Qualitative Interviewing: The Art of Hearing Data

Call centers are an increasingly important part of today's business world, employing millions of agents across the globe and serving as a primary customer-facing channel for firms in many different industries. Call centers have been a fertile area for operations management researchers in several domains, including forecasting, capacity planning, queueing, and personnel scheduling. In addition, as telecommunications and information technology have advanced over the past several years, the operational challenges faced by call center managers have become more complicated. Issues associated with human resources management, sales, and marketing have also become increasingly relevant to call center operations and associated academic research.

In this paper, we provide a survey of the recent literature on call center operations management. Along with traditional research areas, we pay special attention to new management challenges that have been caused by emerging technologies, to behavioral issues associated with both call center agents and customers, and to the interface between call center operations and sales and marketing. We identify a handful of broad themes for future investigation while also pointing out several very specific research opportunities.

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The Modern Call Center: A Multi-Disciplinary Perspective on Operations Management Research

Industry 4.0 is increasingly being promoted as the key to improving productivity, promoting economic growth and ensuring the sustainability of manufacturing companies. On the other hand, many compa...

Impacts of Industry 4.0 technologies on Lean principles

Forecasting has always been at the forefront of decision making and planning. The uncertainty that surrounds the future is both exciting and challenging, with individuals and organisations seeking to minimise risks and maximise utilities. The large number of forecasting applications calls for a diverse set of forecasting methods to tackle real-life challenges. This article provides a non-systematic review of the theory and the practice of forecasting. We provide an overview of a wide range of theoretical, state-of-the-art models, methods, principles, and approaches to prepare, produce, organise, and evaluate forecasts. We then demonstrate how such theoretical concepts are applied in a variety of real-life contexts. 
We do not claim that this review is an exhaustive list of methods and applications. However, we wish that our encyclopedic presentation will offer a point of reference for the rich work that has been undertaken over the last decades, with some key insights for the future of forecasting theory and practice. Given its encyclopedic nature, the intended mode of reading is non-linear. We offer cross-references to allow the readers to navigate through the various topics. We complement the theoretical concepts and applications covered by large lists of free or open-source software implementations and publicly-available databases.

Forecasting: theory and practice

A comprehensive survey of guaranteed-service models for multi-echelon inventory optimization

A new method to forecast intermittent demand in the presence of inventory obsolescence

With increasing components’ variety in mixed-model assembly lines, industrials show interest in kitting operations using robots. This paper deals with a hybrid kitting system that consists of a rob...

Kitting optimisation in Just-in-Time mixed-model assembly lines: assigning parts to pickers in a hybrid robot–operator kitting system

Supply chain can be a powerful source of competitive differentiation for today’s companies. For this purpose, a measurement and management system of supply chain performance is paramount. However, companies often failed in this endeavour. The present article examines this area by means of a benchmarking approach analysing eleven large companies’ performance systems and complemented by two brainstorming workshops. The responses of these companies to this need are categorized to form a framework for addressing this critical topic and as a basis for further research.

Measurement and management of supply chain performance: practices in today’s large companies

In this paper, we consider call center models with impatient customers. Our purpose is to study the effect of informing customers about their anticipated delays upon performances. First, we consider a single class call center model. We propose a method for modeling the customer reaction with regard to delays information. Thereafter, we conduct a numerical comparison between performance measures of both models with and without information. The experiments show how the expected customer satisfaction in the model with information would tip the scales in favor of that model. Second, we address the analysis to the case of a two-class call center with strict priority. Finally, some practical issues are discussed. In particular, we propose a method of delays announcement referred to as announcement by increments. We shown how this method would improve the system behavior through reducing errors approximations.

Yves Dallery

Papers

A comprehensive survey of guaranteed-service models for multi-echelon inventory optimization

A new method to forecast intermittent demand in the presence of inventory obsolescence

Kitting optimisation in Just-in-Time mixed-model assembly lines: assigning parts to pickers in a hybrid robot–operator kitting system

Measurement and management of supply chain performance: practices in today’s large companies

Modeling Call Centers with Delays Information