Search results

The purpose of this study is to present the implementation of Six Sigma in a solenoid valve manufacturing company in China. The project aims to reduce the solenoid valve defects, decrease the cost of poor quality, increase customer satisfaction and improve the long-term profitability of Company B.

This paper follows the Six Sigma methodology: DMAIC (define, measure, analyse, improve and control) principle of case study research. Hysteresis, the key characteristic of a solenoid valve, is the main chance for quality improvement. This paper emphasizes the solution to the hysteresis problem. During DMAIC phases, the critical factors that affect hysteresis performance are identified for continuous quality improvement of solenoid valve manufacturing.

The implementation of Six Sigma leads to a great quality improvement for the company studied in this paper. Control plans are made for good hysteresis performance. As a result, the first pass yield of solenoid valves has increased from 60% to 99.64%. The key hysteresis of the solenoid valve has shown a better performance.

This study presents a solenoid valve industrial quality improvement case that demonstrates how Six Sigma and DMAIC methodology can be applied to reduce defects and achieve quality improvement in Company B. This study can be referred to for managers and engineers to undertake quality improvement programs.

This study explores the factors that characterize the logistics service quality (LSQ) of cross-border e-commerce and identifies the different relationships between these factors with respect to customer satisfaction.

The study applied a two-stage mixed-methods design. The first stage (Stage 1) was a qualitative study of 3,000 reviews from the Amazon China e-commerce platform. The second stage (Stage 2) included a quantitative study that analyzed survey data from 590 Chinese cross-border e-commerce customers using the Kano model.

Stage 1 involved developing a conceptual framework for the LSQ of cross-border e-commerce, including six dimensions: timeliness, safety, reliability, economy, personnel contact quality and information quality. In Stage 2, the study found that only reliability and personnel contact quality indicators are linearly related to customer satisfaction. Timeliness and the safety of packaging greatly contribute to customer satisfaction, but do not cause dissatisfaction when unfulfilled. Economics and information quality indicators, and the safety of goods, are basic requirements that tend to provoke customer dissatisfaction when unmet, but do not increase customer satisfaction when they are met.

This study is one of the first to construct a conceptual model of LSQ that applies to cross-border e-commerce and to identify the instrumental nature of various LSQ attributes and their impact on improved customer satisfaction.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship of the post-publication peer review (PPPR) polarity of a paper to that paper's citation count.

Papers with PPPRs from Publons.com as the experimental groups were manually matched 1:2 with the related papers without PPPR as the control group, by the same journal, the same issue (volume), the same access status (gold open access or not) and the same document type. None of the papers in the experimental group or control group received any comments or recommendations from ResearchGate, PubPeer or F1000. The polarity of the PPPRs was coded by using content analysis. A negative binomial regression analysis was conducted to examine the data by controlling the characteristics of papers.

The four experimental groups and their corresponding control groups were generated as follows: papers with neutral PPPRs, papers with both negative and positive PPPRs, papers with negative PPPRs and papers with positive PPPRs as well as four corresponding control groups (papers without PPPRs). The results are as follows: while holding the other variables (such as page count, number of authors, etc.) constant in the model, papers that received neutral PPPRs, those that received negative PPPRs and those that received both negative and positive PPPRs had no significant differences in citation count when compared to their corresponding control pairs (papers without PPPRs). Papers that received positive PPPRs had significantly greater citation count than their corresponding control pairs (papers without PPPRs) while holding the other variables (such as page count, number of authors, etc.) constant in the model.

Based on a broader range of PPPR sentiments, by controlling many of the confounding factors (including the characteristics of the papers and the effects of the other PPPR platforms), this study analyzed the relationship of various polarities of PPPRs to citation count.