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Managing Volunteer Engagement Non-profit organizations that provide food, shelter, and other services to people in need, rely on volunteers to deliver their services. Unlike paid labor, non-profit organizations have less control over unpaid volunteers' schedules, efforts, and reliability. However, these organizations can invest in volunteer engagement activities to strive for a steady and adequate supply of volunteer labor. The paper, "A Dynamic Model for Managing Volunteer Engagement", models the volunteer management process. The paper derives a dynamic control policy that judiciously uses the non-profit's resources for volunteer engagement activities depending on explicit congestion thresholds, thereby lowering the overall cost of the non-profit operation. Nonprofit organizations that provide food, shelter, and other services to people in need, rely on volunteers to deliver their services. Unlike paid labor, nonprofit organizations have less control over unpaid volunteers' schedules, efforts, and reliability. However, these organizations can invest in volunteer engagement activities to ensure a steady and adequate supply of volunteer labor. We study a key operational question of how a nonprofit organization can manage its volunteer workforce capacity to ensure consistent provision of services. In particular, we formulate a multiclass queueing network model to characterize the optimal engagement activities for the nonprofit organization to minimize the costs of enhancing volunteer engagement, while maximizing productive work done by volunteers. Because this problem appears intractable, we formulate an approximating Brownian control problem in the heavy traffic limit and study the dynamic control of that system. Our solution is a nested threshold policy with explicit congestion thresholds that indicate when the nonprofit should optimally pursue various types of volunteer engagement activities. A numerical example calibrated using data from a large food bank shows that our dynamic policy for deploying engagement activities can significantly reduce the food bank's total annual cost of its volunteer operations while still maintaining almost the same level of social impact. This improvement in performance does not require any additional resources—it only requires that the food bank strategically deploy its engagement activities based on the number of volunteers signed up to work volunteer shifts. Supplemental Material: The e-companion is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.2021.0419. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A waste-to-energy firm that recycles organic waste with energy recovery performs two environmentally beneficial functions: it diverts waste from landfills and it produces renewable energy. At the same time, the [...]

This paper studies how a firm can create and capture value by converting a waste stream into a useful and saleable by-product (i.e., implementing by-product synergy (BPS)). We show that [...]

To meet the growing demand for sustainably produced products, firms must be able to source sustainably produced parts from their suppliers. In this study, we analyze how a buyer (manufacturer or retailer) can use sourcing policies to influence their suppliers to adopt sustainable processes that can meet certain sustainability criteria. We study two sustainable sourcing policies commonly observed in practice, which influence suppliers' process decisions by committing to offer sustainable products. Under a Sustainable Preferred policy, a buyer commits to offering a sustainable product if she can source sustainably produced parts from the supplier, but will otherwise offer a conventional product. In contrast, under a Sustainable Required sourcing policy, a buyer will only offer a sustainable product, and therefore will only source from the supplier if he has adopted a sustainable process. Our results offer insights for managers by identifying how these sustainable sourcing policies influence upstream suppliers to switch to a sustainable process, and how this affects the ability of a downstream buyer to offer a sustainable product. We find that when the buyer sources from a sole supplier, the Preferred policy can deter the supplier from switching as compared to when the buyer remains noncommittal. However, only the Required policy can induce the supplier to switch. In contrast, when a buyer has multiple suppliers, the Preferred policy does not deter the supplier, but can induce him to switch to a sustainable process, similar to the Required policy. Accordingly, our results suggest that to induce the supplier to switch to a sustainable process, a buyer should adopt a Required policy when sourcing from a sole supplier, but utilize a Preferred policy when there are multiple suppliers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Should a firm develop a formal knowledge system? How can firms leverage knowledge management systems to optimally leverage employee-generated know-how? How should knowledge be managed, particularly in terms of what [...]

ABSTRACT The fresh produce supply chain is characterized by large (mainstream) farms that are located far from consumers, and capacity-constrained (local) farms that are located close to the consumer. In this setting, we study: (i) how leadtime and capacity asymmetry between mainstream and local farms affect a retail grocer's order policy for fresh produce, and (ii) how various operational mechanisms can increase the amount sourced from local farms. We show that this supply chain structure is disadvantageous for local suppliers (farms) because it induces the retailer to treat the local supply as a de facto responsive supply without paying a premium for the responsiveness. This disadvantage is exacerbated when the retailer's objective is to achieve a high service level. We study three mechanisms that can improve conditions for local farms: working with an intermediary, backhauling, and a retail order policy, purchase guarantee, that explicitly supports local farms. The intermediary and backhauling mechanisms help the local farm by making local supply more attractive to the retailer, inducing her to order more locally sourced produce. The intermediary reduces the retailer's overstock and stockout costs whereas backhauling increases the average margin. The purchase guarantee order policy helps local farms at the expense of retail profit. However, we show that purchase guarantee and backhauling are complementary mechanisms that together can benefit the retailer and local farms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]