About

Wendell Gilland is an Associate Professor of Operations and an Associate Dean of the Evening Executive MBA, Weekend Executive MBA, and Charlotte Executive MBA Programs at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School. He is an award-winning teacher specializing in operations management and topics such as supply-chain management, response-time management, and models used to guide operations decision making. His research focuses on performance improvement through the use of multiple customer priorities, designing products for multiple markets, and utilizing multiple channels of distribution. Dr. Gilland brings valuable industry experience to his academic career, having worked at Monitor Company, a consulting firm founded by Michael Porter, where he applied business strategy frameworks to strategic planning for Fortune 500 clients. He also worked at CSC Index, a firm led by Jim Champy and Michael Hammer that pioneered business process reengineering. His consulting experience spans various industries and companies, including Apple Computer, Eastman Chemicals, Intel, Caterpillar, Hoechst-Celanese, Matsushita, Nationwide Insurance, Sony, State Street Bank, and Tektronix. He holds a PhD and MBA from Stanford University and an AB from Harvard University.

Research topics

• Marketing
• Business
• Computer Science
• Industrial organization
• Geography
• Engineering
• Agricultural economics
• Natural resource economics
• Finance
• Risk analysis (engineering)
• International trade
• Medicine
• Economics

Selected publications

• Impact of productivity on cross-training configurations and optimal staffing decisions in hospitals

  RePEc: Research Papers in Economics

  preprintSenior author

  Cross-training of nursing staff has been used in hospitals to reduce labor cost, provide scheduling flexibility, and meet patient demand effectively. However, cross-trained nurses may not be as productive as regular nurses in carrying out their tasks because of a new work environment and unfamiliar protocols in the new unit. This leads to the research question: What is the impact of productivity on optimal staffing decisions (both regular and cross-trained) in a two-unit and multi-unit system. We investigate the effect of mean demand, cross-training cost, contract nurse cost, and productivity, on a two-unit, full-flexibility configuration and a three-unit, partial flexibility and chaining (minimal complete chain) configurations under centralized and decentralized decision making. Under centralized decision making, the optimal staffing and cross-training levels are determined simultaneously, while under decentralized decision making, the optimal staffing levels are determined without any knowledge of future cross-training programs. We use two-stage stochastic programming to derive closed form equations and determine the optimal number of cross-trained nurses for two units facing stochastic demand following general, continuous distributions. We find that there exists a productivity level (threshold) beyond which the optimal number of cross-trained nurses declines, as fewer cross-trained nurses are sufficient to obtain the benefit of staffing flexibility. When we account for productivity variations, chaining configuration provides on average 1.20% cost savings over partial flexibility configuration, while centralized decision making averages 1.13% cost savings over decentralized decision making.

  Publisher

• Regulatory Trade Risk and Supply Chain Strategy

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024

  • Business
  • International trade
  • Industrial organization
  PublisherDOI

• Mitigating Supply Risk: Dual Sourcing or Process Improvement?

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024

  • Computer Science
  • Business
  • Risk analysis (engineering)
  PublisherDOI

• Inventory Prepositioning for UNICEF Plumpy Nut Supply Chain

  Springer series in supply chain management · 2021

  • Business
  • Agricultural economics
  • Natural resource economics
  PublisherDOI

• Boiling Frogs: Pricing Strategies for a Manufacturer Adding a Direct Channel that Competes with the Traditional Channel

  Carolina Digital Repository (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) · 2021-09-08

  articleOpen access

  In this paper, we analyze a scenario where a manufacturer with a traditional channel partner (i.e., a retailer) opens up a direct Internet channel that is in competition with the traditional channel partner. We first consider that in order to mitigate channel conflict the manufacturer, who chooses wholesale prices as a Stackelberg leader, commits to setting a direct channel retail price that matches the retailer’s price in the traditional channel. Under this general equal-pricing strategy, we determine the effect of more specific pricing strategies on prices and profits of the manufacturer and the retailer. These specific strategies are: (1) keep wholesale prices as they were before, (2) keep retail prices as they were before, or (3) select wholesale and retail prices that optimize profits for the manufacturer. Within these strategies we identify and summarize cases when the resulting prices are lower than the pre-Internet prices, and when they are higher, relating them to the respective channel costs and to the relative convenience to the consumer of the Internet channel. We find that Strategy 3 – the specific equal-pricing strategy that optimizes profits for the manufacturer – often is also preferred by the retailer and customers (through lower prices) over the other equal-pricing strategies. We next consider the implications of the equal-pricing constraint through a numerical experiment that indicates that the equal-pricing strategy is appropriate as long as the Internet channel is significantly less convenient than the traditional channel. If the Internet channel is of comparable convenience to the traditional channel, then the manufacturer has tremendous incentive to abandon the equal-pricing policy – at great peril to the traditional retailer.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Regional Planning Model for Cancer Screening with Imperfect Patient Adherence

  Service Science · 2019-06-01 · 4 citations

  articleSenior author

  The effectiveness of cancer screening and adherence to cancer screening guidelines can be inhibited by long wait times for screening appointments. In this article, the authors develop a queueing network model of screening for a disease within a population of patients with imperfect adherence to screening guidelines to characterize the relationship between the screening request frequency rate and the wait time for screens. They first use their model to derive the capacity needed by a given system or the population size a given system can serve to guarantee a certain service level, and then analyze routine screening for average-risk patients as well as the additional capacity required for diagnostic screening and surveillance of high-risk patients. Finally, the authors perform a numerical study using national public health data for colorectal cancer (CRC) screening in the United States and provide insights for public health officials, providers, and policy makers, showing how queueing models can be applied to regional planning decisions for determining CRC screening capacity requirements.

  PublisherDOI

• Patient Access in Plastic Surgery

  Annals of Plastic Surgery · 2015-03-18 · 15 citations

  article

  INTRODUCTION: Inefficient patient throughput in a surgery practice can result in extended new patient backlogs, excessively long cycle times in the outpatient clinics, poor patient satisfaction, decreased physician productivity, and loss of potential revenue. This project assesses the efficacy of multiple throughput interventions in an academic, plastic surgery practice at a public university. METHODS: We implemented a Patient Access and Efficiency (PAcE) initiative, funded and sponsored by our health care system, to improve patient throughput in the outpatient surgery clinic. Interventions included: (1) creation of a multidisciplinary team, led by a project redesign manager, that met weekly; (2) definition of goals, metrics, and target outcomes; 3) revision of clinic templates to reflect actual demand; 4) working down patient backlog through group visits; 5) booking new patients across entire practice; 6) assigning a physician's assistant to the preoperative clinic; and 7) designating a central scheduler to coordinate flow of information. Main outcome measures included: patient satisfaction using Press-Ganey surveys; complaints reported to patient relations; time to third available appointment; size of patient backlog; monthly clinic volumes with utilization rates and supply/demand curves; "chaos" rate (cancellations plus reschedules, divided by supply, within 48 hours of booked clinic date); patient cycle times with bottleneck analysis; physician productivity measured by work Relative Value Units (wRVUs); and downstream financial effects on billing, collection, accounts receivable (A/R), and payer mix. We collected, managed, and analyzed the data prospectively, comparing the pre-PAcE period (6 months) with the PAcE period (6 months). RESULTS: The PAcE initiative resulted in multiple improvements across the entire plastic surgery practice. Patient satisfaction increased only slightly from 88.5% to 90.0%, but the quarterly number of complaints notably declined from 17 to 9. Time to third available new patient appointment dropped from 52 to 38 days, whereas the same metric for a preoperative appointment plunged from 46 to 16 days. The size of the new patient backlog fell from 169 to 110 patients, and total monthly clinic volume climbed from 574 to 766 patients. Our "chaos" rate dropped from 12.3% to 1.8%. Mean patient cycle time in the clinic decreased dramatically from 127 to 44 minutes. Mean monthly productivity for the practice increased from 2479 to 2702 RVUs. Although our collection rate did not change, days in A/R dropped from 66 to 57 days. Mean monthly charges increased from U.S. $535,213 to U.S. $583,193, and mean monthly collections improved from U.S. $181,967 to U.S. $210,987. Payer mix remained unchanged. CONCLUSIONS: Implementation of a PAcE initiative, focusing on outpatient clinic throughput, yields significant improvements in access to care, patient satisfaction as measured by complaints, physician productivity, and financial performance. An academic, university-based, plastic surgery practice can use throughput interventions to deliver timely care and to enhance financial viability.

  PublisherDOI

• Volume Flexibility in Services: The Costs and Benefits of Flexible Labor Resources

  Management Science · 2014-01-31 · 160 citations

  articleSenior author

  Organizations can create volume flexibility—the ability to increase capacity up or down to meet demand for a single service—through the use of flexible labor resources (e.g., part-time and temporary workers, as compared to full-time workers). Although organizations are increasingly using these resources, the relationship between flexible labor resources and financial performance has not been examined empirically in the service setting. We use two years of archival data from 445 stores of a large retailer to study this relationship. We hypothesize and find that increasing the labor mix of temporary or part-time workers shows an inverted U-shaped relationship with sales and profit while temporary labor mix has a U-shaped relationship with expenses. Thus, although flexible labor resources can create volume flexibility for a firm along multiple dimensions, it is possible to have too much of a good thing. This paper was accepted by Serguei Netessine, operations management.

  PublisherDOI

• Impact of productivity on cross-training configurations and optimal staffing decisions in hospitals

  European Journal of Operational Research · 2014-04-03 · 40 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Sequence Matters: Shelf‐Space Allocation under Dynamic Customer‐Driven Substitution

  Production and Operations Management · 2012-10-22 · 29 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Customers who face a stockout situation often decide to purchase a different product in the same category. We analyze the resulting dynamic substitution problem in a retail environment, where customers serve themselves from the store shelves, such that the sequence of customer arrivals affects how scarce products are allocated to customers. We consider a setting with constrained shelf space, and we study how a retailer should optimally allocate such space between substitute products. We characterize environments where the sequence of customer arrivals can have a substantial impact on profitability.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Kyle Cattani

  6 shared

• Aleda V. Roth

  Clemson University

  6 shared

• H. Sebastian Heese

  North Carolina State University

  5 shared

• Jayashankar M. Swaminathan

  5 shared

• Yimin Wang

  4 shared

• Brian Tomlin

  4 shared

• Adelina Gnanlet

  California State University, Fullerton

  3 shared

• Ann S. Marucheck

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  2 shared