Dr. Ayham Ja’roun, Head of the Industrial Engineering Department at An-Najah University, participated in the 4th Production and Operations Management World Conference held in Amsterdam, Netherlands between July 1^st and 5^th.

The Conference was held at the University of Amsterdam and included more than 696 researchers representing more than 57 different countries. The Conference concentrated on presenting the latest results of scientific research conducted on how to build innovative systems for services and information to support industrial and service operations in light of the current global economical crisis. This crisis has created pressure on the industrial institutions to build alternative systems for running operations which would help these institutions reduce expenditures and apply austerity without negatively affecting performance.

Dr. Ja’roun participated with a paper which he co-prepared with Professor Chris Backhouse, Vice President of Loughborough University for Strategic Planning in the UK and Director of the School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering at the University.

The paper was titled “Enhancing Resources Utilization in Service Industries: an economical crisis exit strategy” in which the researcher discussed an innovative system called “Vanguard Method” which is used to designing service operations through researching its impact on the rationalization of an institution’s resources and the reduction of costs. For this purpose, two studies were conducted in the UK on two industrial companies operating in the private sector. The studies revealed notable improvement on the two companies’ ability to use the best resources and reduce costs.

In addition to this, the analysis showed that the ability to predict demand in the service departments at these two companies as well as the reduction of wastes are two major factors that are directly linked with the reduction of costs.

This conference is among the most significant events that are organized to discuss production and operations management and is organized by the European Operations Management Association (EurOMA),the Journal of Japanese Operations Management and Strategy (JOMSA) and the American Production and Operation Management Society (POMS).