Search results

While researchers across the board have identified significant productivity improvements, and substantial improvements in consumer surplus using information technology in enterprises, there has been little evidence of significant positive impact to sustainable business profitability. While IT systems so far have provided operational benefits and enhanced consumer experience, unless managers take care to go beyond strategic alignment of their information infrastructure investments to ensure architectural flexibility and constantly optimize IT delivery efficiency, they will begin to see diminishing returns from IT as the pace of business changes increases.

After completing the case study, the students will be able to explore, create and capture the dilemmas of a platform strategy; compare, contrast and configure strategies for successful platform adoption; develop fitting configurations for marketplace design; and use temple framework to evaluate the dilemma of the element of time (do it sooner, delay for later or dismiss forever) in launching a new marketplace.

Shoppre was a parcel-forwarding firm established in 2017. In a short period, Shoppre turned out to be one of the best parcel forwarding and cross-border commerce companies in India, thanks to the first-mover advantage it enjoyed. Shoppre had offerings of shopping and shipping of cross-border e-commerce. As a new firm looking forward to increasing its market power, Shoppre faced the dilemma of whether to launch the marketplace, and if yes, whether to do it soon or delay it for the future. There was also confusion in the marketplace’s design and implementation. Nikkitha Shankar’s (she/her) worry was that if Shoppre did not decide quickly on this, there would be possible crises in managing the partners and their financial performance. Shankar was brainstorming the issues with the founding partner and was gauging the dimensions. This case study presented new marketplaces’ dilemmas along with managing sellers, customers, markets, finance, logistics and digital transformation.

The case study is suitable for undergraduate- and graduate-level students pursuing courses in business programmes and senior management professionals participating in executive education programmes. The case study will also fit well for courses such as the “Platform strategy: building and thriving in a vibrant ecosystem” course [1], digital business models [2] and digital business strategy [3].

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 11: Strategy.

The building design processes today are complex, involving many disciplines and issues like collaboration, concurrency and collocation. Several studies have focused on understanding and modeling formal information exchange in these processes. Few past studies have also identified the importance of informal information exchanges in the design process and proposed passive solutions for facilitating this exchange. The purpose of this paper is to term the informal information as ad hoc information and explores if components of ad hoc information exchanges can be actively managed.

An MDM-based framework integrating product, process and people dependencies is proposed and a prototype platform to implement this framework is developed. The demonstration on the usage of this platform to identify information paths during collaboration and hence manage ad hoc information exchanges is presented through an example problem.

Based on the effectiveness of the prototype platform in identifying information paths for design queries, it is concluded that the proposed framework is useful for actively managing some components of ad hoc information exchange.

This research enables the design manager/participants to make a more informed decision on requesting and releasing design information.

Reckons the success of technology initiatives depends on whether the person responsible for implementation has the required incentives, authority and credibility required in the organization. Uses figures to aid in explanation of dimensions in IT investments, responsibility and budget distribution. Concludes IT people must understand business strategy has been beaten to death as nowadays business people often have to understand the implications of technology for their business.

As the engineering design process becomes increasingly complex, multidisciplinary teams need to work together, integrating diverse expertise across a range of disciplinary models. Where changes arise, these design teams often find it difficult to handle these design changes due to the complexity and interdependencies inherent in engineering systems. This paper aims to develop an innovative approach to clarifying system interdependencies and predicting the design change propagation at the asset level in complex engineering systems based on the digital-twin-driven design structure matrix (DSM).

The paper first defines the digital-twin-driven DSM in terms of elements and interdependencies, where the authors have defined three types of interdependency, namely, geospatial, physical and logical, at the asset level. The digital twin model was then used to generate the large-scale DSMs of complex engineering systems. The cluster analysis was further conducted based on the improved Idicula–Gutierrez–Thebeau algorithm (IGTA-Plus) to decompose such DSMs into modules for the convenience and efficiency of predicting design change propagation. Finally, a design change propagation prediction method based on the digital-twin-driven DSM has been developed by integrating the change prediction method (CPM), a load-capacity model and fuzzy linguistics. A section of an infrastructure mega-project in London was selected as a case study to illustrate and validate the developed approach.

The digital-twin-driven DSM has been formally defined by the spatial algebra and Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) schema. Based on the definitions, an innovative approach has been further developed to (1) automatically generate a digital-twin-driven DSM through the use of IFC files, (2) to decompose these large-scale DSMs into modules through the use of IGTA-Plus and (3) predict the design change propagation by integrating a digital-twin-driven DSM, CPM, a load-capacity model and fuzzy linguistics. From the case study, the results showed that the developed approach can help designers to predict and manage design changes quantitatively and conveniently.

This research contributes to a new perspective of the DSM and digital twin for design change management and can be beneficial to assist designers in making reasonable decisions when changing the designs of complex engineering systems.

The purpose of this study is to introduce and evaluate the effect of critical success factors (CSF) in rescue operations in burning buildings by calculating the partial least squares structural equation modeling of PLS-SEM.

To do this, success criteria (SC) and CSF in the literature, which are related to the topic, articles, standards and relevant books, will be identified and then evaluated through the extended PLS-SEM model.

The results show that technological factors, awareness, resources and safety play an effective role in successful performance management in fire accidents.

Appropriate use of these factors will promote incident management and decrease casualties and financial loss in the event of accidents.

Fire-fighting is of great importance, especially in tall and complex buildings. In recent years, extended studies have been carried out regarding fire accident management in terms of CSFs in the category of rescue and firefighting. However, attention has not been paid to the relation and severity of impact between SC and CSF by researchers in addition to the identification of the most important criteria during rescue operations.

The digital revolution and the use of big data (BD) in particular has important applications in the construction industry. In construction, massive amounts of heterogeneous data need to be analyzed to improve onsite efficiency. This article presents a systematic review and identifies future research directions, presenting valuable conclusions derived from rigorous bibliometric tools. The results of this study may provide guidelines for construction engineering and global policymaking to change the current low-efficiency of construction sites.

This study identifies research trends from 1,253 peer-reviewed papers, using general statistics, keyword co-occurrence analysis, critical review, and qualitative-bibliometric techniques in two rounds of search.

The number of studies in this area rapidly increased from 2012 to 2020. A significant number of publications originated in the UK, China, the US, and Australia, and the smallest number from one of these countries is more than twice the largest number in the remaining countries. Keyword co-occurrence is divided into three clusters: BD application scenarios, emerging technology in BD, and BD management. Currently developing approaches in BD analytics include machine learning, data mining, and heuristic-optimization algorithms such as graph convolutional, recurrent neural networks and natural language processes (NLP). Studies have focused on safety management, energy reduction, and cost prediction. Blockchain integrated with BD is a promising means of managing construction contracts.

The study of BD is in a stage of rapid development, and this bibliometric analysis is only a part of the necessary practical analysis.

National policies, temporal and spatial distribution, BD flow are interpreted, and the results of this may provide guidelines for policymakers. Overall, this work may develop the body of knowledge, producing a reference point and identifying future development.

To our knowledge, this is the first bibliometric review of BD in the construction industry. This study can also benefit construction practitioners by providing them a focused perspective of BD for emerging practices in the construction industry.

The learning outcomes of this case study are to understand the business model canvas and value propositions and apply advanced business innovation tools in electric vehicle business models; evaluate the current cargo vehicle scenarios at national and global levels and draw out the possibilities and costs for a new player; extrapolate the future scenario of the cargo economy, its electrification and positioning in a business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-customer (B2C) segment, especially for a developing economy; and improve the student’s ability to get organisational buy-in and execute new business models.

LoadExx is a fully electrified electric cargo service focusing on logistics in Kolkata, a metropolitan city in the eastern part of the country. The service of LoadExx commenced in January 2021 in the B2B segment after overcoming its then issues of driver hesitancy and customer anxiety and financial issues to adopt electrified cargo systems. The conundrum faced by LoadExx in its commencement thus had been solved under the able guidance of its owner Amit Arora. The case study was positioned four months after the commencement of LoadExx. To gain market power and traction, Arora and his team came up with the idea of market expansion. However, the current conundrum was whether LoadExx would enter the B2C segment in its current location or expand with the same business model to other parts of the country. The expansion was to be implemented in the immediate future to retain its rarity and reduce the imitability of the business model of LoadExx. This case study details the logistics and market operations of the cargo sector, especially electric cargo, in a developing economy, especially India. A teaching note supplementing the “Cracking the conundrum of e-cargo logistics: curious case of LoadExx” case study has been provided.

This case study is designed for undergraduate and postgraduate students and senior management professionals in executive education programmes undertaking courses in logistics management and supply chain operations and related cargo logistics courses. This case study denotes integrating key processes from end-users and gaining the trust of drivers, thereby showing the perspective of the plight and conundrums of a cargo aggregator working in the B2C segment. This case study could be used to discuss concepts related to not-for-profit firms, aggregators, policymakers and think tanks.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 9: Operations and logistics.

Social entrepreneurship, Social enterprise.

Masters Programme in Social Entrepreneurship, Social Work, Business Administration; Management Development Programme for Social Entreprenuers.

Organisation for Social Change, Awareness and Responsibility (OSCAR) Foundation is a non-profit organisation registered in 2010 under the Bombay Public Trust Act, 1950. Born and raised in the slum colony of Ambedkar Nagar, Cuffe Parade, Ashok, the founder, grew up seeing his friends becoming a victim to many socially inappropriate behaviours due to dropping out of school. Inspired by the thought of breaking this vicious cycle, Ashok used football as a mechanism to instil essential life skills among children and youth and encouraged them to continue their education. The success of his pilot motivated him to set up OSCAR. Presently, through its various programmes, the organisation has reached out to more than 3,000 marginalised children and 500 youths and aims to reach out to 20,000 children by 2020. The case highlights the struggles of Ashok’s entrepreneurial journey and maps the new challenges in scaling up his enterprise.

The expected learning outcomes are as follows: to identify the characteristics of a social entrepreneur and ascertain the leadership skills required by a social entrepreneur; to scrutinise the life cycle of a social enterprise and develop insights to examine the unique risks and challenges faced at the start-up phase of the social enterprise; and to enhance the understanding of interrelationship between passion, mission focus and challenges to attain financial sustainability for a social venture.

Teaching Notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes.

CSS 3: Entrepreneurship.

Quality has undergone several transformations over the past decades. From the inspection to total quality management (TQM), some tools have been created to improve the performance of industrial processes and services, such as control charts and Pareto’s diagram. Now, the fourth industrial revolution (4th IR), Industry 4.0, has become part of the routine of organizations and people. The purpose of this paper is to verify how traditional quality concepts are being adapted within organizations.

As the term “Quality 4.0” is still recent, this research aimed to conduct a literature review on the topic by using the systematic literature review method called Bibliometrix. Through the combination of keywords, 116 papers were found. After eliminating the repeated papers, an analysis was made with the remaining 104 papers, presenting the sources of publication, period of publication, countries, among other characteristics. Finally, a more detailed analysis of the 10 most recent papers published in journals was performed.

The main results of this research are: publications on the topic have increased significantly from 2013, mainly in journals and conference papers; the most important elements connected with Quality 4.0 are Quality Management and Industry 4.0; there is not yet a universal definition for Quality 4.0; however, it seems that digital tools can be used to improve the performance of processes; one can expect a natural evolution from TQM to Quality 4.0, not replacing the traditional quality methods; activities inside organizations will be faster and smarter, due to the use of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI), combined with traditional quality methods.

Identifying new approaches and gaps for quality research may improve the development of new concepts and tools.