Biography
Zeynep Ton is an Adjunct Associate Professor of Operations Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Ton is currently examining how organizations can design and manage their operations in a way that satisfies employees, customers, and investors simultaneously. Her earlier research focused on the critical role of store operations in retail supply chains. Ton identified operational problems at stores that reduce retail supply chain performance as well as store profits and traced these problems to the design of store processes and the management of store labor.
Her work has been published in a variety of journals, including Organization Science, Production and Operations Management, and the Harvard Business Review. In addition, she has written numerous cases that explore different approaches to managing retail stores and labor.
Prior to MIT Sloan, Ton spent seven years as an assistant professor in the Technology and Operations Management area at Harvard Business School, where she was awarded the HBS Faculty Teaching Award for teaching excellence.
Ton holds a DBA from Harvard Business School and a BS in Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering from Pennsylvania State University.
- The Good Jobs Strategy: How the Smartest Companies Invest in Employees to Lower Costs and Boost Profits. Ton, Zeynep. Boston, MA: New Harvest, 2014.
- "Why ‘Good Jobs' are Good for Retailers." Zeynep, Ton. Harvard Business Review, January 2012.
- "The Effect of Product Variety and Inventory Levels on Sales: A Longitudinal Study." Ton, Zeynep and Ananth Raman. Production and Operations Management Journal Vol. 19, No. 5 (2010): 546-560.
- "The Role of Execution in Managing Product Availability." DeHoratius, Nicole and Zeynep Ton. In Retail Supply Chain Management: Quantitative Models and Empirical Studies (International Series in Operations Research & Management Science), 53-78. New York, NY: Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, 2008.
- "The Hidden Risk in Cutting Retail Payroll." Ton, Zeynep. Harvard Business Review, March 2008.
- "Managing the Impact of Employee Turnover on Performance: The Role of Process Conformance." Zeynep, Ton and Robert S. Huckman. Organization Science Vol. 19, No. 1 (2008): 56-68.
- "The Role of Store Execution in Managing Product Availability." Ton, Zeynep. Harvard University, Graduate School of Business Administration, 2002.
- "The Achilles Heel of Supply Chain Management." Raman, Ananth, Nicole DeHoratius and Zeynep Ton. Harvard Business Review, May 2001.
- "Execution: The Missing Link in Retail Operations." Raman, Ananth, Nicole DeHoratius and Zeynep Ton. California Management Review Vol. 43, No. 3 (2001): 136-152.