Food hubs have seen substantial growth in the past few decades but the overall operational efficiency and effectiveness is a concern for the managers of these facilities. The experiment designed consisted of 60 participants divided into four treatment groups that simulated tasks completed at food hubs. The experiment designed was a 2x2 factorial design and each treatment group had five teams with three members. The treatment groups had all combinations of the two independent variables ‘training’ and ‘process improvement’ and the impact these factors made on time to pack (TP), time to stack (TS), number of errors while stacking (ES), and number of errors while packing (EP) were investigated. The results show that for TS, TP, and ES, both training and process improvement significantly increased the food hub’s efficiency. For EP, process improvement significantly reduced errors while training had less impact.
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/richard_stone/24/
This is a manuscript of a proceeding published as Stone, Richard T., Colten Fales, Dean Jose, Thomas Schnieders, Caroline Krejci, Zhonglun Wang, Drew Schweiger, and Christopher Hernandez. "The Impact of Scientific Management Principles on Food Hub." In Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting 62, no. 1 (2018): 1454-1458. DOI: 10.1177%2F1541931218621330. Posted with permission.