State-dependent service rates in make-to-order shops: an assessment by simulation

Matthias Thürer (), Mark Stevenson (), James Aitken () and Cristovao Silva ()
Additional contact information
Matthias Thürer: Jinan University (Zhuhai Campus)
Mark Stevenson: Lancaster University Management School, Lancaster University
James Aitken: Surrey Business School,University of Surrey
Cristovao Silva: CEMUC - University of Coimbra

Operations Management Research, 2020, vol. 13, issue 1, No 6, 70-84

Abstract: Abstract Most literature on make-to-order shops assumes that service rates are independent of the system state. In practice however, the service rate is often dependent on the workload level experienced by the worker. While a body of knowledge on state-dependent service rates exists, the available literature has not given sufficient attention to make-to-order shops, which are often characterized by complex routings and defined due dates, which means delivery performance becomes a major concern. This study uses simulation to assess the performance impact of state-dependent service rates under different degrees of routing directedness. We show that including information on the load upstream of a station when making service rate adjustments has the potential to improve performance compared to considering the load directly queuing at a station only, as has been the case in previous research on state-dependent service rates. Moreover, using the same threshold to trigger service rate adjustments at each station in shops with directed routings leads to higher service rates at upstream stations. This service rate imbalance can be avoided by using different triggering thresholds for upstream and downstream stations. Further, and most importantly, we show that although speeding up behavior during high load periods significantly improves performance, if worker fatigue leads to a decrease in the service rate in response to the initial increase then performance may in fact deteriorate.

Keywords: Behavioral operations management; Capacity planning; Make-to-order production; Workload control; State-dependent service rates (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s12063-020-00149-w Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:opmare:v:13:y:2020:i:1:d:10.1007_s12063-020-00149-w

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/12063

DOI: 10.1007/s12063-020-00149-w

Access Statistics for this article

Operations Management Research is currently edited by Jan Olhager and Scott Shafer

More articles in Operations Management Research from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().