Luluk Lusiantoro, Nicola Yates, Carlos Mena and Liz Varga
The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of the relationship between information sharing and performance of perishable product supply chains (PPSC)…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of the relationship between information sharing and performance of perishable product supply chains (PPSC). Building on transaction cost economics (TCE), organisational information processing theory (OIPT), and contingency theory (CT), this study proposes a theoretical framework to guide future research into information sharing in perishable product supply chains (IS-PPSC).
Design/methodology/approach
Using the systematic literature review methodology, 48 peer-reviewed articles are carefully selected, mapped, and assessed. Template analysis is performed to unravel the relationship mechanisms between information sharing and PPSC performance.
Findings
The authors find that the relationship between information sharing and PPSC performance is currently unclear, and there is inconsistency in the positioning of information sharing among constructs and variables in the IS-PPSC literature. This implies a requirement to refine the relationship between information sharing and PPSC performance. The review also revealed that the role of perishable product characteristics has largely been ignored in existing research.
Originality/value
This study applies relevant multiple theoretical perspectives to overcome the ambiguity of the IS-PPSC literature and contributes nine propositions to guide future research. Accordingly, this study contributes to the refined roles of relationship uncertainty, environmental uncertainty, information sharing capabilities, and perishable product characteristics in shaping the relationship between information sharing and PPSC performance.
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Luluk Lusiantoro and Nicola Yates
Maintaining a safe and available supply of blood requires a mindfully coordinated supply chain (SC) and is fundamental to the effective operation of health systems across the…
Abstract
Purpose
Maintaining a safe and available supply of blood requires a mindfully coordinated supply chain (SC) and is fundamental to the effective operation of health systems across the world. This study investigates how blood supply chain (BSC) actors demonstrate collective mindfulness (CM) principles in their operations and how these demonstrations lead to improvements in blood safety and availability (BSA) in different operational contexts.
Design/methodology/approach
Six case studies drawn from two contrasting BSCs, the UK and Indonesia, which differ in structure and regulation are investigated in this research. Qualitative data are collected and analysed using template analysis.
Findings
The cases reveal how the CM principles are demonstrated in the supply chain context in a range of operational conditions and their impact on BSA. The BSC actors in the more centralised and tightly regulated cases display more behaviours consistent with more of the CM principles over a greater range of operational conditions compared to those in the more decentralised and loosely regulated cases. As such, more improvements in BSA are found in the former compared to the latter cases.
Originality/value
This paper is considered the first to investigate the demonstration of CM principles at the SC as opposed to the single organisational level. It proposes an alternative approach to understanding and evaluating reliability performance using behavioural rather than statistical principles.
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Sebastian H.W. Stanger, Richard Wilding, Evi Hartmann, Nicola Yates and Sue Cotton
Are lateral transshipments an effective instrument to ensure the safe and efficient supply of blood? This paper will use the lens of institutional theory to determine how the…
Abstract
Purpose
Are lateral transshipments an effective instrument to ensure the safe and efficient supply of blood? This paper will use the lens of institutional theory to determine how the blood supply chain can benefit from lateral transshipments and what requirements are necessary for their implementation. The paper aims to discuss these issues.
Design/methodology/approach
The research design comprises two stages. First, 16 case studies clustered into two case groups were conducted with transfusion laboratories in UK hospitals resulting in the derivation of eight key themes which were tested using a follow-up survey.
Findings
The blood supply chain acts under the influence of significant institutional pressures. Coercive pressures result from regulations enforced to ensure the safe supply of blood, normative pressures are imposed by society, demanding wastage is minimized and mimetic pressure from other hospitals fosters efficient supply chain operation. Lateral transshipments offer a powerful organizational tool to allow the blood supply chain to conform to these pressures.
Research limitations/implications
This paper offers a novel institutional perspective on a complex supply chain issue where additional external pressures are seen to complicate the context. Due to the special characteristics of the blood supply chain, generalization of the findings to other industries must be done with care.
Practical implications
The paper confirms the benefits of lateral transshipments in a perishable product context. Special requirements for the blood supply chain/health care services are identified.
Originality/value
The key contributions of this paper are five propositions which offer an institutional theory perspective on the application of lateral transshipment relationships in the blood supply chain.
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Younes Ettouzani, Nicola Yates and Carlos Mena
The purpose of this paper is to present an investigation into the causes of promotional on‐shelf‐availability (on‐shelf‐availability) shortfalls in retailing.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to present an investigation into the causes of promotional on‐shelf‐availability (on‐shelf‐availability) shortfalls in retailing.
Design/methodology/approach
The research follows a multiple‐case study research design involving seven major retailers and four multinational food manufacturers operating in the UK. The data collection took the form of semi‐structured interviews with 110 practitioners across 24 sites. Observations and documentation were used as supporting evidence.
Findings
Improving promotional on‐shelf‐availability presents retailers and manufacturers with a complex set of inter‐connected problems distributed across the supply chain. This research identified 32 causes affecting on‐shelf‐availability, grouped into eight themes, six of which are generic (forecasting, collaboration, replenishment, IT, distribution and production), and two which are specific to promotions (timescales and promotional process). This classification provides practitioners with a framework to improve promotional on‐shelf‐availability and academics with a more comprehensive range of the factors affecting on‐shelf‐availability, including two new themes not previously documented.
Research limitations/implications
Although the number of cases does not allow statistical analysis, the size and scope of the organizations involved helps to underpin the generalizability of the findings. The volume of data collected for retailers is significantly higher than for manufacturers, although this only reflects the importance of retailers in ensuring on‐shelf‐availability.
Practical implications
This paper presents a framework designed to provide a steer for further research into promotional on‐shelf‐availability and to help retail professionals to prioritize their actions towards improving promotional on‐shelf‐availability.
Originality/value
While on‐shelf‐availability has been the subject of much research, promotional on‐shelf‐availability has not been investigated in significant depth. This research is, to our knowledge, the first to investigate the causes of poor promotional on‐shelf‐availability and expands the knowledge of the field by highlighting the similarities and differences between traditional on‐shelf‐availability and promotional on‐shelf‐availability. Given the increasing use of promotions as a competitive strategy this area of research is both timely and important.
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Armando Papa, Gabriele Santoro, Lia Tirabeni and Filippo Monge
The purpose of this paper is to study the effects of social media usage on four knowledge creation processes, namely socialisation, externalisation, combination and…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to study the effects of social media usage on four knowledge creation processes, namely socialisation, externalisation, combination and internalisation, and innovation in small and medium enterprises (SMEs).
Design/methodology/approach
A sample of 96 SMEs has been used to gather data through a standardised questionnaire and test the hypotheses through OLS regression models.
Findings
The results indicate that social media influence positively three out of four knowledge creation processes and that they help to foster the innovation process.
Originality/value
From a theoretical perspective, the study contributes to literature considering a specific digital tool and its effect on knowledge creation and innovation. In fact, a few studies have considered the impact of social media usage on other variables, such as ROI and productivity, but never on knowledge creation and innovation through a quantitative study. From a managerial perspective, the research suggests managers to implement and involve social media within business and innovation processes.
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Nicolas Travers, Zeinab Hmedeh, Nelly Vouzoukidou, Cedric du Mouza, Vassilis Christophides and Michel Scholl
The purpose of this paper is to present a thorough analysis of three complementary features of real-scale really simple syndication (RSS)/Atom feeds, namely, publication activity…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to present a thorough analysis of three complementary features of real-scale really simple syndication (RSS)/Atom feeds, namely, publication activity, items characteristics and their textual vocabulary, that the authors believe are crucial for emerging Web 2.0 applications. Previous works on RSS/Atom statistical characteristics do not provide a precise and updated characterization of feeds’ behavior and content, characterization that can be used to successfully benchmark the effectiveness and efficiency of various Web syndication processing/analysis techniques.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors empirical study relies on a large-scale testbed acquired over an eight-month campaign from 2010. They collected a total number of 10,794,285 items originating from 8,155 productive feeds. The authors deeply analyze feeds productivity (types and bandwidth), content (XML, text and duplicates) and textual content (vocabulary and buzz-words).
Findings
The findings of the study are as follows: 17 per cent of feeds produce 97 per cent of the items; a formal characterization of feeds publication rate conducted by using a modified power law; most popular textual elements are the title and description, with the average size of 52 terms; cumulative item size follows a lognormal distribution, varying greatly with feeds type; 47 per cent of the feed-published items share the same description; the vocabulary does not belong to Wordnet terms (4 per cent); characterization of vocabulary growth using Heaps’ laws and the number of occurrences by a stretched exponential distribution conducted; and ranking of terms does not significantly vary for frequent terms.
Research limitations/implications
Modeling dedicated Web applications capacities, Defining benchmarks, optimizing Publish/Subscribe index structures.
Practical implications
It especially opens many possibilities for tuning Web applications, like an RSS crawler designed with a resource allocator and a refreshing strategy based on the Gini values and evolution to predict bursts for each feed, according to their category and class for targeted feeds; an indexing structure which matches textual items’ content, which takes into account item size according to targeted feeds, size of the vocabulary and term occurrences, updates of the vocabulary and evolution of term ranks, typos and misspelling correction; filtering by pruning items for content duplicates of different feeds and correlation of terms to easily detect replicates.
Originality/value
A content-oriented analysis of dynamic Web information.
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Oussama Ayoub, Christophe Rodrigues and Nicolas Travers
This paper aims to manage the word gap in information retrieval (IR) especially for long documents belonging to specific domains. In fact, with the continuous growth of text data…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to manage the word gap in information retrieval (IR) especially for long documents belonging to specific domains. In fact, with the continuous growth of text data that modern IR systems have to manage, existing solutions are needed to efficiently find the best set of documents for a given request. The words used to describe a query can differ from those used in related documents. Despite meaning closeness, nonoverlapping words are challenging for IR systems. This word gap becomes significant for long documents from specific domains.
Design/methodology/approach
To generate new words for a document, a deep learning (DL) masked language model is used to infer related words. Used DL models are pretrained on massive text data and carry common or specific domain knowledge to propose a better document representation.
Findings
The authors evaluate the approach of this study on specific IR domains with long documents to show the genericity of the proposed model and achieve encouraging results.
Originality/value
In this paper, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, an original unsupervised and modular IR system based on recent DL methods is introduced.
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The aim of this publication is to list the catalogues of the Department of Manuscripts which are in regular use. Catalogues which have been superseded by later publications are…
Abstract
The aim of this publication is to list the catalogues of the Department of Manuscripts which are in regular use. Catalogues which have been superseded by later publications are not normally included, since whatever their historical or bibliographical interest they are no longer everyday working tools. To save space in cross‐reference, the catalogues, etc., here listed have been numbered serially in Clarendon type, thus: 31. This numeration has no other significance.