Critical Issues in the Air Force Medical Equipment Procurement Process

The Air Force medical logistics community relies on multiple contracting offices to acquire medical equipment for the Air Force Medical Service. The perception is that burdensome regulations contribute to the challenges faced in the procurement process. This research takes a broader examination to understand the factors leading to long lead times and delayed procurements. Process mapping and interviews with the key stakeholders supporting medical equipment procurement determined that the critical issues were a lack of centralized medical equipment contracting authority, insufficient market research and inconsistent local knowledge on contracting processes. This research provides future recommendations for the Air Force Medical Service to improve the procurement process and reduce the contract backlog

Salespeople are from Mars, purchasers are from Venus : matching sales to purchasing

There is no business without sales and no sales without customers. The bridge that spans business‐to‐business (B2B) selling and their customers is termed a buyer‐seller relationship. The contemporary buyer‐seller environment presents salespeople with the challenge of finding ways to overcome the current ineffectiveness of many previously effective sales approaches. The effectiveness of many sales approaches has been questioned based on the ongoing paradigm shift in the purchasing domain. Purchasing based changes have had, and are expected to continue to have a tremendous influence on the buying process. Yet, the different roles in buyer‐seller relationships are, in the Marketing and Sales domain, either studied from the buyer’s perspective or from the seller’s point of view. Buying organizations, however, are gradually shifting power to the purchasing function. For sales practitioners and sales researchers, this ongoing shift demands a study in the evolution of the purchasing function in order to improve their sales approaches. This doctoral thesis analyzes the domain of Buyer‐Seller Relationships in B2B contexts, with an emphasis on Personal Selling and Sales Management. The objective of this dissertation is to obtain a better understanding of how changes in market conditions and advances in technology have empowered the B2B purchaser, thereby creating new challenges to the sales organization and sales function. The first essay of this dissertation is based on an extensive review of the Buyer‐Seller literature and is a call to sales practitioners to pay more attention to the purchasing function and to develop sales strategies and sales approaches that cater to the customers’ purchasing function. The research contribution of the first essay is a presentation of a research grid for future sales research. This framework depicts avenues for future sales research that encompasses the important topics that are considered to be important for the Purchasing & Supply Management (PSM) and the Buyer‐Seller research domains. Based on findings from the first essay, the second essay entails how the sales side should first understand specific purchaser’s jargon, the strategic importance of their offer while looking through a purchaser’s lens, to then adapt the sales messaging based on particular knowledge needs by the purchaser. This results in a selling approach that further advances the curren versions of value‐based selling, and contributes to the sphere of salespeople who succeed by a better presentation of the competitive advantages of their offer related to future cost benefits and risk reduction. Finally, the third essay matches existing sales strategies according to the purchasing maturity of the customers. The maturity of the customer’s purchasing department is defined by Reck and Long (1977) in four gradual steps of professionalism. This research essay draws on these steps by first identifying the purchasing department’s maturity level, followed by an examination of what sales strategies are best suited to match the specific needs associated with the four levels of purchasing maturity

The role of manufacturing in the Industrial District through the analysis of the Global Value Chain framework: the case study of Belluno Eyewear Industrial District

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Innovation ecosystems for industry 4.0 : a collaborative perspective for the provision of digital technologies and platforms

Industry 4.0 considers complex interrelated IoT-based technologies for the provision of digital solutions. This complexity demands a vast set of capabilities that are hard to be found in a single technology provider, especially in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Innovation ecosystems allow SMEs to integrate resources and cocreate Industry 4.0 solutions. This thesis investigates the role of collaboration for the development of technologies and solutions in the Industry 4.0 context. To this end, this thesis was organized into three papers, which objectives are: (i) to verify if collaboration through inbound Open Innovation activities with different actors in the supply chain positively moderates the relationship between Industry 4.0 technologies and their expected benefits; (ii) to identify how the characteristics of an innovation ecosystem focused on solutions for Industry 4.0 change at each evolutionary lifecycle stage using elements from social exchange theory; and (iii) to identify which technologies can be configured as platforms through boundary-spanning activities and how they operate collaboratively to develop solutions for Industry 4.0. As a result, this thesis proposes a model that explains the role of collaboration at different levels (supply chains, ecosystems, and platforms) for the development of solutions in the Industry 4.0 context. This research approach combines both qualitative (i.e., focus group, interviews, and case studies) and quantitative (i.e., survey research with multivariate data analysis) aspects. The main results obtained are: (i) we show how collaboration with different actors in the supply chain through Open Innovation strategy has both positive and negative impacts on three strategies associated with product development (cost reduction, focalization, and innovation); (ii) we define the main characteristics of innovation ecosystems focused on the provision of Industry 4.0 solutions, considering an evolutionary lifecycles perspective and a Social Exchange view (iii) we define which are the different technology platforms of the Industry 4.0 context at different operation levels using Boundary-Spanning view. As remarking conclusions, from an academic perspective, these results help to understand how collaboration for the development of new solutions in Industry 4.0 can be analyzed under different perspectives (Open Innovation, Social Exchange Theory, and Boundary-Spanning) and in different contexts of integration (supply chains, ecosystems, and platforms). From a practical perspective, the results help to enlighten a trending business topic by showing how the collaboration among technology providers for Industry 4.0 should be fostered and developed

The Outsourcing of National Defense

The outsourcing of military activities and services has grown dramatically in recent decades. My objective is to understand and explain this phenomenon at work in the United States Department of Defense (DoD) using theoretical frameworks of strategic efficiency, political ideology and organizational theory factors. This study seeks to answer the question, why has the DOD outsourced support activities and functions that contribute to larger national security objectives and were traditionally performed by DoD personnel? I\u27ll use a case-study methodology to examine outsourcing in the DoD between 1970 and 2005, to include an in-depth look at the information technology (IT) networks area of the military services. I\u27ve chosen these cases because they combine to represent a broad perspective of outsourcing behavior across each service over time as well as a specific core area relevant to the war-fighting mission of each service. Since the phenomenon is under explored in political science, my study will be valuable in expanding our understanding of the factors influencing the increasing role of market actors in national defense activities. I\u27ll also address issues regarding the distribution of power, authority and public accountability while identifying relevant bureaucratic, ideological and organizational factors affecting the development and implementation of national security

Report summarising the implications per industry for EU countries and emerging economies

The main objective of WP9 was to provide insights into inter-sectoral differences in drivers, degree and patterns of global innovation network formation. Three different sectors, each representing their own category in the influential Pavitt (1984) taxonomy, are chosen as cases. Thus, the WP provided insights into GIN formation in each of these sectors on their own and, by way of comparative analysis, lifted the analysis to a more general European level perspective. The main research questions were: What GIN patterns are forming in the selected sectors, and to what extent are these influenced (driven, constrained) by contextual conditions specific to these sectors? The point of departure for this work package was the recognition that sectors diverge with respect to knowledge, cumulativeness and opportunity conditions. Existing empirical work e.g. show that the “global footprints” of different industries diverge according to the degree of tacitness and complexity of involved knowledge; according to degree of modularity of the product; and with the distribution of actors and environments globally which can be identified and towards which relevant linkages may be formed. Thus, different sectors face different tensions between centrifugal and centripetal forces of internationalization; which result in different patterns of international search, sourcing and collaboration. Understanding these are critical to the formulation of innovation policy in a context of globalization, as the patterns of GINs forming will determine home and host implications. National and EU level innovation policy must simultaneously account for the firm level need to interact and use the most competent and cost-effective partners world-wide; while ensuring that the linkages formed at this level strengthen rather than hollow out innovative capabilities at those same national and EU levels

Ethics and taxation : a cross-national comparison of UK and Turkish firms

This paper investigates responses to tax related ethical issues facing busines