Browsing by Subject "Engineering Management"
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Item An Effective Implementation of Operational Inventory Management(2010-01-16) Sellamuthu, SivakumarThis Record of Study describes the Doctor of Engineering (DE) internship experience at the Supply Chain Systems Laboratory (SCSL) at Texas A&M University. The objective of the internship was to design and develop automation tools to streamline lab operations related to inventory management projects and during that process adapt and/or extend theoretical inventory models according to real-world business complexity and data integrity problems. A holistic approach to automation was taken to satisfy both short-term and long-term needs subject to organizational constraints. A comprehensive software productivity tool was designed and developed that considerably reduced time and effort spent on non-value adding activities. This resulted in standardizing and streamlining data analysis related activities. Real-world factors that significantly influence the data analysis process were identified and incorporated into model specifications. This helped develop an operational inventory management model that accounted for business complexity and data integrity issues commonly encountered during implementation. Many organizational issues including new business strategies, human resources, administration, and project management were also addressed during the course of the internship.Item An empirical study of the relations between leadership, social support networks, task autonomy and emotions in a technical work environment(Texas A&M University, 2006-04-12) Wickliff, Tanya Verniece DugatThe world in which we live is hyper-dynamic with multiple inputs, outputs and expectations. As it relates to the fast pace of corporate America, customers want products and services within a tighter market window, with no defects and for lower costs. Stakeholders insist that managers do more with less human and financial resources yet more aggressive technological and sales goals. These realities translate into a more complex work environment in that the emotional toll of pending economic outcomes act to motivate or paralyze the very engine designed to produce the desired outcomes the employees. The body of work presented in this dissertation directly addresses the empirical relationship between the perceptions of the work context factors of leadership, task autonomy and social support networks with respect to the positive and negative emotions of the employees of the engineering firm that participated in this study. The empirical results from this research indicate that a positive and significant interrelationship does exist among the factors examined in this study. The employees studied included 249 middle to upper level managers of whom 78.7% were men and 21.3% were women. The range of years of experience for the participants varied from new hire to more than 20 years. Homogeneity of Variance tests confirms the validity of comparative analysis for the segmented data population. Multivariate statistics were used to address the four research questions. The strongest correlations occurred for the subgroups of women and non-managers with respect to the relationship of social support networks and positive emotions. Until now, there has been no empirical research linking the social support networks factor directly to emotions.