Structured process improvements in facilities management organisations: Best practice case studies in the retail sector

Facilities management is a key managerial discipline and large corporations are increasingly recognising its importance in respect of achieving organisational goals and objectives. Enterprises are able to improve their performance by the more effective use of resources, the matching of appropriate support systems to business activities, and the application of assertive management by those best qualified and equipped to carry it out. However, FM organisations lack clear guidelines to direct their improvement efforts and to benchmark their performance against other organisations. The SPICE FM (Structured Process improvement in construction environments – facilities management) maturity framework was developed as a response to this requirement. SPICE FM draws a distinction between FM organisations that have ‘mature’ or well-established processes, and those where the processes are ‘immature’. This paper briefly describes the characteristics of the SPICE FM Framework, followed by a review of the key findings from the case study undertaken

Governance of Environment-Enhancing Technical change - past experiences and suggestions for improvement

There is much talk about environmental policies being faulty. Past policies are being criticisedfor failing to achieve environmental goals (the environmentalist complaint), for being overlyexpensive (the industrialist complaint) and for failing to encourage innovation and dynamicefficiency (the complaint of economists dealing with innovation). This paper looks at theinnovation and technology adoption effects of past environmental policies. It finds indeed fewexamples of environmental policies that stimulated innovation. The common technologyresponse is the use of expensive end-of-pipe solutions and incremental process changesoffering limited environmental gains. This begs the question: why did the policies fail topromote more radical innovation and dynamic efficiency? One explanation—well-recognisedin the economic literature—is the capture of government policies by special interests. Thispaper offers a second explanation—based on innovation and technology adoption studies—which says that in order to have a decisive and socially beneficial influence policy instrumentsmust be fine-tuned to the circumstances in which sociotechnical change processes occur and tipthe balance. Within this alternative view, the starting point of government interventions is thecapabilities, interests, interdependencies and games of social actors around an environmentalproblem instead of the set of environmental policy instruments for achieving an environmentalgoal. The paper sees a need for government authorities to be explicitly concerned with technicalchange (rather than implicitly through a change in the economic frame conditions) and to beconcerned with institutional arrangements beyond the choice of policy instruments, and act as achange agent. This requires different roles for policy makers: that of a sponsor, planner,regulator, matchmaker, alignment actor and ‘creative game regulator’. The paper offers twoperspectives on environmental policy: an instrument one and a modulation one. The latter isespecially important for promoting innovation and bringing about radical change, somethingwhich is very difficult with traditional regulatory instruments. Instruments for promotingenvironment-enhancing technical change are appraised and suggestions are offered for thepurposes for which different policy instruments may be used in differing economic contexts.environmental economics ;

Reuse of safety certification artefacts across standards and domains: A systematic approach

Reuse of systems and subsystem is a common practice in safety-critical systems engineering. Reuse can improve system development and assurance, and there are recommendations on reuse for some domains. Cross-domain reuse, in which a previously certified product typically needs to be assessed against different safety standards, has however received little attention. No guidance exists for this reuse scenario despite its relevance in industry, thus practitioners need new means to tackle it. This paper aims to fill this gap by presenting a systematic approach for reuse of safety certification artefacts across standards and domains. The approach is based on the analysis of the similarities and on the specification of maps between standards. These maps are used to determine the safety certification artefacts that can be reused from one domain to another and reuse consequences. The approach has been validated with practitioners in a case study on the reuse of an execution platform from railway to avionics. The results show that the approach can be effectively applied and that it can reduce the cost of safety certification across standards and domains. Therefore, the approach is a promising way of making cross-domain reuse more cost-effective in industry.European Commission's FP7 programm

Medical Device Regulations, Industrial Capabilities, and Affordable Healthcare Technology Development: Case Studies from the United Kingdom and South Africa

This thesis concerns the influence of healthcare systems regulation on firm-level capabilities and affordable healthcare technologies. Regulatory change is highly contentious, critics arguing that regulatory changes interfere with the efficiency of the market, and advocates arguing that well designed regulatory changes make markets more efficient and ensure market outcomes are more equitable. To date, very few studies analyze the influence of regulatory change on the medical device industry, and its ability to manufacture and supply affordable healthcare technologies. To respond to this gap, this research employs the Sectoral Systems of Innovation (SSI) approach as a theoretical framework to analyze the influence of regulatory changes on industrial capabilities in medical device industries and affordable healthcare technologies in South Africa and the United Kingdom. A mixed-method approach, focusing on three cases of regulatory change, emphasised documentary analysis and questionnaire-guided interviews to collect primary and secondary data from different sources in the healthcare systems of the two study countries. Regulatory changes facilitated some firms to create new strategies and innovative capabilities. Regulatory changes enabled some firms to develop close collaborative linkages with external providers in search of competitive advantage and improved market positioning. One reactive regulatory change, in particular, illustrated negative influence on innovative capabilities. Smaller firms were at a particular disadvantage in adapting to regulatory change. In the South Africa case, the more stringent regulatory requirements made it hard for domestic suppliers to enter the supply chain and led to joint ventures mainly with multinational corporations. The thesis argues, with empirical evidence, that a more enabling and discriminating regulation that takes into consideration of firms’ technological capabilities can achieve intended goals more efficiently and effectively, than constraining and indiscriminate regulation

Co-regulation and voluntarism in the provision of food safety: lessons from institutional economics

Traditional regulation in the food safety domain has been in the form of mandatory, inflexible food safety controls that are applied to firms. There has been a trend away from this regulatory paradigm towards more co-regulation and self-regulation by industry. This paper investigates the potential for systemic failure in the provision of safe food that might arise as a consequence of this new regulatory paradigm. These systemic failures occur owing to the fact that the food safety outcome depends on the behaviour of the three sets of agents (firms, consumers and the regulator). These populations of agents have generally been treated in the literature as homogeneous in terms of their behaviour and strategies. Further, the actions taken by any one agent are assumed to be independent of those taken by others. The institutional economics model that is developed assumes heterogeneity and inter-agent strategic interactions. Given this (more realistic) depiction of behaviour, instances of potential regulatory inefficiencies arise . In particular, the model challenges the trend towards voluntarism and self-regulation.co-regulation, strategic behaviour, food safety, ex ante regulation, institutional economics, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Institutional and Behavioral Economics,

Standards as a platform for innovation and learning in the global economy: a case study of Chilean salmon farming industry

Conventionally, standards are considered as a governance tool in the production system in a one-directional and hierarchical relationship between foreign trans-national corporations (TNCs) or global buyers on one hand and subsidiaries and producers on the other. They were considered as transmitting necessary specifications of goods (codified knowledge) to the producers. Despite the fact that this process begins with a one-way power relationship and associated flow of knowledge and standards, such one-way flows may become consolidated into two-way interlinkages when power balances themselves reverse with the development of collective capability in catching-up countries. In such a context, standards increasingly act as a catalyst for creating collective interfaces where diverse knowledge from horizontal and vertical relationships (local and global, tacit and codified, and buyer and producer) intercept and converge to promote interactions and learning for those involved. The Chilean salmon farming industry is examined to understand how standards compliance enhanced collective capability.Standards, Industrial standards, Capability, Governance, Fishing industry, Chile, Catching up

A new governance approach for multi-firm projects: lessons from Olkiluoto 3 and Flamanville 3 nuclear power plant projects

We analyze governance in two contemporary nuclear power plant projects: Olkiluoto 3 (Finland) and Flamanville 3 (France). We suggest that in the governance of large multi-firm projects, any of the prevalent governance approaches that rely on market, hierarchy, or hybrid forms, is not adequate as such. This paper opens up avenues towards a novel theory of governance in large projects by adopting a project network view with multiple networked firms within a single project, and by simultaneously going beyond organizational forms that cut across the traditional firm–market dichotomy. Our analysis suggests four changes in the prevailing perspective towards the governance of large projects. First, there should be a shift from viewing multi-firm projects as hierarchical contract organizations to viewing them as supply networks characterized by a complex and networked organizational structure. Second, there should be a shift in the emphasis of the predominant modes of governance, market and hierarchy towards novel governance approaches that emphasize network-level mechanisms such as self-regulation within the project. Third, there should be a shift from viewing projects as temporary endeavors to viewing projects as short-term events or episodes embedded in the long-term sphere of shared history and expected future activities among the involved actors. Fourth, there should be a shift from the prevailing narrow view of a hierarchical project management system towards an open system view of managing in complex and challenging institutional environments