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Spotlights the problem of increases in administration brought about by more widespread certification to the ISO 9000 and BS 5750 standards. Introduces a quality records management system that has been designed to solve the problem of “administrative overload”, however, it also collects and collates data in several categories to provide accessible records on different subjects. Presents two case studies of businesses that are currently using the system and examines how each benefits from the features on offer.

This paper highlights the case of David Cooper, a vulnerable adult who was financially abused. It discusses the indicators that may have alerted individuals and services to the risk of financial abuse, and the measures taken by those aware of David's potential vulnerability.

The work of the European Commission's unit to combat fraud, UCLAF, is taking full advantage of information technology in its efforts to improve the collection, collation and detection of fraud and irregular activities in the Member States. This is the first of two papers dealing with the work of UCLAF, and concentrates upon bringing the nature of the problem and the institutional and technological background to the attention of readers. The second paper will concentrate upon an interview with Per Knudsen, Director of UCLAF, in which the impact of the new technology and future developments in detection and prosecution will be the focus.

The purpose of this paper is to create a valid and fit instrument to measure school resilience, and to understand teachers’ and students’ contributions to build school resilience.

The construct of school resilience is adapted from Henderson and Milstein’s (2003) concept regarding two factors: mitigating risk factor in environment and building resilience in the environment. Senior high school teachers and students in a disaster-prone area in Indonesia were chosen as the sample using purposive sampling technique.

The results of this research are that the instrument is considered as good, valid, reliable, and fit for measuring the students’ and the teachers’ contributions in building school resilience; and the results of the confirmatory factor analysis test of the hypothesized model of school resilience of teachers and students in a disaster-prone area are in line with the empirical data. Based on the analysis of the value of the major loading factors, teachers and students show different contributions. In building school resilience for disaster mitigation, teachers begin by mitigating risk factor in the environment whereas students tend to give a priority to build resilience in the environment.

The results of this study are applicable to develop school resilience on disaster mitigation, and the instrument of the research provides a practical contribution to broader research scope, in terms of different population, school level, socio-cultural background, and disaster-prone area.

This study presents reliable instrument to measure teachers and students’ contribution in building school resilience. This study also sought to understand the different contributions shown by teachers and students in building school resilience for disaster mitigation.

THE topics of the Library Association Conference and the election of the Council of the Association naturally absorb a great deal of attention this month. To deal with the second first: there were few novelties in the nominations, and most of the suggested new Councillors are good people; so that a fairly good Council should result. The unique thing, as we imagine, about the Library Association is the number of vice‐presidents, all of whom have Council privileges. These are not elected by the members but by the Council, and by the retiring Council; they occupy a position analagous to aldermen in town councils, and are not amenable to the choice or desires of the members at large. There are enough of them, too, if they care to be active, to dominate the Council. Fortunately, good men are usually elected, but recently there has been a tendency to elect comparatively young men to what are virtually perpetual seats on the Council, simply, if one may judge from the names, because these men occupy certain library positions. It, therefore; is all the more necessary that the electors see that men who really represent the profession get the seats that remain.

To contribute to the largely unexplored issue of directly assessing the effect of service quality factors on store performance.

Service quality is decomposed into tangible elements, such as store size and personnel. A binary probit model is utilized in order to analyze the effect of various service quality factors on the probability that a store performs above average compared with its competitors.

Results indicate that the store size, product variety, location and belonging to chain, variables exert the largest positive effect upon the probability that a store experiences above‐average performance.

The present study suffers the limitation of a rather small usable questionnaires sample, albeit that the very satisfactory fit of the estimated econometric model allows for the findings to be a reliable comparison basis with future findings.

The approach proposed here can be widely used for empirical investigation in order to provide findings that may be compared across services sectors, trading places/countries and time. On the other hand, the importance of such findings to managerial decision‐making processes is evident.

The paper introduces a framework for empirically investigating the direct effect of service quality elements on store performance.

Air carriers and aircraft manufacturers are investing in technologies and strategies to reduce fuel consumption and associated emissions. This chapter reviews related issues to assess airline fuel efficiency and offers various empirical evidences from our recent work that focuses on the U.S. domestic passenger air transportation system. We begin with a general presentation of four methods (ratio-based, deterministic frontier, stochastic frontier, and data envelopment analysis) and three perspectives for assessing airline fuel efficiencies, the latter covering consideration of only mainline carrier operations, mainline–subsidiary relations, and airline routing circuity. Airline fuel efficiency results in the short run, in particular the correlations of the results from using different methods and considering different perspectives, are discussed. For the long-term efficiency, we present the development of a stochastic frontier model to investigate individual airline fuel efficiency and system overall evolution between 1990 and 2012. Insight about the association of fuel efficiency with market entry, exit, and airline mergers is also obtained.

A service system, including self-service technologies (SSTs), should facilitate actors’ value co-creation processes to enhance customer experiences. The purpose of this paper is to analyze how customers’ experiences – both favorable and unfavorable – are formed by identifying the underlying drivers when using SSTs in the context of a self-service-based system. The authors also analyze customers’ journeys, which occur before, during, and after their experience with a self-service-based system with SSTs.

An exploratory, inductive study examines customers’ self-service experiences of using an SST. By undertaking 60 customer interviews, an event-based technique identified 200 favorable and unfavorable experienced events, which consist of activities and interactions identified through open coding guided by a theoretical framework. Customers’ experiences form through social norms and rules, referred to here as schemas. The authors sorted the drivers into four main categories of schemas (informational, relational, organizational, and technological) and into three categories: before, during, and after the store visit.

The authors identified 13 favorable and unfavorable customer experience drivers that guide value co-creation and explain how the flow of value co-creation helps form customers’ experiences.

The results are limited to one self-service system context and therefore do not provide statistical generalizability. In addition, the examined company already focusses on customer experiences; other organizations may have different experience drivers.

The results explain what is important when designing an SST-based service system. Besides, managers can promote the drivers in this research as advantages customers can gain by using self-service.

This study offers original contributions by: first, classifying and analyzing 13 experience drivers in four categories grounded in customers’ schemas; and second, offering a new conceptualization that focusses on the formation of customers’ experiences during a value co-creation process – that is, the customer's journey – rather than on the outcome experience only.