Upgradable system opportunities in order to rationalize materials

Part of: Seliger, Günther (Ed.): Innovative solutions : proceedings / 11th Global Conference on Sustainable Manufacturing, Berlin, Germany, 23rd - 25th September, 2013. - Berlin: Universitätsverlag der TU Berlin, 2013. - ISBN 978-3-7983-2609-5 (online). - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:83-opus4-40276. - pp. 96–101.Design of more sustainable products is a fundamental priority in our society. New opportunities for facilitating the dissemination of the remanufacturing approach or the Product-Service Systems, or for increasing the lifetime of product (three ways for rationalizing of materials) are proposed by the integration of upgrades, functional enrichments brought to the product. This paper aims to show the need of product upgradability through a concrete study focused on four hypotheses: • H1- Upgradability concept requires a potential of disposed devices which still works. • H2- Upgradability concept requires a need for adaptability of product towards user needs. • H3- Upgradability concept requires a need for adaptability of product versus the competition. • H4- Upgradability concept is consistent with an accumulation of problems. The first results show the necessity to consider a new sort of "evolutionary" products for sustainability: Innovations with multiples upgrade cycles

INFORMATION FLOW ASSURED BY IT&C CONTINUITY PLANNING

Forwarding the frequent usage of complex processes and the big volume of information, it is imperative to manage the automatic circuit of the document flow in a company activity. The main advantage of such a system consist in document waiting to be procesinformation flow, IT&C continuity, maturity model for IT&C continuity, IT rationalization

A structural model to examine the antecedents and consequences of customer with experiential brands

Despite the increasing attention towards customer experience, empirical research to explain this notion, its antecedents and its consequences is still limited. Hence, this research aims to develop a framework of customer experience based on a number of antecedents that influence customer experience in the service sector. This paper presents the first part of the study which includes the review of literature, the application of netnography method to the development of customer experience construct, the development of the research measures and the hypotheses development for the structural model. The second part of the study, which is presented in another paper, provides the results of the empirical study and discusses the findings of the structural model

Workforce Intermediaries: Powering Regional Economies in the New Century

Examines the role of workforce intermediary organizations in developing local strategies and funding, and coordinating the efforts of stakeholders in regional economic development. Outlines the qualities of successful workforce intermediary organizations

Hospetitiveness – the Empirical Model of Competitiveness in Romanian Hospitality Industry

Our interest is focused on an important sector of the national economy: the hospitality industry. The paper is the result of a careful analysis of the literature and of a field research. According to the answers of hotels' managers, competitiveness is based mainly on service quality and cost control. The analyses of questionnaires and dedicated literature lead us to the design of a competitiveness model for hospitality industry, called "Hospetitiveness – The empirical model of competitiveness in the Romanian hospitality industry". The model has three levels: the first level (the base) is represented by decisive factors of competitiveness: human resources, innovation, services and costs, which influence all hotels' operations. The second level consists in the inclusion of competitiveness factors’ attributes in the organization’s processes and operations, in order to reach the objectives and obtain competitive advantage. This is the level where all the competitiveness factors are transposed in objective measures, in order to make them easily understood by the employees. The third level illustrates the dimensions of competitiveness as results of the impact of the decisive factors on the organization’s internal processes and operations. These dimensions are: customer satisfaction, market position and internal and external social responsibility. The model is dynamic, being the starting point for specific models in hotel management (e.g. business or seaside hotels’ management), and also the base for a best practices guide that translates competitiveness factors into key competitive advantage.competitiveness, hospitality industry, hotel management, competitive advantage

Impact of the Financial Crisis on Finance Sector Workers

[Excerpt] The purpose of this paper is to briefly review the background, causes, characteristics and trajectory of the ongoing financial and economic crisis; to define the financial services sector, its occupations and their educational requirements, as well as recent important trends; to provide a preliminary assessment of the impact of the crisis on finance sector jobs; and to give suggestions on possible policy responses to address the effects of the crisis on finance sector workers

A netnography study on branded customer experience: Evidence from the red sea

This study addresses the question of what are the underlying dimensions and messages to self and others that constitute the construct of customer experience. The study uses a netnography method to validate or refute and extend a priori concepts that the literature identifies within the context of resort-hotel brands in a Sharm El Sheikh resort in Egypt. The results identify eight dimensions (comfort, educational, hedonic, novelty, recognition, relational, safety and sense of beauty) and unique configurations of these eight dimensions that extend prior research on customer experience