Editorial

Citation

Moutinho, L. and Huarng, K.-H. (2012), "Editorial", Journal of Modelling in Management, Vol. 7 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/jm2.2012.29707aaa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Modelling in Management, Volume 7, Issue 1

Here we are at the beginning of the seventh year of publication of JM2. Amidst a very turbulent situation, social change, economic crisis, the “new” normal environment and reset economy, academic research has to strengthen its robustness and prove its relevance. Hopefully, JM2 is making a small contribution in this endeavour. In this issue we have a plethora of topics.

Experts’ subjective probability assessment plays an important role in many decision-making models. People also rely on expert’s subjective probability assessment in probability risk analysis. Lin and Huang investigate how expert’s overconfidence and dependence may affect the calibration of aggregated probability judgments by using various models such as Cooke’s classical model, the equal weight linear pooling method, and the best expert approach. Different results are found from these methods. Both linear pooling aggregation approaches significantly outperformed the best expert technique. The linear pooling approaches do not effectively counteract the effect of expert’s overconfidence. The second-order interaction between aggregation method and dependence shows that Cooke’s classical model is more sensitive to expert dependence. High dependence generally leads to much poorer aggregated results. The equal weight approach is more robust under different dependence levels.

Forecasting has long been a popular research topic. It would be appealing to see how to apply various forecasting methods to various problems with different performances. To forecast demand is one of the interesting topics. Bala uses K-means, a clustering technique, to capture the customer segmentation based on various attributes as an input to the demand forecasting in a retail store. The proposed model has been applied for forecasting demands of eight SKUs for grocery items in a supermarket. The proposed forecasting model with the inventory replenishment system results in the reduction of inventory level and increase in customer service level. Hence, the proposed model improves the inventory performance.

Organizations apply various methodologies such as concurrent engineering, lean product development (LPD)/lean new product development, agile product development/agile new product development, etc. to improve their current product development (PD) process. However, how an organization chooses proper methodology becomes a critical issue. Gurumurthy and Kodali apply one of the most commonly used multi-attribute decision-making models, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to model the above problem by a hypothetical case situation. Various attributes for selecting a suitable PD methodology were identified. The empirical results show that LPD is a better alternative for the case situation under consideration.

Repairable inventory theory is related to design inventory system for repaired and reuse items. These repairable inventory systems are common in the military. Measuring the performance of these systems is very critical. Most performance measurement in the hypothetical base model is undertaken through the average lead-time for each of the echelons. Garg and Deshmukh point out the shortcomings of the current systems and attempt to explore issues in the design of performance measurement system for multi echelon repair inventory systems based on balanced scorecard (BSC) approach for non-profit organizations.

Over the last two decades, literature has identified a number of frameworks aimed at facilitating health structures both in improving quality and in designing and implementing performance measurement systems, such as continuous quality improvement or the BSC. The conceptual scheme of BSC, which implements a balanced set of different types of indicators, has gained huge popularity as an effective theoretical support tool in decisions regarding the multi-dimensionality of evaluation processes, the identification of individual and group targets, as well as in the application of strategies concerning operational and organizational activities.

The BSC is typically applied by organizations and industries within the strategic management area. In the last decade however, the BSC approach has also been introduced in the Health sector, under the guidelines of accredited international institutions such as the (WHO, 2000) and OECD (Hurst, 2000), establishing concrete requirements designed to implement, sustain and improve micro-economic efficiency and macro-economic sustainability in national health systems. Lovaglio and Vittadini utilise the BSC framework advocated by Kaplan and Norton. Performance indicators were developed in four key performance areas: clinical process, patient satisfaction, human capital and financial performance.

Success of JM2 as a scholarly research outlet is down to your continued interest and contributions. The whole editorial team is grateful to you.

Luiz Moutinho, Kun-Huang Huarng