Strategies to Manage Reduced Demand Among Mattress Manufacturers in Puerto Rico

The COVID-19 pandemic reduced consumer demand in Puerto Rico, resulting in manufacturing jobs decreasing from 76,000 in March 2020 to 72,600 in August 2020, and the PMI decreasing falling from 50.5 to 48.1 in the same period. Owners of mattress manufacturing firms in Puerto Rico who lack strategies to increase consumer demand risk financial losses. Grounded in the strategic management theory, the purpose of this qualitative multiple case study was to explore strategies owners of mattress manufacturing firms in Puerto Rico use to increase demand for mattresses. The participants included three owners of mattress manufacturing firms in Puerto Rico who successfully increased demand for mattresses. Data were collected from semistructured interviews and company documents related to mattress sales and demand. Thematic analysis of the data resulted in four themes: having inventory for immediate sales increased the demand for mattresses, marketing in social networks increased the demand for mattresses, establishing good prices increased the demand for mattresses, and delivering excellent customer service increased the demand for mattresses. A key recommendation is for owners of mattress manufacturing firms to post the amount of inventory available at their manufacturing facilities on their websites in response to the importance the buyers place buyers\u27 importance on buying products at the manufacturing facilities. The implications for positive social change include the potential of improved health benefits of more frequent mattress replacement and increased revenue that could translate into a larger more extensive tax base that local governments could use to implement community-based projects

Strategies to Manage Reduced Demand Among Mattress Manufacturers in Puerto Rico

The COVID-19 pandemic reduced consumer demand in Puerto Rico, resulting in manufacturing jobs decreasing from 76,000 in March 2020 to 72,600 in August 2020, and the PMI decreasing falling from 50.5 to 48.1 in the same period. Owners of mattress manufacturing firms in Puerto Rico who lack strategies to increase consumer demand risk financial losses. Grounded in the strategic management theory, the purpose of this qualitative multiple case study was to explore strategies owners of mattress manufacturing firms in Puerto Rico use to increase demand for mattresses. The participants included three owners of mattress manufacturing firms in Puerto Rico who successfully increased demand for mattresses. Data were collected from semistructured interviews and company documents related to mattress sales and demand. Thematic analysis of the data resulted in four themes: having inventory for immediate sales increased the demand for mattresses, marketing in social networks increased the demand for mattresses, establishing good prices increased the demand for mattresses, and delivering excellent customer service increased the demand for mattresses. A key recommendation is for owners of mattress manufacturing firms to post the amount of inventory available at their manufacturing facilities on their websites in response to the importance the buyers place buyers\u27 importance on buying products at the manufacturing facilities. The implications for positive social change include the potential of improved health benefits of more frequent mattress replacement and increased revenue that could translate into a larger more extensive tax base that local governments could use to implement community-based projects

Adaptive security-related data collection with context awareness

The huge economic loss resulting from network attacks and intrusions has led to an intensive study on network security. The network security is usually reflected by some relevant data that can be collected in a network system. By learning and analyzing such data, which are called security-related data, we can detect the intrusions to the network system and further measure its security level. Clearly, the first step of detecting network intrusions is to collect security-related data. However, in the context of 5G and big data, there are a number of challenges in collecting these data due to the heterogeneity of network and ever-growing amount of data. Therefore, traditional data collection methods cannot be applied in the next generation network systems directly, especially for security-related data. This paper presents the design and implementation of an adaptive security-related data collector based on network context in heterogeneous networks. The proposed collector solves the issue of heterogeneity of network system by designing a Security-related Data Description Language (SDDL) to instruct security related data collection in various networking contexts. It also applies adaptive sampling algorithms to reduce the amount of collected data. Furthermore, performance evaluation based on a prototype implementation shows the effectiveness of the adaptive security-related data collector in terms of a number of pre-defined design requirements.Peer reviewe