OR Insight

This article provides an overview of the knowledge management challenges for practitioners and examines the extent to which existing information systems and operational research modelling approaches cater for the practice of knowledge management. It concludes that the current focus of modelling approaches on problem solving needs to be extended in order to deal with the human and social aspects of practice. It provides an example of how this can be done by using Checkland's soft systems methodology in conjunction with Merali's Cognitive Congruence Framework.

Organizations around the world are struggling to come to grips with four major issues: intensifying global competition, a changing workforce, changing rules of competition, and new technology. The one of these that appears to be having the greatest impact on OR is new technology.

I have been responsible for starting three successful OR groups, but comment here will be restricted to my first venture. Although this was a few decades ago, the experience may be interesting and possibly even helpful to today's practitioners. Some at least of the requirements are still relevant.

The task of examination timetabling at universities is becoming more difficult as student numbers rise and student choice widens. Many universities are turning to computerised scheduling packages, and this article outlines various stages of the computerisation of the examination process at Swansea University. The practical issues involved in designing and implementing a system based on simulated annealing are addressed and the benefits and problems of the system are discussed.

Failed first-time home deliveries may result in carrier's repeated delivery journeys and also consumer's trips to retrieve their failed deliveries from the carrier's depot. Home shopping is rapidly becoming a significant generator of logistics activity, and efforts are being devoted to identify the transport and environmental implications of those failed home deliveries. The attended collection/delivery point (CDP) concept is one solution to deal with the first-time delivery failures, using a variety of locations (for example, convenience stores, post offices) as alternative addresses to receive deliveries. Using two databases of households from across Winchester and West Sussex (UK), this article confirms that certain benefits might accrue from using networks of Local Collect post offices, supermarkets and railway stations as CDPs, compared with the traditional delivery method where the carrier may make several redelivery attempts to the home, with the customer making a personal trip to the carrier's depot in the event that these attempts also fail.