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Recent research has proposed the position of a project owner as the individual accountable for realizing target benefits. However, there is a lack of understanding in the literature of this role – in particular, the specific responsibilities of the project owner that can enhance benefits realization and operations performance. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

The paper identifies these responsibilities in practice through two studies – a qualitative study, which includes interviews with senior executives who fund projects, and an in-depth longitudinal case study, which describes a company that continuously realizes the benefits from its projects.

The results suggest that a project owner should have 22 key responsibilities across four project phases and that an operations manager is often the most suitable candidate to fulfill this role in operations improvement projects. When performing these project responsibilities effectively, operations managers enhance benefits realization and operations improvement. Finally, the paper proposes five hypotheses for future research.

Based on agency theory, the paper increases our knowledge of the role of the project owner in practice. This new knowledge can enhance the realization of target benefits from projects and ensure a smooth transition from the project to the operations environment.

The purpose of this paper is to resolve a core issue in project management research and practice – inconsistent terminology of key project roles. This inconsistency has negative consequences on the quality and impact of research in this area.

The authors conducted an analysis of the literature and project management standards to identify both agreed-upon and inconsistent project role terms. Based on role and agency theories, the authors propose a consistent terminology.

The authors found consensus regarding four terms: project manager, project team, project management office, and program manager. However, the authors also found conflicting definitions and misuse concerning other terms, as well as use of the same title for different roles (e.g. customer, sponsor, champion). The authors define the ten core project roles and the two project entities with which they are associated.

The proposed role definitions and clear distinction between the two project entities offer clarity, reliance on existing consensus, avoidance of conflicts of interest, and clear separation of principal and agent roles. The implementation of these definitions will improve communications and enhance quality within and between both the research and the practice communities.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how the research knowledge in OM has been obtained and distributed since the first journals in OM began publication in 1980, changes in the interests of OM over the decades and where they are heading in the future; and to explore the changing roles of individual journals in the development of OM.

A two-stage bibliometric study was employed, first using citation analysis to examine the changing research interests in OM through an analysis of the OM journals. Then the top journals of most importance to OM were analyzed to determine the role that each one played in the knowledge distribution network and how that changed over the decades.

OM’s journal base consists of 7 research knowledge sources, 12 transmitters linking different journal groups, and 11 sinks with limited input. Research attention changed from practice, engineering, and OR to general management, strategy, and production management in the 2000s, with strategy, organizational issues, and logistics surfacing in the 2010s. OM features increasingly academic research with less interest in practice. OM journals’ network importance has increased substantially, with JOM now a bridge between the quantitative and management journals.

Both researchers and managers gain in understanding the history and identifying the future direction of OM, as well as which journals will have the most relevant papers to their interests.

This research identifies the history of the OM field in terms of its constituents and where it is going in the future. This history is related to the role OM plays among the knowledge network of top journals and presents a novel way of classifying and labeling journals based on their contribution.

Project goal setting, led by a project proposal development team, is an important operations process because effective goal setting aligned with the operations strategy can enhance project investment decision making, project success and thereby operations performance. The purpose of this paper is to argue that because of the strategic nature of this task, the organizational climate (OC) that the proposal development team works in is critical for the effectiveness of their goal setting.

The authors raise hypotheses regarding the role OC plays in enhancing the effectiveness of the support senior executives provide to project proposal teams. The authors test the hypotheses in a longitudinal survey of 200 managers in the USA.

Results show that a formal organizational process used by proposal development teams for setting project goals is highly effective and that an appropriate OC further intensifies the positive effect of such a process. However, a formal organizational process has no positive effect on effective goal setting if implemented in an environment with a poor OC.

The paper contributes to the literature by finding that a positive OC intensifies the already positive effect of organizational support. In practice, the creation of such a climate can enhance project goal setting, project success, and as a result, operations performance.

Justifying new manufacturing technology is usually very difficult since the most important benefits are often strategic and difficult to quantify. Traditional capital budgeting procedures that rely on return measures based on direct cost savings and incremental future cash flows do not normally capture the strategic benefits of higher quality, faster responses to wider ranges of customer needs, and the options for future growth made available by flexible manufacturing technology. Adding to these limitations is the difficulty of using traditional cost accounting systems to generate the information necessary for justifying new manufacturing investments. This paper reviews these problems and recommends procedures useful for assessing investments in flexible manufacturing technology.

The purpose of this research is to track the evolution of logistics research with a focus on the methods and orientation of the research from the past to the present. Specifically, this paper investigates the evolution of logistics research methodologies in an attempt to address previous calls for a paradigm discussion aimed at assessing the current direction and proposing a future direction for research in the logistics discipline.

The authors chose a previously established framework which describes and evaluates alternative research paradigms. A content analysis of articles in selected journals allows published research of the logistics discipline to be evaluated and categorized. The categorization process uses a two‐dimensional framework which then allows the authors to classify research into cells in a matrix which represent a variety of research paradigms.

The results illustrate that the methodologies employed in logistics have evolved during the period of analysis. The logistics discipline appears to focus on survey‐based research in an attempt to examine attitudinal and behavioral aspects of logistics interactions. Significant amounts of research are also conducted with simulation and mathematical modeling while case study and action research methods comprise a relatively small but growing portion of published logistics research. Nevertheless, the results of the research support the conclusion that the logistics discipline is diversifying its research efforts and expanding the array of issues addressed.

The results are based on a thorough literature review along with the use of well established research frameworks and methodologies. Nevertheless, the research focuses on analyzing the content of logistics discipline research in specific outlets and during specific periods of time. Therefore, while the authors believe the results provide a useful guide for assessing the evolution of research in the discipline, it is not all‐inclusive in nature.

Based on our research results in general logistics, researchers appear to be responding to the evolution of the discipline by expanding their efforts to conduct applied research. It appears that common interests are being identified and in many cases, academicians and practitioners are working together to build an alliance designed to benefit the discipline by building on the strengths of each group.

Research plays an important role in furthering any discipline by enhancing our understanding of issues pertinent to those studying and practicing the discipline. This paper helps academicians and practitioners of the logistics discipline to better understand the direction of the profession and to assist us in shaping the future of the discipline.

The purpose of this paper is to attempt to achieve customization while maintaining quick delivery to customers by use of a hybrid of make-to-order (MTO) and make-to-stock (MTS) strategies.

The paper reports on various studies based on simulation, optimization, and Markov analysis to respond to some of the unique challenges of the hybrid strategy.

Implementation of the make-to-forecast (MTF) hybrid strategy provides considerable competitive advantage in certain manufacturing situations by achieving as much as 50 percent shorter delivery times for highly customized products than would be possible with a pure MTO strategy. It also has potential to offer competitive advantages to pure MTS and MTO operations.

The manufacturing situations, appropriate for MTF paradigm, are fairly complex. The paper reviews only several of the many managerial challenges. For instance, it assumes a given product variety but does not dwell on what the optimum product variety offering should be. Additional research to this and other aspects of the situation is warranted.

The paper reports on a real managerial problem. The suggested approaches can be easily implemented by certain manufacturing companies striving to achieve competitive advantage by offering shorter delivery time and substantial customization to their customers.

Managing the trade-off between delivery time and degree of customization is not new. Assemble-to-order, mass customization, and postponement strategies have been suggested to soften the trade-off. This paper provides a new paradigm for the same challenge based on pre-release of units into the manufacturing system in anticipation of customer orders.

Cellular and functional layouts were investigated under a variety of real‐world conditions via a two‐stage computer simulation study. In the first stage, simulation models were developed for three actual companies. Six different cell formation procedures were used to develop the cellular layouts and CRAFT was used to develop the functional layout. The following six variables were used to measure shop performance: average flow time, maximum flow time, average distance travelled by a batch, average work‐in‐process level, the maximum level of work‐in‐process, and the longest average queue. Factors observed in the first stage of the study that appear to make cellular manufacturing less beneficial than might otherwise be expected were found to be small batch sizes, a small number of different machines the parts require in their processing, short processing times per part, the existence of bottleneck machines (i.e. machines with insufficient capacity), and the absence of natural part families (i.e. sets of parts with similar processing requirements). In the second stage of this study, earlier assumptions associated with sequence‐dependent setup times and move time delays were relaxed. These two parameters were identified as important factors as well.

This paper presents the results of a case/simulation study that evaluated a number of potential maintenance policies for a flexible manufacturing system (FMS). Empirical data were used to structure the operation of the FMS, and to simulate its failures and repairs on the shop floor. Five maintenance policies – corrective, 30‐day preventive, 90‐day preventive, on‐failure opportunistic, and 30‐day opportunistic – were compared on four performance criteria: equipment utilization, machine downtime, through‐put, and average flow time. The “30‐day opportunistic” policy performed best overall, although the “corrective” policy was a close second, outperformed only in the area of equipment utilization. The “on‐failure opportunistic” policy performed poorly on every measure of system performance.