Professor Gokce Esendurang will be presenting:
"Manufacturing as a Service"
Co-authors: Alok Chaturvedi, Burcu Tan, Gaurav Nanda
Abstract: In this paper, we introduce and analyze the Manufacturing as a Service (MaaS) concept designed to address the lack of employment opportunities in underdeveloped parts of the world. The MaaS framework we study is motivated by Saksham, a project implemented in Jharkhand in India that aims to bring mobile manufacturing environments -- called Factories on Wheels (FOWs)-- to low-income communities. Under this project, community members form a labor firm in each community. Then, these labor firms have an opportunity to rent an FOW to make and sell products and achieve economic growth and stability. We model the interaction between the social planner, labor firms, and FOWs. We compare two operating modes: Under an autonomous mode, the FOW decides how much to charge as rent, and each labor firm decides how long to rent the FOW and how much wage to pay its employees. Alternatively, under a centralized mode, the social planner makes decisions to maximize the total welfare, which is the sum of the FOW and labor firm profits and the employee surplus. We compare the two operating modes and aim to understand the implications of choosing an autonomous mode over a centralized one. While an autonomous mode gives the labor firms and FOWs self-government opportunities, it naturally results in lower welfare. We identify the situations under which this welfare gap is minimal. Further, we find that although the autonomous mode yields a lower total welfare, it may lead to a higher employee surplus than that under a centralized mode. On the other hand, our results show that a centralized mode may yield a higher total profit for the firms.
Biography: Professor Gokce Esenduran is an Associate Professor in Operations Management at Krannert School of Management, Purdue University. She received her PhD in Operations Management from Kenan-Flagler Business School, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Before joining Purdue, she was an associate professor of operations management at the Ohio State University. Her current research primarily focuses on sustainable operations. Whether driven by regulations or taken voluntarily, firms' true sustainability impact is shaped by the interactions of supply chain members, market competition, and consumer preferences. She studies the interplay between these factors and their effect on firms’ sustainability performance
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