International audienceThis study addresses the challenges of finding and implementing profitable energy efficiency (EE) projects, a critical foundation for sustainable operations. We focus on manufacturing enterprises, but many of our findings apply also to the back office of service operations. Our starting point is that, in nearly every industrial enterprise, there are many profitable EE projects that could be implemented but are not. An oft-cited hindrance to implementation is the lack of an internal management framework in which to find, value, and execute these projects. Using a conceptual approach, we rely on proven sustainable operations tools to develop such a framework. We identify three major value drivers of EE projects: savings intensity, 'green' image, and project complexity. We then describe a framework for understanding the context of EE projects in industry, with an underlying analytic foundation in optimal portfolio analysis. A case study of a large manufacturing site is used to illustrate emerging best practices-based on Kaizen management principles-for integrating EE project management with operations, engineering, and strategy

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W e examine the effect of a hospital's objective (i.e., non-profit vs. for-profit) in hospital markets for elective care.Using game-theoretic analysis and queueing models to capture the operational performance of hospitals, we compare the equilibrium behavior of three market settings in terms of such criteria as waiting times and patient costs from waiting and hospital payments. In the first setting, a monopoly, patients are served exclusively by a single non-profit hospital; in the second, a homogeneous duopoly, patients are served by two competing non-profit hospitals. In our third setting, a heterogeneous duopoly, the market is served by one non-profit hospital and one for-profit hospital. A non-profit hospital provides free care to patients, although they may have to wait; for-profit hospitals charge a fee to provide care with minimal waiting. A comparison between the monopolistic and each of the duopolistic settings reveals that the introduction of competition can hamper a hospital's ability to attain economies of scale and can also increase waiting times. Moreover, the presence of a for-profit sector may be desirable only when the hospital market is sufficiently competitive. A comparison across the duopolistic settings indicates that the choice between homogeneous and heterogeneous competition depends on the patients' willingness to wait before receiving care and the reimbursement level of the non-profit sector. When the public funder is not financially constrained, the presence of a for-profit sector may allow the funder to lower both the financial costs of providing coverage and the total costs to patients. Finally, our analysis suggests that the public funder should exercise caution when using policy tools that support the for-profit sector-for example, patient subsidies -because such tools may increase patient costs in the long run; it might be preferable to raise the non-profit sector's level of reimbursement.