Gabrielle Mae Quijano

BSA 3-1

Maintenance
Norbord (an IDCON Client) Achieves Safety Milestones
GUNTOWN, MISSISSIPPI (June 11, 2010) Norbord Inc. today celebrated the achievement of
three significant safety milestones at its oriented strand board (OSB) mill in Guntown
Mississippi.
1. Approved as an OSHA Voluntary Protection Program (VPP) Star Site, effective March 25,
2010. VPP represents OSHAs premiere recognition programs for employers and employees
who have implemented exemplary workplace safety and health systems.
2. Certification to Norbords Safety Star Status. The Safety Star program is a company-specific
program that combines OSHAs VPP Star requirements with Norbords own safety expectations.
3. Completion of one million hours without a lost time safety incident.
Every member of the Guntown team is to be recognized and thanked for their outstanding
commitment to working safely, said Barrie Shineton, President and CEO of Norbord. I believe
a strong safety culture is a good indicator that all operating systems are well-managed in a mill.
This is certainly true in Guntown and I congratulate the team on its success. We will look to
them for guidance and leadership as we work to achieve Norbord Safety Star status at all
Norbord mills worldwide.
Built by Norbord in 1995, the Guntown mill has 120 employees and annual production capacity
of 450 MMsf 3/8.
Norbord Profile
Norbord Inc. is an international producer of wood-based panels with assets of $1.0 billion,
employing approximately 1,950 people at 14 plant locations in the United States, Europe and
Canada. Norbord is one of the worlds largest producers of OSB. In addition to OSB, Norbord
manufactures particleboard, medium density fibreboard (MDF), hardwood plywood and related
value-added products. Norbord is a publicly traded company listed on the Toronto Stock
Exchange under the symbol NBD.

Supply Chain Management System

This Friday, November 11th, NC State University will host FoodCon 2016, at the Talley Student
Union. In advance of this day-long conference, I had a chance to sit down and speak with one of
the organizers, Graham Givens about this event and his studies as a graduate student in the
Jenkins MBA program in the Poole College of Management. FoodCon is a student-organized,
student-founded conference focused on the business of sustainable food. In its third year, plans
and the agenda for FoodCon 2016 are impressive already. The goal of the conference is to
engage a diverse audience of students, community members, and business professionals with
the shared interest in the sustainable food industry, as well as increase the awareness and
understanding of the sustainable food industry in North Carolina. Their efforts through FoodCon
2016 also aim to further support and grow the industry locally and throughout the country.
Givens had just returned from New Orleans, Louisiana, when we spoke after attending the Food
Distribution Research Society Annual Conference. The FDRS, founded in 1967, is an
organization dedicated to encouraging applied research in the field of food distribution, assist
with food industry education, and provide opportunities for professional development for the
food industry. The theme of this years FDRS conference was Exploring Linkages in Food
Market Innovations, so Givens research and organizing around FoodCon 2016 were extremely
relevant.
We had the opportunity to learn more at FDRS about the economic impact of local food
systems, strengthening local food linkages, and implementing various research concepts, said
Givens, who was also presenting on his graduate research. As a SCRC Supply Chain Scholar,
I have been collaborating with the North Carolina Growing Together Project, an initiative of the
Center for Environmental Farming Systems (CEFS).
A second-year full-time MBA student, Givens research is focused on whether a distributor can
facilitate the creation of a value chain in the local and sustainable food restaurant supply chain. I
asked Givens why he felt that this research was important or unique. I completed this research
by conducting interviews with numerous chefs, employees of local distributors, and farmers
throughout North Carolina, said Givens. Our research is really the first to look at the creation of
value over the course of a year, while our scope includes many of the different players across
the supply chain.

This is an exciting investigation for anyone paying attention to trends that will impact the
complex demands on supply chains, especially those around local, organic, or sustainable
farmed products all facing growing demand in the marketplace. Some of our preliminary
findings are that many chefs want to have direct relationships with farmers and not gather
information about the product through a distributor, while farmers find it difficult to hold
numerous relationships with chefs and dont really see the financial benefit of doing so, said
Givens of his research. Together with Dr. Rebecca Dunning, Project Manager for NCGT, I will
continue to observe and research this topic in the coming months. It will be interesting to see
how these dynamics can be reconciled to benefit the consumer and marketplace in a
sustainable way.
I also spoke with one of Givens classmates, second-year, full-time MBA student Lindsay
Schilleman, who also attended the Food Distribution Research Society Annual Conference.
Schillemans background as an SCRC Supply Chain Scholar and her previous research on
supply chain economic impact analysis were especially relevant in a pre-conference session
highlighting an economic impact analysis toolkit. This toolkit provides necessary steps to
complete your own assessment in a local city, county, or region of choice, said Schilleman.
The toolkit session not only provided great networking opportunities with local food enthusiasts,
guidance on completing an economic impact analysis using IMPLAN, and it also provides
advice for overcoming obstacles such as lack of reliable data in the local foods sector. It was a
good introduction for me into the realm of local foods.
I am always impressed by the ambition of our students, as well as their efforts to connect in a
real way with industry on industry terms. Conferences like this are a great example of where our
students can gain great insight into the reality of industries where they may want to work.
Hearing great outcomes from Givens and Schillemans attendance to the FDRS conference is
inspiring and leaves us looking forward to Foodcon2016 with even more excitement.
Overall, the conference provided some great information and contacts in the distribution and
economic food research field. It was interesting to hear about all the research that is currently
being completed to better understand and facilitate the growth of local food systems,
summarized Graham Givens. For me, this is particularly relevant to my future career in local
and sustainable food supply chains, and it was great to come to New Orleans and be able to
bring so much of what I learned back to our upcoming FoodCon conference.

FoodCon began at UNC-Chapel Hills Kenan-Flagler Business School in 2014, bringing together
a diverse range of speakers to discuss current trends and issues in the sustainable food
industry. In 2015, the conference moved to Dukes Fuqua School of Business and became a
partnership event between UNC, Duke and NC State. This is the first year that NC State
University will host FoodCon. Together with NetImpact, the NC State Business Sustainability
Collaborative, CEFS, and others, the SCRC is proud to sponsor this event and I recommend
you get your tickets now as there are only a few remaining. Good luck to all of our student
organizers. We look forward to learning more Friday.

Service Product Design

Cross-functional (Marketing/Operations) Product/Service Design Approaches During recent
years, market-utility-based approaches (conjoint and discrete choice analyses) have started
appearing in operations management-focused product/service design articles. For example,
Pullman and Moore (1999) presented an optimal service design model by combining a DCAbased customer preference model with capacity and demand management strategies. Moore et
al. (1999) demonstrated how results from a series of conjoint experiments could be combined
together to make effective product platform decisions, which are consistent with market needs,
and at the same time also take into account operating constraints such as
production/development costs and components sharing among products. Pullman, Goodale,
and Verma (2000) developed an integrated design of mass services by combining preferences
of customers of multiple market segments with waiting times and labor-scheduling decisions.
Assuming conjoint data, Raman and Chhajed (1995) developed an approach for simultaneously
determining product attributes, prices, and production processes; Morgan et al. (1996)
presented a mathematical programming formulation for managing marketing/manufacturing
trade-offs in product-line management; and Ramdas and Sawhney (1999) developed an
approach for multiple product-line extensions

Quality Management
Patient Satisfaction With Healthcare Services: A Critical Review
As healthcare systems shift from fee-for-service to alternate payment models, and consumers
gain access to more healthcare options, patient satisfaction is becoming increasingly important
for the financial performance of healthcare providers and for patient well-being. However,
patient satisfaction is a complex construct. To assist researchers and practitioners, the authors

provide a critical review of articles published in the Quality Management Journal (QMJ) on the
topic of patient satisfaction. The authors employ Golder, Mitra, and Moormans (2012) seminal
integrative framework of quality as a lens through which to evaluate the studies contributions
and shortcomings. They find that prior QMJ research has focused on patient satisfaction from
the perspective of the healthcare delivery system. However, less attention has been given to: 1)
understanding patients perceptions of their experiences and how these perceptions affect
satisfaction and perceived quality, and 2) identifying patients expectations of what attributes
should be provided during healthcare services. Consequently, widely used measures of
satisfaction, including the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems surveys,
may be inadequate. The authors review provides direction for researchers in developing a more
comprehensive research agenda for understanding patient satisfaction.

Location
Hospital urban and rural location Location and proximity to markets are important factors for
service organizations generally and hospitals in particular. Specifically, having an urban or rural
location is an important environmental factor for hospitals. Hospitals in rural locations have
struggled in recent years and their survival may depend on developing strategies that are
appropriate for their location (Hudson, 1995; Henry, 1994). Hospital location is important
because the largest segment of a hospitals market share comes from an area of proximity to
the hospital (Robinson and Luft, 1985). Rural hospitals sometimes have no competition in their
immediate region, so it is not clear that rural location by itself is an inherent disadvantage.
Although a majority of hospital closures in the past occurred in rural hospitals (Cleverly, 1991),
rural hospitals have increasingly become targets for purchase by hospital chains because they
are often inexpensive and have little competition in their immediate region, reducing certain
types of risk to investors (Campbell, 1997). The literature generally regards rural location as a
disadvantage for hospitals but provides limited empirical evidence that this is true. The size of
potential markets in rural areas may be an impediment because some hospitals are located
near limited populations.
It is also plausible that while market size may be adequate, lack of investment in medical
technologies severely limits the services that are offered. This research investigates the
dichotomy of urban and rural location in the context of strategy development and technology
investments.