The first comprehensive survey paper on scheduling problems with separate setup times or costs was conducted by Allahverdi et al. (1999), who reviewed the literature since the mid-1960s. Since the appearance of that survey paper, there has been an increasing interest in scheduling problems with setup times (costs) with an average of more than 40 papers per year being added to the literature. The objective of this paper is to provide an extensive review of the scheduling literature on models with setup times (costs) from then to date covering more than 300 papers. Given that so many papers have appeared in a short time, there are cases where different researchers addressed the same problem independently, and sometimes by using even the same technique, e.g., genetic algorithm. Throughout the paper we identify such areas where independently developed techniques need to be compared. The paper classifies scheduling problems into those with batching and non-batching considerations, and with sequence-independent and sequence-dependent setup times. It further categorizes the literature according to shop environments, including single-machine, parallel machines, flow shop, no-wait flow shop, flexible flow shop, job shop, open shop, and others.

This study investigates how customers perceive and adopt Internet Banking (IB) in Hong Kong. We developed a theoretical model based on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) with an added construct Perceived Web Security, and empirically tested its ability in predicting customers' behavioral intention of adopting IB. We designed a questionnaire and used it to survey a randomly selected sample of customers of IB from the Yellow Pages, and obtained 203 usable responses. We analyzed the data using Structured Equation Modeling (SEM) to evaluate the strength of the hypothesized relationships, if any, among the constructs, which include Perceived Ease of Use and Perceived Web Security as independent variables, Perceived Usefulness and Attitude as intervening variables, and Intention to Use as the dependent variable. The results provide support of the extended TAM model and confirm its robustness in predicting customers' intention of adoption of IB. This study contributes to the literature by formulating and validating TAM to predict IB adoption, and its findings provide useful information for bank management in formulating IB marketing strategies.

We investigate here antecedents and consequences of supplier integration (black-box and gray-box) in product development activities. Antecedents include embeddedness with suppliers, supply base rationalization, and supplier selection based on product development capabilities. Product innovation and quality are modeled as returns of supplier integration in product development. We also assess the moderating role that firm size may play in the relationships we posit. Our research framework relies primarily on the social network perspective (SNP) and using a sample of 157 firms we found support for many of the posited hypotheses. Specifically, we found that embeddedness with suppliers is positively related to supply base rationalization and supplier selection based on product development capabilities. Supply base rationalization has a significant positive impact on gray-box integration (i.e., suppliers working along side the customer's engineers for product development) but not black-box integration (i.e., suppliers carry out on their own the development of components or parts for the customers). On the other hand, selecting suppliers based on their product development capabilities leads to higher levels of both gray-box and black-box integration. Only gray-box integration manifests statistically significant positive effects towards product innovation. The effects of black-box integration are negligible. Product innovation exhibits strong positive effects on quality. We also found partial support for the moderating impact of firm size. Supply base rationalization practiced by small firms has a statistically significant negative impact on black-box integration but there is no statistically significant effect for large firms. Supply base rationalization is statistically related to gray-box integration only for large firms. Finally, the positive effects of product innovation on quality are more potent for large firms. #

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The extant operations management literature has extensively investigated the associations among quality, customer satisfaction, and firm profitability. However, the influence of employee attributes on these performance dimensions has rarely been examined. In this study we investigate the impact of employee satisfaction on operational performance in high-contact service industries. Based on an empirical study of 206 service shops in Hong Kong, we examined the hypothesized relationships among employee satisfaction, service quality, customer satisfaction, and firm profitability. Using structural equations modeling, we found that employee satisfaction is significantly related to service quality and to customer satisfaction, while the latter in turn influences firm profitability. We also found that firm profitability has a moderate non-recursive effect on employee satisfaction, leading to a ''satisfaction-quality-profit cycle''. Our empirical investigation suggests that employee satisfaction is an important consideration for operations managers to boost service quality and customer satisfaction. We provide empirical evidence that employee satisfaction plays a significant role in enhancing the operational performance of organizations in the high-contact service sector. #

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