Events Calendar

Modeling Discretion, Knowledge and Coordination in Professional Service Systems

INFORMATION AND OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT DEPARTMENT, Marshall School of Business, Operations Management, PresentsSeyed M. R. Iravani, Associate Professor, Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences, Northwestern UniversityFriday, November 20, 2009, Hoffman Hall 306, 10:00 AM – 11:30 AM"Modeling Discretion, Knowledge and Coordination in Professional Service Systems"ABSTRACT: The American economy has been shifting away from traditional manufacturing activities and toward service and professional functions. In the early 1900s, only three out of ten workers in the United States were working in the service sector. By 1950, this number was five out of ten. More than forty million new jobs have been created in the service sector in the last thirty years. Today, the service sector employs eight out of every ten workers in the United States, and accounts for approximately 70 percent of U.S. national income. While in some service operations tasks are routine and well-defined, in others, which we call professional service systems, tasks are not routine; they are knowledge-intensive, they depend on worker's discretion, and they require a high level of coordination. In this talk we focus on these three features of professional service systems. We show that introducing discretion in task completion adds a fourth variability buffer, i.e., quality, to the well-known variability buffers of capacity, inventory, and time. In the second part of the talk we develop a modeling framework that includes the knowledge of the worker into the decision process and introduce a new class of networks: knowledge-based decision-flow networks. These networks allow us to evaluate the simultaneous impact of decision-making and task processing on the performance of some professional service systems. Finally, we focus on the issue of coordination in large professional service systems. Specifically, we develop a new approach to characterizing the lack of coordination between product architecture and organizational interactions in the vehicle development process of a large U.S. auto manufacturer. BIO: Seyed Iravani is an associate professor in the department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences at Northwestern University. He got his PhD from University of Toronto, and worked as postdoctoral fellow in the Industrial and Operations Engineering department at the University of Michigan. He has been working with GM, Ford, Cisco, Motorola, Feeding America, and Mobile CARE among others on several projects related to the design and control issues of manufacturing and service operation systems and non-profit supply chains. His research interests are in the applications of stochastic processes and queueing theory in production and service operations and supply chains. He has served as Associate Editor for Management Science, IIE Transactions, and Navel Research Logistics. Currently he is the Department Editor for Service Operations Engineering for IIE Transactions and Associate Editor for Operations Research.

Location: Hoffman Hall 306

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Georgia Lum