Learn from research’s biggest names.
The Simon community is small by design. In fact, it is the smallest of the top-ranked business schools, which offers students the opportunity to work closely with world class scholars. Simon doesn’t require a specific undergraduate major or a minimum work experience; scholars are free to choose from any of our six research focus areas.
| Accountancy | Comp. and Info. Systems | Economics and Mgmt. |
| Finance | Marketing | Operations Management |
Operations Management
The operations of a firm involve the acquisition of productive resources by IT, their configuration into a productive system, and their utilization in producing goods and services. These activities require decision making at strategic, planning, and scheduling levels. Operations Management is concerned with formulating and solving such decision problems. This demands the realistic modeling of these decision problems, as well as the knowledge of the relevant methodology and, very often, the development of new theory and techniques.
Recent Research
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Experts offer efficiency for surgery room savings
Greg Dobson, Abraham Seidmann, and Vera Tilson
Operating rooms are some of the most expensive areas in acute care delivery at most hospitals. For successful operations, they rely on the timely delivery of the appropriate sterile surgical instruments for each procedure on hand—and that’s where the expense becomes a significant factor.
Simon professors Greg Dobson, Vera Tilson, and Abraham (Avi) Seidmann recently tackled the problem with co-author and surgeon Anthony Froix, MD, ’12S (MS), ’13S (MBA). Read more about “Configuring Surgical Instrument Trays to Reduce Costs,” published in IIE Transactions on Healthcare Systems Engineering.
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Is Good Customer Service a Popularity Contest
Huaxia Rui, Abraham Seidmann, and Priyanga Gunarathne
Recent research by Simon faculty shows that for customers with a problem to be solved, Twitter is the way to go—as long as they have a lot of followers. In their paper, “Customer Service on Social Media: Do Popularity and Sentiment Matter?” professors Huaxia Rui and Avi Seidmann and doctoral graduate student Priyanga Gunarathne gathered over a half-million tweets sent to and by American Airlines, United Airlines, and Air Canada.
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Upgrade Intervals Affect Profitability
Abraham Seidmann, Amit Mehra, and Probal Mojumder
In a new paper published by Production and Operations Management Journal, “Product Life Cycle Management of Packaged Software,” Simon professor Abraham Seidmann and co-authors Amit Mehra and Probal Mojumder study the optimal intervals between software upgrades and analyze how these intervals change over a product’s life cycle.
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Math Modeling Could Save Millions
David Tilson, Vera Tilson, Gregory Dobson, and Curtis Haas
A Simon Business School case study of production practices at Strong Memorial Hospital reveals the potential to save millions in production costs at hospital pharmacies across the nation.
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Comparing Bank Financing and Trade Credit
Abraham Seidmann
A new paper by Simon professor Abraham Seidmann and Professor Bing Jing of Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business, “Finance Sourcing in a Supply Chain,” examines the merits of trade versus bank credit between a manufacturer and a retailer with limited capital. The study adds critical new insights to an active research area that has important managerial implications.
Learn from mentors and masters.
Henri Groenevelt
Professor Groenevelt has been a consultant on operations management and data analysis issues for numerous manufacturing and service organizations (including hospitals and other health care providers), as well as the city of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
John F. Raffensperger
Born and raised in Chicago, Raffensperger obtained a B.S. in industrial engineering from Northwestern University, later attending the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business for an M.B.A. and Ph.D., studying U.S. Army training readiness. He was a RAND Summer Associate in 1990. From 1998 to 2012, he was a senior lecturer in management science at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, where he focused on auction theory, environmental economics, and markets for water resources. From 2013-2021, he was a Senior Operations Researcher at RAND, where he worked on problems of national security and emergency preparedness, including disaster recovery and military readiness and logistics. His research interests include logistics, process improvement, risk analysis, scheduling, water allocation, and climate change.
Ricky Roet-Green
Ricky Roet-Green received a PhD in Operations Research from the school of mathematics at Tel-Aviv university (Israel) in 2014. Before joining Simon Business School, she spent two years as a postdoc at the University of Toronto. Her research interests lie in modelling and analyzing the behavior of strategic customers in congestion-prone environments, particularly in service systems. Her work integrates queueing theory, game theory and mechanism design, aiming to optimize system performance in terms of revenue and social welfare maximization.
Vera Tilson
Prior to her academic career, Professor Tilson worked as a software engineer and project manager in telecommunications, medical instrumentation, supply chain software and financial industries.
Lin Zang
I am a second-year PhD student at Simon Business School. I am interested in the emergence and growth of new business models. Welcome to get in touch with me.