smaller set of customer needs text is then employed to adapt this mapping to the target customer needs-product specifications relationship, thereby closing the semantic gap. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model adaptation operation and the prompting structure. Additionally, the experiments highlight the robustness of the proposed method against variations in training data size, thereby mitigating the challenges posed by imbalanced classes. The proposed method could potentially bring innovation to product customization and C2M platform development. By bridging the semantic gap, companies can better integrate customers in the co-design process and effectively translate customer needs into actionable product specifications.
•We reframe bridging the semantic gap as a multitask text classification problem.•We develop a resource-efficient soft prompt-based deep neural network for the task.•We integrate semantic information from text by ensembling various soft prompts.•Experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.
This paper addresses the multi-site production planning problem for a multinational lingerie company in Hong Kong subject to production import/export quotas imposed by regulatory requirements of ...different nations, the use of manufacturing factories/locations with regard to customers’ preferences, as well as production capacity, workforce level, storage space and resource conditions at the factories. In this paper, a robust optimization model is developed to solve multi-site production planning problem with uncertainty data, in which the total costs consisting of production cost, labor cost, inventory cost, and workforce changing cost are minimized. By adjusting penalty parameters, production management can determine an optimal medium-term production strategy including the production loading plan and workforce level while considering different economic growth scenarios. The robustness and effectiveness of the developed model are demonstrated by numerical results. The trade-off between solution robustness and model robustness is also analyzed.
Background
: Pegylated recombinant human arginase (PEG-BCT-100) is an arginine depleting drug. Preclinical studies showed that HCC is reliant on exogenous arginine for growth due to the ...under-expression of the arginine regenerating enzymes argininosuccinate synthetase (ASS) and ornithine transcarbamylase (OTC).
Methods
: This is a single arm open-label Phase II trial to assess the potential clinical efficacy of PEG-BCT-100 in chemo naïve sorafenib-failure HCC patients. Pre-treatment tumour biopsy was mandated for ASS and OTC expression by immunohistochemistry (IHC). Weekly intravenous PEG-BCT-100 at 2.7 mg/kg was given. Primary endpoint was time to progression (TTP); secondary endpoints included radiological response as per RECIST1.1, progression free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS). Treatment outcomes were correlated with tumour immunohistochemical expressions of ASS and OTC.
Results
: In total 27 patients were recruited. The median TTP and PFS were both 6 weeks (95% CI, 5.9–6.0 weeks). The disease control rate (DCR) was 21.7% (5 stable disease). The drug was well tolerated. Post hoc analysis showed that duration of arginine depletion correlated with OS. For patients with available IHC results, 10 patients with ASS-negative tumour had OS of 35 weeks (95% CI: 8.3–78.0 weeks) vs. 15.14 weeks (95% CI: 13.4–15.1 weeks) in 3 with ASS-positive tumour; expression of OTC did not correlate with treatment outcomes.
Conclusions
: PEG-BCT-100 in chemo naïve post-sorafenib HCC is well tolerated with moderate DCR. ASS-negative confers OS advantage over ASS-positive HCC. ASS-negativity is a potential biomarker for OS in HCC and possibly for other ASS-negative arginine auxotrophic cancers. Trial registration number: NCT01092091. Date of registration: March 23, 2010.
The literature has long suggested that the prime objective of planned change is to establish desired employee behaviour. However, the planned operational change's behavioural effect is nevertheless ...ambiguous in the literature. This study aims to bridge this gap and evaluate how a planned change at the operational level affects employee behaviour. As the scope of planned operational change is usually broad, we focus on studying the change in a physical workplace: 5S via a quasi-experiment. 5S is different from other planned changes such as TQM which requests a wide range of synchronised changes in the organisation. We conceptualise 5S as a change intervention aimed at regulating the physical workplace and nurturing desired employee behaviour. We examine the difference in perceived self-discipline between 99 pairs of operators from a treatment group and a control group formed by propensity score matching (PSM). After controlling two organisational support factors, the quasi-experiment result reveals that the increase in the treatment group's perceived self-discipline is significantly more massive than that of the control group. This study sets the stage for advancing research in planned operational change and opens an avenue for empirical investigation of operations management.
Androgen deprivation therapy (ADT), either by medical or surgical castration, is the backbone for standard treatment of locally advanced or metastatic prostate cancer, yet it is also associated with ...various metabolic and cardiovascular complications. Recent evidence have shown that obesity, insulin resistance, or metabolic disturbances can be associated with changes in the gut microbiome, while animal studies also show that castration is associated with changes in the gut microbiome. This study aims to investigate whether the fecal microbiota in prostate cancer patients who had undergone prostatectomy or ADT are different, and explore changes in phylogeny and pathways that may lead to side effects from ADT.
A total of 86 prostate cancer patients (56 patients on ADT and 30 patients with prostatectomy) were recruited. The fecal microbiota was analyzed by the 16S rRNA gene for alpha- and beta-diversities by QIIME2, as well as the predicted metabolic pathways by Phylogenetic Investigation of Communities by Reconstruction of Unobserved States 2.
The alpha-diversity was significantly lower in the ADT group. The beta-diversity was significantly different between the groups, in which Ruminococcus gnavus and Bacteroides spp were having higher relative abundance in the ADT group, whereas Lachnospira and Roseburia were reduced. The Firmicutes-to-Bacteroidetes ratio is noted to be lower in the ADT group as well. The functional pathway prediction showed that the biosynthesis of lipopolysaccharide (endotoxin) and propanoate was enriched in the ADT as well as the energy cycle pathways. This study is limited by the cross-sectional design and the clinical heterogeneity.
There is a significant difference in gut microbiome between prostate cancer patients on ADT and prostatectomy. We theorize that this difference may contribute to the development of metabolic complications from ADT. Further longitudinal studies are awaited.
Does process management encompass both process exploitation and exploration? Conventional thought long has suggested that exploitation is the very nature of process management, but recent literature ...suggests a perspective broader in scope. Our review highlights three problems that plague process management research based on conventional thought, which also has suffered from insufficient theory building and empirical validation. Here, we emphasize the duality of change and re-conceptualize process management to provide a comprehensive definition via capability lens. Our view of process management illuminates that the two routes organizations can take to a glean process knowledge: process exploitation and process exploration, both of which are not only essential but complementary. Basing upon scale development using 330 responses from Chinese manufacturers in the Pearl River Delta, this hypothesis is supported. We find that the inclusion of process exploration provides process management a better prediction of different business performances. Our study also reveals that prevailing theories predicting the relationship between process exploitation and exploration find little support from the results.
•Dominant view about process management.•Re-conceptualize process management.•Full-fledged scale development.•Process exploitation and exploration.
Purpose
The importance of supplier integration (SI) in improving firms’ performance has been previously identified but the effects of SI are complicated, as the relationship between supplier and ...buyer is full of uncertainty. The purpose of this paper is to re-examine the effects of SI on operations performance from a relational view.
Design/methodology/approach
Two strategies of integrating suppliers are theoretically presented: information sharing and joint decision making. Hypotheses are then developed on when SI influences operations performance, using product complexity and competitive intensity as moderating factors. The hypotheses are tested using a global survey data set, made up of 763 manufacturing firms from 22 countries.
Findings
The results indicate a positive relationship between SI and operations performance and that the moderating roles of product complexity and competition intensity are significant, but product complexity does not have significant moderation effects on the relationships between joint decision making and product quality/cost reduction.
Research limitations/implications
The moderators of product complexity and competitive intensity are not comprehensive. Future study into how and under what circumstances SI has the greatest effect will be of benefit.
Originality/value
This study makes theoretical contributions by exploring the strategies of SI through a relational view, and examining the effects of SI through the moderating roles of product complexity and competition intensity.
That behavioral change is a prime outcome of planned quality change has been suggested for long, but little empirical evidence was available about how organizational factors affect the relationship. ...For a long time, the operations management literature has been dominated by the view that operations change-intervention is self-contained without considering the fit with the organizational environment. We contribute to this research line by arguing that change intervention's success is contingent upon organizational factors' status. Specifically, this study sheds light on how the relationship between 5S, a popular workplace change-intervention and its behavioral outcome is influenced by three organizational factors: perceived organization support (POS), perceived supervisory support (PSS), and management nationality. The result supports the hypothesis that the causal relationship between 5S intervention and employees' behavior is strengthened in the presence of POS and PSS. By assessing the measurement invariance between the Chinese operators of a Japanese-managed subsidiary and a Chinese-managed company, we find that the two operator groups shared the same conceptual framework of 5S but differed in their perceived implementation rigor. The operators of the Japanese-managed company implemented 5S intervention and performed self-discipline with a higher latent means level, indicating a greater 5S intensity and integration in the company. The result supports the hypothesis that management nationality matters when implementing workplace management intervention.
Microwave (MWA) and radiofrequency ablation are the commonly used local ablation for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Studies comparing both techniques are scarce. The aim of this study was to compare ...the efficacy of MWA versus RFA as a treatment for HCC.
Patients with HCC who were suitable for local ablation were randomized into MWA or RFA. All patients were followed up regularly with contrast-enhanced computed tomography (CT) performed at 1, 3, 6 and 12 months after ablation. Both patients and the radiologists who interpreted the post-procedure CT scans were blinded to the treatment allocation. Treatment-related morbidity, overall and disease-free survivals were analyzed.
A total of 93 patients were recruited. Among them, 47 and 46 patients were randomized to MWA and RFA respectively. Patients in two groups were comparable in baseline demographics and tumor characteristics. With a median follow-up of around 30 months, there were no significant difference in the treatment-related morbidity, overall and disease-free survivals. MWA had a significantly shorter overall ablation time when compared with RFA (12 min vs 24 min, p < 0.001).
MWA is no different to RFA with respect to completeness of ablation and survivals. It is, however, as safe and effective as RFA in treating small HCC.
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