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The case helps to understand: the working mechanisms of a digitized salon service, with a focus on the lower- and middle-income strata. The changing scenario of the service marketing model, with the growth in digital service models. To investigate the organisational challenges of a digitally facilitated/based start-up and find solutions to overcome the challenges.

“Yes Madam”-salon at home was a business enterprise, providing beauty and wellness services at the doorstep through a mobile application and web-based platform. The case describes the reason for opening the doorstep beauty services, its revenue model and aims to provide quality services to lower- and middle-income strata. The case will help students to understand the working mechanism of digitized salon services and associated challenges; prominent ones being attracting, selecting and retaining the beauticians and providing the standardised services. The case has examined the low-price services for the consumers delivered by the company. The case also discussed their plans for diversification and penetration into the untapped markets.

Graduates and postgraduates.

Teaching Notes are available for educators only.

CSS 3: Entrepreneurship.

‘Saksham’, a corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiative of one of the largest public sector companies in India, the Gas Authority of India Limited (GAIL), provides specific training in skills required for plastic industry to low-income communities potentially affected by GAIL's business operations. Unlike a typical GAIL CSR programme, which directly targets communities affected by GAIL's operations, the Saksham programme serves the needs of one of GAIL's main customers - the small and medium scale plastic industry. Although the programme is a huge success and has completed three batches, all the students of which were placed in plastic manufacturing companies, Shamasundara, Zonal General Manager of GAIL is still not sure about the future of the programme. He wondered what should be the metrics to evaluate whether a programme can be classified as a CSR initiative by a firm.

Building on the arguments of expectancy theory and social exchange theory, the present study provides insights into the process by which pay-for-performance (PFP) impacts employee job performance.

Based on a sample size of 226 employees working in a technology company in India, the study examines the relationships between PFP, procedural justice, organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and employee job performance. Data on perceptions of PFP and procedural justice were collected from the employees, data on OCB were collected from the supervisors and the data on employee job performance were collected from organizational appraisal records.

The study found support for the positive relationship between PFP and job performance and for the sequential mediation of the relationship between PFP and job performance via procedural justice and OCB. Further, procedural justice was found to mediate the relationship between PFP and OCB.

The study was cross-sectional, so inferences about causality are limited.

The study tests the relationship between PFP and employee job performance in the Indian work context. The study shows that the existence of PFP is positively related to procedural justice which, in turn, is positively related to OCB. The study found support for the sequential mediation of PFP-job performance relationship via procedural justice and OCB.

The study provides an insight into the underlying process through which PFP is related to employee job performance. To the best of our knowledge, such a study is the first of its kind undertaken in an organizational context.

Integrated supply chain in pharmaceutical industry requires organized planning and modeling of each strategic element of pharmaceutical supply chain (PSC). The aim is to coordinate each activity of PSC and design a robust strategy to make the system hassle-free. Each activity of industry is interdependent and follows certain co-relations with each other. The paper focuses on the four most significant identified issues in PSC and analyses the weightages of these issues and their sub issues with respect to cost incurred and time taken to manage whole chain of supply.

Fuzzy analytical hierarchy process methodology has been applied to rank the issues which consume maximum time and/or costs.

The derived result shows that warehouse design and management (WDM) consumes more than one third of the total time and around half of the total cost. Other than WDM, process of supplier selection for procurement is second most time and cost consuming issue. The derived results are discussed and provided to the field experts of the area. The analysis will be useful for decision makers to economize PSC.

The study is limited to PSC; hence, result may vary with other practical situations.

This generated scope for further research on how to minimize the weightage of WDM for cost and time in PSC industry so that decision-makers can optimize the economic system of PSC.

The research is based on the field survey of India’s largest generic medicine distributing company in the government sector; hence, analysis has been performed on real situation.

The purpose of this paper is to classify the total quality management (TQM) practices and position them based on their importance in the implementation of TQM in steel industries for obtaining improved business performance and customer satisfaction.

The study undergoes a deep literature review to recognise the TQM practices necessary for the implementation of TQM in the steel industry. The identified 17 practices were grouped under three activities such as “breakthrough activities”, “improvement activities” and “routine operational and maintenance activities” with experts’ suggestion. The positioning of 17 TQM practices and 3 activities of TQM was done using an analytical hierarchy process (AHP) technique as per their relevance in TQM implementation.

The findings of the research show that though all the 17 practices and 3 activities of TQM play a vital role in the successful implementation of TQM in steel industries, breakthrough activities have gained more weightage as compared to the other two activities. Top management commitment, quality system and continuous improvement are relatively more important than the other practices.

The research has limitation analogous to the AHP technique. The technique considers all the sub-sets of each nod to be independent from each other, whereas in real world this does not stand true.

The study positions the TQM practices and activities on the basis of their relevance in TQM implementation in the steel industry, thus helping the managers in understanding which practice has to give how much importance for TQM implementation in steel industries. By following the practices according to the weights, the managers can achieve the results desired from TQM implementation.

The study gives the implementation priorities of TQM practices in the steel industry. To the best knowledge of researcher, it is the first study in the steel sector for TQM implementation. The lacuna was reported by the literature, and the researcher has made an attempt to fill that gap.

This paper aims to examine the level of awareness and determinants of the actual adoption of fintech services. This paper further focuses on how usages of different kind of fintech services fulfills the business needs of the micro-entrepreneurs of urban slum dwellers of Uttarakhand.

The research investigated the predictive significance of actual adoption of fintech services using the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) and prospect theory framework. Data was collected from 80 micro-entrepreneurs of urban slum areas of Uttarakhand, using an adapted semi-structured questionnaire. For analysis of data partial least square structural equal modeling has been used.

This paper finds that different fintech services have different levels of awareness whereas payment, regulation and market provision-related fintech services have high awareness. The main drivers for adopting fintech are services trust (ST) and behavioral intention (BI). BI significantly influences fintech adoption, while ST positively impacts BI, actual usage and facilitating conditions; perceived risk, however, negatively affects ST. The widely used fintech services are payment-based fintech (unified payments interface), followed by regulatory fintech (Khatabook app). Fintech effectively serves the business needs of micro-entrepreneurs in the urban slums of Uttarakhand with innovative product solutions.

The findings of this study are valuable for various fintech providers. These results can serve as a roadmap to strengthen fintech services in the broader population, including niche market segments.

This study uniquely contributes to the literature that addresses the issues of entrepreneurs of the lower strata of society through the use of fintech services.

The current approach to valuing customers is based on the notion of discounted profit generated by the customers over the lifetime of the relationship, also known as customer lifetime value (CLV). However, in the financial services industry, the customers who contribute the most to the profitability of a firm are also the riskiest customers. If the riskiness of a customer is not considered, firms will overestimate the true value of that customer. This paper proposes a methodology to adjust CLV for different types of risk factors and creates a comprehensive measure of risk-adjusted lifetime value (RALTV).

Using data from a major credit card company, we develop a measure of risk adjusted lifetime value (RALTV) that accounts for diverse types of customer risks. The model is estimated using Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA).

Major findings indicate that rewards cardholders and affinity cardholders tend to score higher within the RALTV framework than non-rewards cardholders and non-affinity cardholders, respectively. Among the four different modes of acquisition, the Internet generates the highest RALTV, followed by direct mail.

This paper not only controls for different types of consumer risks in the financial industry and creates a comprehensive risk-adjusted lifetime value (RALTV) model but also shows empirically the value of using RALTV over CLV for predicting future performance of a set of customers. Further, we investigate the impact of a firm’s acquisition and retention strategies on RALTV. The measure of risk-adjusted lifetime value is invaluable for managers in financial services.

Due to its impact on business performance total quality management (TQM) has gained a lot of importance by businessmen, managers, practitioners, and research scholars over the last 20 years. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to critically assess the literature on TQM and find out the areas where future research is required.

To achieve this purpose the articles published in the last 20 years were studied in a systematic way and a snapshot of the same was prepared in the tabular format with points such as year and journal of publication, application and country, statistical method used, and findings of the study such as practices and impact of TQM. After identifying the practices and impact of TQM a quality tool “Pareto Analysis” was applied on them for development of the model.

The findings provide the practices of TQM and its impact on the performance of a business. The gaps from the literature have been identified and areas for future research have been suggested. On the basis of the findings a generalized framework of TQM has been suggested which can be applicable irrespective of the sector.

The research will help academicians and future researchers to have a clear understanding of TQM in different rosters.

Ample literature is available on TQM but in the best knowledge of authors no study has taken place to integrate the reviews and findings of 102 research papers of the last two decades.

Human resources analytics (HRA) can potentially create value and provide a competitive advantage; however, whether and how HRA creates this value has been sparsely explored in scholarly literature. Hence, the purpose of this study is to provide a process-oriented framework for value creation from HRA use by exploring the underlying mechanisms, complementary resources and outcomes.

The study used a qualitative research design as the research question was exploratory. A total of 26 in-depth expert interviews with different organizations were conducted. These interviews were transcribed and coded for emerging themes, which were placed in a temporal sequence of occurrence to derive a process understanding of value creation from HRA. Additionally, validation tests were conducted.

The thematic analysis using NVivo provided qualitative evidence of the value-creating potential of HRA. Further, it unraveled the process of value creation from HRA in the form of problem construction, insight generation, the buy-in of stakeholders and solution implementation. This process resulted in various human resource management (HRM) and organizational outcomes. The analysis also highlighted the significance of three complementary resources, namely data quality, analytical competency and business knowledge.

This study offers guidance for HR executives and business managers to assess the conditions under which HRA can add business value to organizations.

The paper is novel as this is among the first studies to provide evidence of value creation from HRA and identify the underlying mechanism, which has been highlighted as a gap in the literature. Based on resource-based theory and its complementarities perspective, the study makes a valuable contribution to the nascent HRA literature.