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Companies with an effective logistics strategy can find significant opportunities in the new European landscape.

Customer demands on manufacturers and retailers are increasing relentlessly. Spurred by the Internet's “click it and get it” value proposition, a growing number of consumers and business buyers want customized products, convenient ordering, and rapid fulfillment. Delivering against these rising expectations is not easy, however. This is especially true for traditional or incumbent companies that have additional cultural obstacles to overcome. Companies have mastered the challenges of speed, convenience, and reliability and are gaining competitive advantage.

The traditional supply chain starts with components, which are assembled and pushed through distribution channels in the hope that someone will buy them. A value net, by contrast, starts with customer priorities and aligns the company operations and supplier relationships to satisfy real customer demand. Value flows to the customer, who receives a faster, more reliable, convenient, and tailored offering. Value flows to the suppliers, who have a more accurate reading of real demand, and value flows to the company managing the network, in the form of a differentiated competitive position, which generates greater profits and market capitalization.

The supply chain can and should be a strategic differentiator, but too many companies are missing the strategic opportunities it offers.

Resurgent interest in the life and work of the Italian Cambridge economist Piero Sraffa is leading to New Directions in Sraffa Scholarship. This chapter introduces readers to some of these developments. First and perhaps foremost is the fact that as of September 2016 Sraffa’s archival material has been uploaded onto the website of the Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge University, as digital colour images; this chapter introduces readers to the history of these events. This history provides sharp relief on the extant debates over the role of the archival material in leading to the final publication of Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, and readers are provided a brief sketch of these matters. The varied nature of Sraffa scholarship is demonstrated by the different aspects of Sraffa’s intellectual legacy which are developed and discussed in the various entries of our Symposium. The conclusion is reached that we are on the cusp of an exciting phase change of tremendous potential in Sraffa scholarship.

The purpose of this research is to argue that a number of organisations focused their efforts on developing sophisticated supply chains such that their managerial focus became myopic, and many lost sight of their markets and their customers, missing the fact that the customers, failing to realise their expectations, switched their loyalties. Thus it is argued here that it is essential to understand the demand chain prior to making supply chain structure decisions.

The first step is to reinforce the point that both supply chain management and demand chain management are about process management. The second step is to re‐validate the notion of the demand chain as a separate entity from the supply chain.

It is interesting to postulate that the differences between the demand chain‐led organization and the supply chain‐led organisation are based on emphasis. The paper attempts to make this point by suggesting that, while supply chain management is to a degree customer‐focused, the emphasis is on efficiency. Management concern is cost‐led and attempts to provide an adequate level of service. The danger here is that customers may be “aggregated” or fitted into categories that appear to be nearly relevant. Thus the link between supplier relationship management and customer relationship management is tenuous. By contrast the demand chain approach is a broader view of relationship management, taking a view that supplier and customer relationship management overlap, and that effective management is to integrate the two. If this is achieved, it results in bringing often conflicting objectives more closely together.

Contrasting the demand chain approach as a broader view of relationship management, and taking the view that effective management is to integrate the two. The view is that, if this is achieved, it results in bringing often conflicting objectives more closely together. Clearly more research is needed before such a view can be held with conviction.

This paper argues that a number of organisations focused their efforts on developing sophisticated supply chains such that their managerial focus became myopic, and many lost sight of their markets and their customers, missing the fact that the customers, failing to realise their expectations, switched their loyalties.

It is argued here that it is essential to understand the demand chain prior to making supply chain structure decisions.

This paper aims to perform an exhaustive revision of relevant and recent related studies, which reveals that both extraction methods are currently used to analyze credibility on Twitter. Thus, there is clear evidence of the need of having different options to extract different data for this purpose. Nevertheless, none of these studies perform a comparative evaluation of both extraction techniques. Moreover, the authors extend a previous comparison, which uses a recent developed framework that offers both alternates of data extraction and implements a previously proposed credibility model, by adding a qualitative evaluation and a Twitter-Application Programming Interface (API) performance analysis from different locations.

As one of the most popular social platforms, Twitter has been the focus of recent research aimed at analyzing the credibility of the shared information. To do so, several proposals use either Twitter API or Web scraping to extract the data to perform the analysis. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations are performed to discover the advantages and disadvantages of both extraction methods.

The study demonstrates the differences in terms of accuracy and efficiency of both extraction methods and gives relevance to much more problems related to this area to pursue true transparency and legitimacy of information on the Web.

Results report that some Twitter attributes cannot be retrieved by Web scraping. Both methods produce identical credibility values when a robust normalization process is applied to the text (i.e. tweet). Moreover, concerning the time performance, Web scraping is faster than Twitter API and it is more flexible in terms of obtaining data; however, Web scraping is very sensitive to website changes. Additionally, the response time of the Twitter API is proportional to the distance from the central server at San Francisco.

Porter's value chain has been a keystone of strategic analysis. However, because of processes associated with economic globalization: outsourcing, brand marketing and “knowledge economy” phenomena, value drivers have changed dramatically over the last 20 years. The added‐value chain provides an expanded mental model for practitioners and academics to develop and communicate strategies for value creation.

The expanded set of activities in the added‐value chain was developed based on experience using the value chain in real world situations and analyzing leading business and strategy models that are commonly used by firms today.

The added‐value chain incorporates new sources of value creation such as the firm's brand, reputation and “social capital” or goodwill in addition to profit margin. The Added‐Value Chain also adds three primary activities.

Managers performing value‐chain analysis need to take into account newly important business drivers.

Expanding the value chain ensures that no potential strategic activity is forgotten and no opportunity for enhancing value is over‐looked.