Value enhanced collaborative working (VECW)

In recent years, the service industry has been made aware of the advantages of risk sharing and inter-firm collaborations. In the current turbulent business environment, a large proportion of Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SME) firms rely on collaboration and partnering with other businesses. The value of such collaboration is highly enhanced by pooling resources to help exploit complementarities between the collaborating businesses and significantly increasing performance and management. Many studies have been conducted on the determinants of collaboration success or failures. However, authors have suggested further research to provide a framework to cover the factors responsible for enhanced value within collaborative working. In particular, the susceptibility of SMEs to successfully collaborate is significantly less than that of large organisations. Hence this was the focus of the current study. The research was focused on establishing the value enhancement of collaborative working within ServQ’s, the sponsoring organisation’s, collaborative environment. The main aim of this research project is ‘To investigate the potential of Value-Enhanced Collaborative Working (VECW) in an SME management advisory firm’. The aim was achieved with the help of the development of a VECW framework based on the issues faced by ServQ’s collaborative environment. To achieve this aim, an inductive research approach was adopted; this was facilitated by literature reviews and research methods such as semi-structured interviews, focus groups and scenario planning. This was to ensure that the project was an applied research based on the sound foundations of available theories on collaborative working. The research was initiated with a preliminary case study of the sponsoring organisation to better understand it. This period of initial investigation entailed learning more about the organisation’s management and working culture. Parallel to the initial case study, a literature review helped establish a definition of Value Enhanced Collaborative Working (VECW) as well as a conceptual VECW framework. Three key factors were identified in the conceptual VECW framework; these were considered as three separate but equally important branches that together will create a sustainable longterm collaborative working environment. The first factor identified was the People factor; the main output from this was the development of a Collaboration Charter. The Process factor developed a business process model for ServQ while the Tools factor was established through scenario planning. The output of this research was a development of a VECW framework. The research work progressed chronologically by first developing a conceptual VECW framework followed by the development of each of the People, Process and Tool factors in further detail with the help of mechanisms such as Collaboration Charter and business process models. Eventually the framework recommended how all these three factors together enhance the value of collaboration in ServQ. These outputs established the mechanisms to balance all the three factors within ServQ resulting in development of a sustainable collaboration environment. The research has contributed to knowledge by providing a VECW framework in an industrial setting that can be replicated in similar organisations with required changes. In addition, it complements the wide array of literature pertaining to Collaborative Working, SMEs, services organisations and Value

Developing a B2B E-Commerce Evolution Model -- The Case Studies of Seven Industries in Taiwan

The e-commerce environment is changing fast and getting mature, the internet technology enabled evolution created many new business organizations and new business models. It also caused new competitions and new management challenges. Although B2B e-marketplace have been promoted as tools for reducing transaction costs, streamlining process efficiency, and enabling virtual collaboration among partners, there are still not many successful B2B e-marketplaces in Asian. This research tried to develop an evolution model based on the IOS (Inter-Organizational Systems) model defined by Benjamin (1990)(1)and Applegate et al, (1996)(2). Through over 100 firms’ case studies in seven industries of Taiwan, the patents of business partnership structures and the path of e-marketplace evolution were found. In order to explore the factors effected e-marketplace evolution, this paper summarized the possible impact factors based on ‘Transaction cost theory’, ‘Resource dependent theory’, ‘Institution theory’, and the ‘Contextual Influences’ which were highlighted as three levels in previous study – socio-cultural, national/regional, and structural (Hsiao and Ming, 2002)(3). The questionnaires were developed and mailed to 980 firms on the list of class-A members of ‘Taiwan Taiwan Electric and Electronic Manufacturers\u27 Association.’ 178 valid questionnaires were received and investigated. The data analysis result suggested that factors of institutionalization effect may be one of the most significant impact dimensions of e-marketplace evolution

The Impact of National Culture on How Innovation Is Facilitated: A Comparative Study of Innovation-Enhancing Management Practices in Chinese and Finnish Companies

The purpose for this thesis is to try to understand main differences in innovation manage-ment practices that emerge in different cultural context, namely China and Finland. The study creates a framework of innovation-enhancing management practices based on the literature on innovation, entrepreneurship, and human resource management and subse-quently aims to combine this knowledge with the cultural dimensions of Hofstede (1980; 1984) and business system theory by Whitley (2000) to explain the differences of how this process works in different countries. Innovation-enhancing management practices focus particularly on empowerment-enhancing HRM practices and knowledge management practices. I conducted a semi-structured interview study with three companies in China and three companies in Finland. The methodology was an application of a grounded theory building through case studies in order to uncover the differences in management practices in Chinese and Finnish companies. Overall, I identified 67 different management practices, out of which 33 practices were considered to be innovation-enhancing management practices. These were further divided under five innovation-enhancing management practice groups: promotion of learning, training, efficient procedures, empowering people and teamwork. The research suggests that Chinese and Finnish companies utilize different management practices to facilitate innovation. While the companies used practices in all of the management practice groups, the individual practices under each group, which were important, were rather different. However, similar practices were in customer collaboration and utilization of multiple different sources for acquiring new knowledge. Moreover, the Chinese and Finnish companies emphasize teamwork in innovations and empowering individuals but stress the importance of withholding personal liability for risks and honest mistakes emerging in innovation development. The main contribution of the study is in increasing our understanding of what kind of management practices work in different cultural settings. For example, collaboration activities concerning innovations work differently in Chinese and Finnish companies due to the difference in long-term orientation of the cultures. Moreover, this research shows that while management practices might be similar on a conceptual level, the contents and impact of similarly defined practices often differ significantly in different cultures

Organizational change in the United States Forest Service: the role of community collaboration

2015 Summer.Over the last three decades, collaboration has come to the fore as a way to address natural resource management problems that are often complex and contentious. As such, a new way of doing business has emerged for the United State Forest Service (USFS) as it engages community members in collaborative governance arrangements created to address forest management issues. USFS field-level personnel and the community stakeholders involved in collaborative governance arrangements expend valuable and limited resources to obtain collaborative outcomes. Field observations suggest that in order for collaborative outcomes to be durable and maintain longevity, changes must occur at the organizational level. However, few existing studies that document organizational changes made by natural resource land management agencies as a result of the agency's engagement in collaborative governance arrangements with community stakeholders. This dissertation provides theoretical and practical insights into the organizational changes occurring at three USFS field offices. This exploratory, qualitative study employs a case study approach and semi-structured interviews were conducted with agency personnel and non-agency stakeholders. Document analysis of meeting minutes and personal observation data were also conducted. The data yielded the richest results when interpreted through three overarching theoretical lenses: organizational change, public administration, and collaborative governance. The results revealed that organizational changes are occurring at the field-level as a result of the actions of individual actors as they cross organizational boundaries. The outcomes of these changes can be beneficial to the agency, but a cautionary tale is presented suggesting that collaborative processes may impede, if not derailed, by power imbalances. The role of trust, or more accurately, the lack thereof, and its ability to change organizational boundaries and create power imbalances in the shared decision-making arena emerged as finding of importance to land managers and collaborative governance theory. This dissertation advances the scholarly and practical knowledge of organizational change by presenting empirical evidence of the impact of community collaboration on federal natural resource agencies. It is necessary for the leadership of the USFS to understand their role in the collaborative process and to understand how and why these changes are taking place if they are to be sensitive to the added pressures and tensions that collaboration brings to their individual staff members. Managers in the USFS will need to be cognizant of the attributes of trust and should encourage their staff to build trust with stakeholders if they wish to maintain equitable power positions in the shared decision-making process. Future research that provides evidence of the linkage between organizational change, trust, and power would be useful in further understanding how the collaborative process and the collaborative behavior of individuals in natural resource management links to the outcomes of collaboration

An analysis of buyer-supplier integration for servitization strategies

AbstractThe Business Model (BM) transformation process, changing from a traditional manufacturing BM to BM focused on servitization (servitized BM), may increase the management complexity, which is also reflected in a need of superior levels of organizational knowledge. Therefore, one alternative to deal with this challenge is by acquiring knowledge from suppliers. However, there is still a lack of studies analyzing the collaboration intensity and knowledge transfer with suppliers to be successful in the BM transformation for servitization. Thus, this paper aims to understand how companies deal with suppliers’ knowledge integration aiming for servitization and to understand the knowledge transfer dynamics in this integration. Aiming this, we adapted to the context of servitized solutions development, the framework proposed by Le Dain and Merminod (2014) for supplier integration in collaborative new product development (NPD), which combines three typical supplier involvement configurations (black, grey and white box integration) with the three knowledge sharing levels proposed by Carlile (2004) (transfer, translation and transformation). By means of a multiple-case study analysis of seven multinational companies, we first reinterpreted the three classical supplier integration configuration, showing how they can happen in servitization; then, we analyzed the levels of knowledge sharing that are present in each one of the three suppliers’ involvement configurations. Our results show differences of the framework when compared to the original one for supplier involvement. We also discuss causes of such a difference between purely product development and servitized product development

Sustainability experiments in the agri-food system : uncovering the factors of new governance and collaboration success

In recent years, research, society and industry recognize the need to transform the agri-food system towards sustainability. Within this process, sustainability experiments play a crucial role in transforming the structure, culture and practices. In literature, much attention is given to new business models, even if the transformation of conventional firms toward sustainability may offer opportunities to accelerate the transformation. Further acceleration could be achieved through collaboration of multiple actors across the agri-food system, but this calls for a systems approach. Therefore, we developed and applied a new sustainability experiment systems approach (SESA) consisting of an analytical framework that allows a reflective evaluation and cross-case analysis of multi-actor governance networks based on business and learning evaluation criteria. We performed a cross-case analysis of four agri-food sustainability experiments in Flanders to test and validate SESA. Hereby, the key factors of the success of collaboration and its performance were identified at the beginning of a sustainability experiment. Some of the key factors identified were risk sharing and the drivers to participate. We are convinced that these results may be used as an analytical tool for researchers, a tool to support and design new initiatives for policymakers, and a reflective tool for participating actors

Collaborative improvement as an inspiration for supply chain collaboration

The battlefield of competition is today moving from the level of\ud individual firms to the one of the extended enterprises, that is, networks of customers and their suppliers. This paper discusses how learning and continuous improvement today take place in processes based on daily collaboration at intercompany level, i.e. Extended Manufacturing Enterprises (EMEs). The purpose of the paper is to present a preliminary theory on Collaborative Improvement (CoI), i.e. continuous improvement at the EME level. Based on a literature review on Supply Networks, and Continuous Improvement and on evidence from two explorative case studies, the paper proposes a model for Collaborative Improvement in EMEs and discusses a research approach based on Action Research and Action Learning to further develop preliminary theory and actionable knowledge on how to foster and sustain CoI in EMEs

Improving data preparation for the application of process mining

Immersed in what is already known as the fourth industrial revolution, automation and data exchange are taking on a particularly relevant role in complex environments, such as industrial manufacturing environments or logistics. This digitisation and transition to the Industry 4.0 paradigm is causing experts to start analysing business processes from other perspectives. Consequently, where management and business intelligence used to dominate, process mining appears as a link, trying to build a bridge between both disciplines to unite and improve them. This new perspective on process analysis helps to improve strategic decision making and competitive capabilities. Process mining brings together data and process perspectives in a single discipline that covers the entire spectrum of process management. Through process mining, and based on observations of their actual operations, organisations can understand the state of their operations, detect deviations, and improve their performance based on what they observe. In this way, process mining is an ally, occupying a large part of current academic and industrial research. However, although this discipline is receiving more and more attention, it presents severe application problems when it is implemented in real environments. The variety of input data in terms of form, content, semantics, and levels of abstraction makes the execution of process mining tasks in industry an iterative, tedious, and manual process, requiring multidisciplinary experts with extensive knowledge of the domain, process management, and data processing. Currently, although there are numerous academic proposals, there are no industrial solutions capable of automating these tasks. For this reason, in this thesis by compendium we address the problem of improving business processes in complex environments thanks to the study of the state-of-the-art and a set of proposals that improve relevant aspects in the life cycle of processes, from the creation of logs, log preparation, process quality assessment, and improvement of business processes. Firstly, for this thesis, a systematic study of the literature was carried out in order to gain an in-depth knowledge of the state-of-the-art in this field, as well as the different challenges faced by this discipline. This in-depth analysis has allowed us to detect a number of challenges that have not been addressed or received insufficient attention, of which three have been selected and presented as the objectives of this thesis. The first challenge is related to the assessment of the quality of input data, known as event logs, since the requeriment of the application of techniques for improving the event log must be based on the level of quality of the initial data, which is why this thesis presents a methodology and a set of metrics that support the expert in selecting which technique to apply to the data according to the quality estimation at each moment, another challenge obtained as a result of our analysis of the literature. Likewise, the use of a set of metrics to evaluate the quality of the resulting process models is also proposed, with the aim of assessing whether improvement in the quality of the input data has a direct impact on the final results. The second challenge identified is the need to improve the input data used in the analysis of business processes. As in any data-driven discipline, the quality of the results strongly depends on the quality of the input data, so the second challenge to be addressed is the improvement of the preparation of event logs. The contribution in this area is the application of natural language processing techniques to relabel activities from textual descriptions of process activities, as well as the application of clustering techniques to help simplify the results, generating more understandable models from a human point of view. Finally, the third challenge detected is related to the process optimisation, so we contribute with an approach for the optimisation of resources associated with business processes, which, through the inclusion of decision-making in the creation of flexible processes, enables significant cost reductions. Furthermore, all the proposals made in this thesis are validated and designed in collaboration with experts from different fields of industry and have been evaluated through real case studies in public and private projects in collaboration with the aeronautical industry and the logistics sector

Propositions and future directions of marketers’ relationship effectiveness in mergers and acquisitions integration

Research on marketing integration related to mergers and acquisitions (M&A) has paid little attention to the combination of similar resources between two similar departments, particularly in the M&A context. Furthermore, existing research does not clearly demonstrate the role of relationship among marketers within the amalgamation process between acquirer and target firm.Hence, this paper addresses a few propositions that relate to strengthening the relationship effectiveness among the marketers in both firms, which at the same time uphold the M&A performance. Collaboration and interaction are proposed as drivers to increase optimistic relationship among the marketers.A quantitative research design is suggested as this method is not popular compared to qualitative methods such as case study, event-study and longitudinal approach in M&A.Drawing from the extant literature, propositions are developed and future directions are presented elaborating success factors to improve M&A integration performance