Capacity Management, Decentralization, and Internal Pricing This paper studies the acquisition and subsequent utilization of production capacity in a decentralized firm comprised of multiple divisions. A central issue in our analysis is whether one or several of the divisions should be structured as investment centers with comprehensive responsibility for acquiring new capacity assets and maint...

To my parents, Ana and Cornel, for their unconditional and unbreakable support iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my family, especially my husband, who has never stopped believing in me, and has never complained being a mother and a father to our two children while I was working on my research. Without him I would have never become the person I am today. I am very grateful I had the cha...

Transformations in the marketplace have led manufacturing companies to focus on their core competences and compete through new forms of enterprise partnerships. A new concept of enterprise partnership is that of Virtual Enterprise wherein autonomous or independent companies come together to temporally address a specific market demand, by collaborating closely and presenting to the market as a s...

Decentralized Capacity Management and Internal Pricing This paper studies the acquisition and subsequent utilization of production capacity in a multi-divisional firm. In a setting where an upstream division provides capacity for itself and a downstream division, our analysis explores whether the divisions should be structured as investmentor profit centers The choice of responsibility centers ...

In this paper we discuss a framework for capacity planning and lead time management in manufacturing companies, with an emphasis on the machine shop. First we show how queueing models can be used to find approximations of the mean and the variance of manufacturing shop lead times. These quantities often serve as a basis to set a fixed planned lead time in an MRP-controlled environment. A major ...

We develop a general framework for determining the optimal resource capacity for each station comprising a stochastic network, motivated by applications arising in computer capacity planning and business process management. The problem is mathematically intractable in general and therefore one typically resorts to either overly simplistic analytical approximations or very time-consuming simulat...

Consider a dynamic decision making model under risk with a fixed planning horizon, namely the dynamic capacity control model. The model describes a firm, operating in a monopolistic setting and selling a range of products consuming a single resource. Demand for each product is time-dependent and modeled by a random variable. The firm controls the revenue stream by allowing or denying customer r...