Strategic product line breadth decisions evoke differential responses from the manufacturing and the marketing areas: manufacturing prefers keeping process disruptions to a minimum and, as a result, discourages product proliferation; however, marketing, in its attempt to match products to heterogeneous consumer needs and gain market share, emphasizes a broader product line. We systematically investigate the market benefits and cost disadvantages of broader product lines on a large sample of over 1,400 business units. Our results indicate significant market share benefits and increases in firms' profitability with broader product lines; moreover, widely held beliefs of increases in production costs are not empirically supported. American manufacturing firms may indeed be flexible enough to accommodate product variety without significant detrimental effects on costs.product line, market share, manufacturing costs, variety, profitability

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Our goal is to assess the strategic and operational benefits of electronic integration for industrial procurement. We conduct a field study with an industrial supplier and examine the drivers of performance of the procurement process. Our research quantifies both the operational and strategic impacts of electronic integration in a B2B procurement environment for a supplier. Additionally, we show that the customer also obtains substantial benefits from efficient procurement transaction processing. We isolate the performance impact of technology choice and ordering processes on both the trading partners. A significant finding is that the supplier derives large strategic benefits when the customer initiates the system and the supplier enhances the system's capabilities. With respect to operational benefits, we find that when suppliers have advanced electronic linkages, the order-processing system significantly increases benefits to both parties.business value of IT, empirical assessment, electronic integration, electronic procurement, B2B, strategic IT impact, operational IT impact

Product design decisions substantially affect the cost and revenue drivers. A design configuration with commonality can lower manufacturing cost. However, such a design may hinder the ability to extract price premiums through product differentiation. We explicitly investigate the marketing-manufacturing trade-off and derive analytical implications for three possible design configurations: unique, premium-common, and basic-common. Our model considers two distinct segments of consumers. Some of the implications of our analysis are not readily apparent. For example, when the high-quality component is made common, the average quality of the products offered to the two segments increases. One may infer that with higher average quality, higher prices or higher total revenues might ensue. However, this may not be the case, as detailed in the paper. Finally, our analysis provides a useful framework to develop an index that can rank order components in terms of their attractiveness for commonality.Design, Product Design, Commonality, Marketing, Segmentation, Marketing/Manufacturing Interface

F irms are increasingly engaging with customers on social media. Despite this heightened interest, guidance for effective engagement is lacking. In this study, we investigate customers' compliments and complaints and firms' service interventions on social media. We develop a dynamic choice model that explicitly accounts for the evolutions of both customers' voicing decisions and their relationships with the firm. Voices are driven by both the customers' underlying relationships and other factors such as redress seeking. We estimate the model using a unique data set of customer voices and service interventions on Twitter. We find that redress seeking is a major driver of customer complaints, and although service intervention improves relationships, it also encourages more complaints later. Because of this dual effect, firms are likely to underestimate the returns on service intervention if measured using only voices. Furthermore, we find an "error-correction" effect in certain situations, where customers compliment or complain when others voice the opposite opinions. Finally, we characterize the distinct voicing tendencies in different relationship states, and show that uncovering the underlying relationship states enables effective targeting. We are among the first to analyze individual customer level voice dynamics and to evaluate the effects of service intervention on social media.

We examine the relationship between life-cycle productivity and conformance quality in software products. The effects of product size, personnel capability, software process, usage of tools, and higher front-end investments on productivity and conformance quality were analyzed to derive managerial implications based on primary data collected on commercial software projects from a leading vendor. Our key findings are as follows. First, our results provide evidence for significant increases in life-cycle productivity from improved conformance quality in software products shipped to the customers. Given that the expenditure on computer software has been growing over the last few decades, empirical evidence for cost savings through quality improvement is a significant contribution to the literature. Second, our study identifies several quality drivers in software products. Our findings indicate that higher personnel capability, deployment of resources in initial stages of product development (especially design) and improvements in software development process factors are associated with higher quality products.software quality and life-cycle productivity, cost of quality, cmm, software process areas, front-end investments

W e review and discuss the evolution of interdisciplinary and interorganizational research in operations management and suggest directions for future investigations. The proposed operations management research focus is one that embraces a more holistic view of an "extended enterprise" which involves working with a new business model-the organization as a network. This methodology starts by treating the organization as a system that is enabled by information technology and is characterized by ubiquitous information sharing across traditional enterprise. Proper integration of technology, business processes and people factors needs to be developed to create higher value from networked enterprises. Operations management research future lies in establishing this science from an interdisciplinary perspective. We analyze this perspective in the context of papers published in the first 50 issues of Production and Operations Management and the related literature. The Roles of Marketing and Operations in Productand Service Design. POM has published several papers in the areas of product and service operations design. This set of papers deals with the issues at the interface between marketing and operations. They break new ground and show substantial departure from the conventional wisdom on the value proposition and provide directions to better bridge the two functional areas. We highlight some of these areas. Product Design The Role of Changes in Product Attributes and Costs in New Product Diffusion and Substitution:A Departure from the Marketing Literature. Schmidt and Druehl (2005) develop a model that adds opera- Figure 2Emphasis of OM Research Publications; Past and Suggested Future.

In fast-cycle, high technology industries, the speed and rate at which companies can introduce products into the market are critical for sustaining competitive advantage and market share. The authors analyze new product development by three international manufacturers that dominate a segment of the electronic component industry. The objective is to examine the impact of two distinct product development strategies and structures on time-to-market. The analysis of more than 200 new product developments provides important findings. A concentrated new product development structure, in contrast to a distributed structure, affords rapid prototyping. However, volume production is reached faster in the distributed structure. Also, devoting more time to prototyping hastens volume production.time-to-market, new product development, product prototyping, hazard function models