The 20th International EurOMA Conference

Citation

Fynes, B. and Coughlan, P. (2015), "The 20th International EurOMA Conference", International Journal of Operations & Production Management, Vol. 35 No. 9. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJOPM-07-2015-0418

The 20th International EurOMA Conference

Article Type: Editorial From: International Journal of Operations & Production Management, Volume 35, Issue 9

The 20th International EurOMA Conference in Dublin represented a milestone in the Association’s history, celebrating the 20th birthday of the Conference and returning to Dublin for the second time. The Conference was a festival of events with a Doctoral Seminar, a Publishing Workshop and a Young Scholars Workshop preceding the parallel sessions. A special highlight was the 20th birthday cake cutting by EurOMA’s founding fathers, Professor Chris Voss and Professor Christer Karlsson at the Welcome Reception in the Quinn School. It was hosted jointly by Ireland’s two leading universities: University College Dublin and Trinity College Dublin.

Following two years of intense preparations, the Conference hosted a record EurOMA audience of 508 delegates from 35 countries across all five continents. The conference theme explored how Operations Management (OM) is central to our economic, social and cultural recovery. The main motivation was to reinforce the message that OM has a central role to play in economic and, indeed, social recovery. Growth and development require new and innovative approaches to customer service, productivity and improvement in a diverse range of settings. Decision areas include product and service development, supply network design, capacity management and process technology implementation. The Conference illustrated the new and innovative ways in which OM researchers are inquiring into and intervening in the many choices available to commercial, social and public organisations, and to their managers.

The Call for Papers attracted 623 abstracts. Using a double-blind review process, the 121 members of the Scientific Committee reviewed the abstracts and provided timely feedback to the authors. During the course of the Conference some 400 papers were presented in 137 sessions in a fully packed Conference Programme. The most popular themes were Sustainability in Operations/Supply chain management, Supply chain management, Innovation, Service operations and Healthcare operations management. The overall thematic distribution of the papers was as follows.

Sustainability in operations and supply chain management (48), Supply chain management (39), Healthcare operations management (27), Innovation and product/service development (24), Managing inter-firm relationships (21), Empirical research in operations management (18), Operations strategy (17), Service operations Management (15), Global operations and strategic sourcing (15), Lean and agile operations Management (15), Total quality management (12), Servitisation (12), Risk management and resilience (12), Humanitarian operations (9), Behavioural operations management (9), Logistics management (9), Performance management and measurement (9), Managing change in operations (9), Purchasing and procurement (9), e-Business and operations (6), Information systems in operations (6), Operations improvement and recovery (6), Operations in the public sector (6), Managing the operations interface (6), Teaching operations management (4), Operations planning (3), Retail operations management (3), Supply network design (3), Sales and operations planning (3), Inventory management (3), Project management (3), Maintenance (3), Mass customisation (3), Operations management and regional economies (3), Technology management (3) and Operations planning/scheduling (3).

The special issue

Following initial consultation with the IJOPM Editorial Team, invitations were issued to the finalists of the Chris Voss and Harry Boer Best Paper Awards to submit a full paper for the Conference special issue of IJOPM. In addition, following discussion with Special Session Chairs, Matthias Holweg (Theory in OM) and Louis Brennan (Next Generation Manufacturing), we invited both Chairs to submit papers from these sessions. In the event, 13 papers were submitted for review and eight are being published. Six of the eight papers are in this special issue of the journal; the two remaining papers will be included in a later regular issue. We congratulate all of the authors on their scholarly achievement.

The reviewers were drawn from the EurOMA community. Their thoughtful, challenging and timely work was central to the development by the authors of the key contributions in their papers and to the overall quality of special issue. We would like to take this opportunity to thank the colleagues who joined us in the conference organising committee in Dublin: Pär Åhlström, Eamonn Ambrose, Harry Boer, Louis Brennan, Sean de Burca, Katrin Dreyer, Vincent Hargaden, Ruth Kearney, Marie Koulikoff-Souviron, Donna Marshall and Mark Pagell.

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): Eamonn Ambrose, Harry Boer, Stephen Brown, Janet Godsell, Paul Humphreys, Donna Marshall, Andrew Taylor and Chris Voss. Finally, we would also like to thank the following reviewers for their help in compiling this special issue (in alphabetical order): Pär Åhlström, Eamonn Ambrose, Alistair Brandon-Jones, Federico Caniato, Paul Childerhouse, Ben Clegg, David Coghlan, Krisztina Demeter, Iskra Dukovska-Popovska, Cipriano Forza, Vincent Hargaden, Juliana Hsuan, István Jenei, Marie Koulikoff-Souviron, Kepa Mendibil, Steve New, Kostas Selviaridis, Andrew Taylor, Taco van der Vaart, Chris Voss and Finn Wynstra.

The papers

The theme of the Conference was underpinned by over 40 sub-themes. The papers included in the special issue reflect some of this depth and diversity, as summarised in Table I.

Table I. Summary of papers in the special issue

If OM is to fulfil its role of contributing to the recovery, it needs to combine both theory and practice in a creative and rigorous way. The first paper presents six short essays that explore the role and use of theory in management research, and specifically ask what is a good or meaningful contribution to theory. Boer, Holweg, Kilduff, Pagell, Schmenner and Voss comment on the current state of theory in OM, the type of theories we have in OM, the role of theory in increasing our general understanding of OM problems, whether we can borrow theories from other fields or actually have theory “of our own”, the different ways in which a contribution to theory can be made, and how to construct a theoretical argument. They argue that theory is fundamental to OM research, but that it is not the inevitable starting point; discovery and observation are equally important and often neglected avenues to contributing to theory. Also, there is no one right way to making a contribution, yet consistency between ontology, epistemology and claimed contribution is what matters. The authors further argue that the choice of theory is critical, as a common mistake is trying to contribute to high-level theories borrowed from other fields. Finally, they recommend using theory parsimoniously, yet with confidence.

If manufacturing is part of the recovery today, does it have a future? The past three decades have seen the transformation of manufacturing involving its global dispersion and fragmentation. In their paper Brennan, Ferdows, Godsell, Golini, Keegan, Kinkel, Singh Srai and Taylor address the major emerging themes that may shape how manufacturing is configured around the world and conclude that most of them are still in their initial stages and are not likely to create a radical shift in the next few years. The importance of a focus on the extended manufacturing network is established. The need for customer engagement and a forward looking approach that extends to the immediate customer and beyond emerges as a consistent feature across the different perspectives presented in the paper. There is both the potential and need for the adoption of innovative business models on the part of manufacturers.

Operations do not exist in isolation and, so, interfaces are key. Zhang, Zhao, Lyles and Guo investigate the effects of a manufacturer’s absorptive capacity (AC) on its mass customisation capability (MCC). They conceptualise AC within the supply chain context as four processes: knowledge acquisition from customers, knowledge acquisition from suppliers, knowledge assimilation, and knowledge application. They then propose and empirically test a model on the relationships among AC processes and MCC using structural equation modelling and data collected from 276 manufacturing firms in China. This study provides empirical evidence of the effects of AC processes on MCC. It also indicates the relationships among AC processes. Moreover, it reveals the mechanisms through which knowledge sourced from customers and suppliers contributes to MCC development, and demonstrates the importance of internal knowledge management practices in exploiting knowledge from supply chain partners. Furthermore, it provides guidelines for executives to decide how to manage supply chain knowledge and devote their efforts and resources in absorbing new knowledge for MCC development.

Operations are organised globally and the scope of the recovery has been signalled through the growth in purchasing. The interest in global purchasing has increased significantly in recent years, but the impact on product innovation is not well understood. The paper by Von Haartman and Bengtsson empirically analyses the impact of global purchasing on product innovation sourced from suppliers, while taking into account how firms integrate their suppliers. Based on the International Purchasing Survey, a large-scale survey of purchasing managers in 679 firms in Europe and North America, the paper shows that global purchasing has no direct impact on product innovation performance. However, supplier integration is more strongly associated with product innovation performance for firms purchasing globally compared to firms purchasing regionally.

The recovery is not an arrival point but the beginning of the next stage of economic, social and cultural development. Here, innovation is key to doing the right things right. Milewski, Fernandes and Mount address the issue of how large manufacturing companies develop and implement new processes along the different stages of the innovation lifecycle. Building on empirical evidence from five large manufacturing companies, they found that mutual adaptation, technological change, organisational change, and systemic impact management across the stages of the innovation life cycle and identify patterns of asymmetric adaptation.

OM involves people as sentient contributors to activities, especially in a recovery. Longoni and Cagliano investigate how cross-functional executive involvement and worker involvement, in the formulation and implementation of operations strategy, supports the strategic alignment of lean manufacturing and sustainability. Using evidence from ten cross-industry case studies, they found that cross-functional executive involvement and worker involvement positively affect the strategic alignment of the lean manufacturing statement and bundles with environmental and social goals and practices.

The scope of OM concerns extend into service design and delivery, activities susceptible to the vagaries that come with an uncertain environment. Durugbo and Ekoyuncu explore the evolution of industrial service uncertainties and the approaches for mitigating these uncertainties and how the interplay of potential uncertainties due to service operation challenges shapes the decisiveness of product-centric businesses. They conducted three in-depth cases in the aerospace industry and found that there is a need for after market-oriented organisation, audit-oriented governance, relationship-oriented intelligence and lifecycle-oriented contracts in order to mitigate industrial service uncertainty.

The nature of service offerings is complex and begs a systematic way in which productive design and delivery are possible. Broekhuis, Van Der Laan, Van Offenbeek and Ahaus examine how services are being decomposed and how the modularization aim and the routineness of the service(s) involved may link to different decomposition logics. They conducted a systematic literature search that generated a variety of modularity cases which they then analysed. They found that single-level decomposition logics seem to be primarily applied in non-routine service offerings whereas the multilevel ones are mainly applied in routine service offerings and thus enable an enhanced application of the modularity concept in services.

OM is central to our economic, social and cultural recovery. It is also a domain which is rich in research opportunity. The EurOMA 2013 Conference and the special issue which has emerged from it are testament to that role. We finish with a special thank you to Stephen Brown, Pamela Danese and Kay Wilkinson, the Editorial team at IJOPM.

Professor Brian Fynes, School of Business, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

Professor Paul Coughlan, School of Business, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland