Contract farming supply chain relationship and business performance within Malaysian poultry industry

Agriculture is one of the key sectors for international trade that supply food to the world population. Further improvement would be strengthening the contract farming system at the operation level and improving the profitability of producers. Measuring business performance provides the required information to the management for effective decision- making and is used by businesses to evaluate progress against objectives in an assessable coordination. This study highlighted the impact of Supplier Involvement and Customer Involvement, later termed as Integrator Involvement (II) and Grower Involvement (GI) in contract broiler production. The research then focused on determining the relationship between integrator involvements and grower involvements moderated by managerial skill towards business performance. This would enable improved contribution of the broiler - farming system in the country and boost profit. The data for this research was collected through mail survey questionnaires from 285 contract broiler producers in Malaysia. The content was validated by experts from the Department of Veterinary Services of Malaysia, and analyzed using the SPSS Version 19 (Statistical Package for Social Science) software. Then correlation and hierarchical regression analysis were done to gauge the preliminary results and relationship between the variables. The research also identified the theory and practice gaps applicable to broiler - contract farming and provided moderating - effect explanations linking those gaps. The result thus derived, suggests that in order for businesses to capitalize and benefit from the working skills, companies need to train their staff in technical and administrative fields. Hence, this study empirically demonstrated its importance and urged the firms to focus on it when applying managerial skills. Staff equipped with better innovative knowledge and managerial skills would be able to deliver operational efficiency and affirm that enhanced managerial skills would be able to strengthen the companies’ ability to augment business performanc

IS standards in designing business-to-government collaborations.

IS STANDARDS IN DESIGNING BUSINESS-TO-GOVERNMENT COLLABORATIONS. Elaborating the impact of standards on inter-organizational collaborations, inter-organizational studies demonstrated a standard’s positive impact on the collaboration between governmental and business partners. How and under which conditions information systems (IS) standards contribute to the effectiveness of business-to-government (B2G) collaborations in customs management is the topic of this thesis. Chapter 2 provides the theoretical and methodological background of the thesis. It illustrates how standards research emerged under institutional conditions such as actor types, linkages and social structures. With the case study in Chapter 3, the thesis introduces a reference framework that gathers different aspects in three pre-selected international business-to-government collaborations. Describing the cases that are subject to the export from EU to non-EU countries a diagnosis of B2G collaborations and relevant elements for the design of the artifact is conducted. A diagnosis of related work in the field of B2G collaborations is provided in Chapter 4. The assessment of collaboration forms revealed necessary constructs of a procedure model and institutional steps necessary to form B2G collaboration as such. Chapter 5 distils related work of IS standards research. In Chapters 6 and 7 considerations from the previous chapters lead to the core part of the thesis, the design and build of a procedure model to institutionalize B2G collaborations, the B2G Procedure Model (B2GPM). The results from the first round of design, the building blocks for B2G collaborations, are subject to Chapter 6. They conclude in a set of design principles of the B2GPM that are being introduced in the chapter. Chapter 7 covers the second round of design by refining the elements of B2G collaboration and the design principles. It continues with the design of the B2GPM. The composition, description, and documentation of the procedure model are the core part of this chapter. Chapter 8 is dedicated to the question of required organizational adoption to deploy the B2GPM. The model is seen as a procedural innovation by which B2G collaboration in customs management can be further improved. The applicability of the B2GPM is based on a series of evaluation cycles and results in the provision of influencing factors of organizational adoption.