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The impact of product variety decisions on fill rate, inventory and sales performance in a consumer goods company has been examined. From a marketing perspective, it is possible to leverage sales, reach new segments and consequently increase competitiveness when there is a greater product variety on the market. However, operations and logistics professionals indicate potential impacts on the supply chain, such as production, storage and distribution complexity. The nature of the product variety-cost-sales performance relationship is not clear, and empirical evidence about whether and how operations cost and sales performance increases with variety is inconclusive.

The multiple linear regression and the Tobit regression techniques were applied over a seven-year horizon of data from a business intelligence platform of a consumer goods company.

Our results show that sales performance is negatively associated with product variety. The total effect of product variety on sales performance has been examined, including both the direct effect and the indirect effect through inventory and fill rate. Therefore, the findings provide a comprehensive understanding of the impact of product variety on operations and sales performance.

Several studies have researched the impact of product variety on fill rate, inventory and sales performance separately; however, the research of the impact and the relationship of these factors is scarce and limited.

The purpose of this paper is to explain the effects of inherent differentiation and system level performance assessment in inventory management. This is done by comparing the performance of two common safety stock methods, by considering the methods’ inherent differentiation and item group-level performance effects.

Due to the lack of analytical relationships between the two methods, the analysis is based on event-driven simulations. Data are collected from eight different case companies. Findings explain the importance of assessing safety stock performance for groups of items and not for individual items, as is common in academic studies. It explains how the methods’ inherent differentiation and planning environment characteristics affect the relative performances of the two safety stock methods.

The study explains the importance of assessing performance of safety stock methods on a system-level, rather than on item-level measures. It explains why the demand fill-rate method has a negative impact on the performance for groups of items, while the number-of-days method has a positive impact. The study also explains how the group-level safety stock performance is affected by five demand data characteristics.

The study explains the importance of assessing performance of safety stock methods on a system-level, rather than on item-level measures. It explains why the demand fill-rate method has a negative impact on the performance for groups of items, while the number-of-days method has a positive impact. The study also explains how the group-level safety stock performance is affected by five demand data characteristics.

Understanding the necessity of system level assessment of safety stock performance, how methods inherently differentiate service levels, and how demand characteristics affect methods’ performance can guide the choice of safety stock methods in companies.

No research on the characteristics of the number-of-days safety stock method, any assessment of differentiation characteristics of and comparison with the demand fill-rate method, has been published. The variable “inherent differentiation” is also introduced and defined.

To have a better understanding of the heat transfer mechanisms in a sleeping bag and to investigate the factors influencing thermal resistance of a down sleeping bag.

The mechanism of heat transfer in a sleeping bag was discussed in this paper. The thermal resistances of 24 samples were investigated. Besides, the relation between fill weight and thermal resistance, and that between the air permeability of fabric and thermal resistance, as well as that between down filling rate and thermal resistance were analyzed.

The results showed that thermal resistances of samples varied from 0.35 to 0.8 m² K/W. The fill weight was the most important factor of thermal resistance of sleeping bag and the relation between fill weight and thermal resistance matched well with cubic function. A multiple regression formula was proposed, which with thermal resistance as a dependent variable and with air permeability of fabric, down filling rate, fill weight as independent variables.

Thermal properties of a sleeping bag were analyzed through simplified basic unit under simplified environment conditions, which was necessary for building the first stage of systematic study of thermal performance of a sleeping bag.

Decision analysis in management science employs concepts from economics such as utility functions and indifference curves. A utility function U models the “satisfaction” that a customer obtains from logistics service. Here U depends on two attributes (lead time, fill rate) whose values more directly represent customer service. The shipper can, at additional cost, improve either or both of these attributes. Constructs and maximizes various utility functions U given a total budget B for distribution service. Finds that without increasing the budget overall logistics service can often be improved from the customer’s point of view. Whether U is additive or multiplicative, a customer’s utility resulting from the optimal lead time and fill rate is typically 20 per cent higher than when those attribute levels are set intuitively (without reference to customer preferences and tradeoffs expressed by U). Gives some introduction to decision analysis (certainty equivalent, risk aversion, …) to aid in understanding the functional forms employed for U and methods of solution, rendering the paper more self‐contained.

Faced with declining government funding support and rising student loan debt, recently timely graduation in higher education has become a focal point of discussion at many institutions, particularly public universities. Timely graduation requires a student to successfully enroll in and complete a set of required and elective courses, the relationship of which is bound by the courses’ prerequisite requirements. However, due to the fact that class capacity is oftentimes limited and wrongly timed, many students find it challenging to stay on track. A well-structured degree roadmap that takes all factors into consideration and specifies the right courses to take by semester will better guide students’ course selection and thus increase their chance of earning their degrees within the four-year time window. Additionally, it will also allow administrators to do better capacity planning, and hence increase course accessibility to students. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

In this research, some operational techniques such as line balancing and simulation are applied to restructure and improve degree roadmaps, and assess the resulting outcomes. Some innovative methods are proposed to improve the processes on which students proceed to degree.

The results based on historical data that contains millions of student records spanning over eight-year time window demonstrate that the improved degree roadmaps can substantially increase students’ chance of completing the degree in a four-year time window. The research findings provide university administrators with cost-effective solutions.

This research breaks a new ground in literature due to its unique approach and focus. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is one of the first attempts to systematically study the impact of degree roadmap on timely graduation. This research focuses on finding solutions that are within the institution’s control, hence the proposed solutions are implementable and will provide university administrators with new tools and perspectives to enhance student success.

This study attempts to determine the reasons for unfilled requests within the Gaelic library consortium in South Africa.

Management information retrieved from the ReQuest document supply system for the participating libraries formed the base point of the research. Data included the number of requests placed and filled, and reasons for unfilled requests. The data were analysed, and fill rates calculated. In‐depth research into the unfilled requests was carried out, which enabled one to suggest remedial measures for such requests. Indicators to measure library performance were identified.

Previous reasons for unfilled requests have been mainly speculative; research, however, confirmed that the hypothesis proved to be correct; namely that the fill rate of requests is determined by the quality of work, the quantity of items requested, and effectiveness of staff within service units, along with sufficient staff capacity and their levels of experience.

The results of this study enable document supply staff to take remedial actions within their institutions. Supplying and requesting fill rates differ. In practice, the request fill rate is the more important. Librarians looking to improve client satisfaction and expectations should focus on this aspect of document supply.

The recommendations are a useful checklist for document supply librarians internationally – not just in South Africa – who wish to improve their service to users.

The purpose of this paper is to address the inefficiency in resource allocation for disaster relief procurement operations. It presents a holistic and reconfigurable procurement auctions‐based framework which includes the announcement construction, bid construction and bid evaluation phases.

The holistic framework is developed in a way that auctioneers and bidders compete amongst each other in multiple rounds of the procurement auction. Humanitarian organization in disaster locations are considered as auctioneers (buyers) and suppliers are considered as bidders.

Unique system parameters (e.g. announcement options, priority of items, bidder strategies, etc.) are introduced to represent the disaster relief environment in a practical way. The framework is verified by simulation and optimization techniques using the system characteristics of the disaster relief environment as an input. Based on the parameters and their values, behavioural changes of auctioneers and suppliers are observed.

Combining the three phases of procurement auctions is unique both in the auction literature and in the disaster relief research, and it helps the humanitarian organizations supply the immediate and long‐term requirements in the disaster location more efficiently.

As document supply grows in volume and importance it becomes more necessary to measure its performance. Nearly all measures are relative — over time, across countries, and between systems; they should therefore be consistent and comparable. The main measures are: fill rate (broken down by subject, form and date); speed (broken down into the various processes involved in document supply); user satisfaction (because users' needs may not be articulated); and costs. There may be trade‐offs between different measures (eg speed and costs). Any measurement system must be practical. Most data will be collected by sampling, but well designed automated systems in future should enable better measures to be calculated with less effort.

In today’s world, the recommender systems are very valuable systems for the online users, as the World Wide Web is loaded with plenty of available information causing the online users to spend more time and money. The recommender systems suggest some possible and relevant recommendation to the online users by applying the recommendation filtering techniques to the available source of information. The recommendation filtering techniques take the input data denoted as the matrix representation which is generally very sparse and high dimensional data in nature. Hence, the sparse data matrix is completed by filling the unknown or missing entries by using many matrix completion techniques. One of the most popular techniques used is the matrix factorization (MF) which aims to decompose the sparse data matrix into two new and small dimensional data matrix and whose dot product completes the matrix by filling the logical values. However, the MF technique failed to retain the loss of original information when it tried to decompose the matrix, and the error rate is relatively high which clearly shows the loss of such valuable information.

To alleviate the problem of data loss and data sparsity, the new algorithm from formal concept analysis (FCA), a mathematical model, is proposed for matrix completion which aims at filling the unknown or missing entries without loss of valuable information to a greater extent. The proposed matrix completion algorithm uses the clustering technique where the users who have commonly rated the items and have not commonly rated the items are captured into two classes. The matrix completion algorithm fills the mean cluster value of the unknown entries which well completes the matrix without actually decomposing the matrix.

The experiment was conducted on the available public data set, MovieLens, whose result shows the prediction error rate is minimal, and the comparison with the existing algorithms is also studied. Thus, the application of FCA in recommender systems proves minimum or no data loss and improvement in the prediction accuracy of rating score.

The proposed matrix completion algorithm using FCA performs good recommendation which will be more useful for today’s online users in making decision with regard to the online purchasing of products.

This paper presents the new technique of matrix completion adopting the vital properties from FCA which is applied in the recommender systems. Hence, the proposed algorithm performs well when compared to other existing algorithms in terms of prediction accuracy.

No thorough review of the literature of performance evaluation of interlibrary loan and document supply operations has been published in over a decade. This article surveys that literature in the years 1987 through 1997 from published research in all English‐speaking countries. There is general agreement that fill rate, turnaround time, cost and user satisfaction are the four primary criteria for evaluating ILL and document supply. Although there has been increased emphasis on quantifying the performance of ILL and document supply in recent years, this research has been hindered by the lack of standardisation of measurement devices and definitions of terms. Following a discussion of theoretical considerations, recent studies in each of the four main criteria will be examined in separate sections. A supplement to this article, covering the years 1998 through 2000, is in preparation and will be published in the near future.