Special Issue on the EurOMA 2010 Conference

Special Issue on the EurOMA 2010 Conference

Article Type: Guest editorial From: International Journal of Operations & Production Management, Volume 32, Issue 9

About the Guest Editors Rui Sousa is Associate Professor at the Catholic University of Portugal (Porto) and holds a PhD in Operations Management from the London Business School. He was Chair of the EurOMA 2010 Conference. His research has won several awards and has been published in leading journals, including the Journal of Operations Management, International Journal of Operations and Production Management, Production and Operations Management and the Journal of Service Research. Rui serves on a number of Editorial Review Boards and is a member of the Board of the European Operations Management Association. His present research interests include multi-channel services, quality management, and manufacturing strategy.

Pedro Oliveira is Assistant Professor at the CATÓLICA-LISBON School of Business and Economics, where he is director of the doctoral program in Technology Change and Entrepreneurship jointly offered with IST and Carnegie Mellon University. He received his PhD in Operations, Technology and Innovation Management from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research has appeared in Production and Operations Management, Research Policy, International Journal of Operations and Production Management, Organizational Research Methods, among others. He was a member of the Organizing Committee of EurOMA 2010. He was an International Faculty Fellow at MIT Sloan School of Management.

Papers in the EurOMA 2010 Conference

The EurOMA 2010 Conference was the 17th International Annual Conference of the European Operations Management Association, and was organized by the School of Economics and Management of the Catholic University of Portugal at Porto, in Porto, Portugal, June 6-9 2010. The conference attracted 651 abstract submissions resulting in 324 full papers in the conference program and was attended by over 450 delegates. The theme of the conference was “Managing Operations in Service Economies”. In the last decades we have witnessed a strong growth and globalization of service activities in developed economies. The frontier between products and services, as well as between manufacturing and service operations is becoming increasingly blurred. These changes have created a substantially different environment and challenges for managing operations. The aim of the conference was to reflect on the implications of this new environment for the research and practice of managing manufacturing and service operations.

A wide variety of topics were represented at the conference (Figure 1). Supply Chain Management – a fairly broad topic – clearly dominated (close to 20 percent), followed by the core theme of Operations Strategy (8 percent), and Service Operations (7 percent). When we add up all papers addressing “service-related” topics (service operations, OM in healthcare, integrating products and services, lean services and service innovation) the tally amounts to 26 percent. Hence, the conference was indeed an important forum for reflecting on the management of operations in service economies. The program also included a number of special track topics (empirical modeling and simulation, integrating products and services, lean services, operations management in healthcare, service innovation and sustainability through supply chain management) with the objective of raising the profile of emerging topics in OM, but also as a way to bring scholars with similar interests together. As Figure 1 shows, these special topics were well populated with papers.

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Figure 1 Percentage of conference papers by theme

About the papers in this issue

All papers submitted to the conference were considered for this special issue, regardless of theme. The careful review and revision process resulted in four accepted papers – these papers are extended and double-blind reviewed versions of the corresponding papers presented at the conference. They represent some of the most current research in the operations management field.

The first paper by Davide Luzzini, Federico Caniato, Stefano Ronchi and Gianluca Spina proposes a theory-based classification for purchasing strategy categories and empirically assesses it based on an international, cross-industry survey. The study identifies four different purchasing strategy categories (steady, volatile, special, and risky), associated with distinctive competitive priorities. The paper highlights the need to employ different purchasing management approaches tailored to the various category characteristics.

The second paper by Taco Van der Vaart, Dirk Pieter van Donk, Cristina Gimenez and Vicenta Sierra investigates the impact of different dimensions of supply chain integration (communication infrastructure, cooperative behaviour, planning information and joint improvement) on performance. This study increases our understanding of how contingencies influence the supply chain. Specifically, it is one of the first studies to investigate the moderating effect of the complexity of the process of delivery (supply complexity) on the effectiveness of supply chain integration practices, having found that the effect of such practices depends on the level of supply complexity.

The third paper by José Moyano-Fuentes, Macarena Sacristán-Díaz and Pedro José Martínez-Jurado looks at the interrelationships between cooperation in the supply chain, information integration and lean production. The authors show that while greater levels of integration with suppliers do not impact on the level of lean production adoption, greater levels of cooperation with customers do have a significant effect. It is also shown that the greater the cooperation with customers, and the more information is integrated with them, the higher the level of Lean Production adoption.

The final paper by Christos Tsinopoulos and Zu’bi Al-Zu’bi explores the impact of collaboration with lead users (users that experience needs unknown to the public and will greatly benefit if they innovate by finding solutions to those needs) and product experts (external new product development collaborators who have a commercial interest in the development of a new product) on the clockspeed of the development of new products and to determine which of the two has an higher impact. The authors find that collaboration with lead users will lead to greater new product development speed than with product experts.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank the colleagues who joined us in the conference organizing committee in Porto: Sofia Salgado Pinto, Conceição Portela and Helena Correia. We are also grateful to the colleagues with whom we worked in the best paper award committees for an initial selection of papers (in alphabetical order): Chris Voss, Harry Boer, Nuran Acur, Patrik Jonsson, Roger Maull and Stephen Brown. Finally, we would also like to thank the following reviewers for their help in compiling this special issue (in alphabetical order): Andy Neely, Andy Yeung, Ann Vereecke, Bart Vos, Geraldo Ferrer, Giovanni da Silveira, Jeff Shockley, Jeroen de Jong, John Gray, Liana Victorino, Marcel Bogars, Martin Spring, Muge Yayla-Kullu, Murat Kristal, Patrik Jonsson, Saara Brax, Sriram Narayanan and Urban Wemmerlov.

Rui Sousa, Pedro OliveiraGuest Editors