Analysis of the customer- based efficiency at workplace for tourism industry using house of quality

The aim of the study is to evaluate the customer expectations and workplace efficiency of tourism industry in the competitive market environment. For this purpose, house of quality is applied to measure the relative importance of the customer expectations and to rank the workplace efficiency based on customer needs using the fuzzy systems. A set of criteria for the customer expectations and workplace efficiency is defined with the supported literature to weight and rank the factors. Fuzzy DEMATEL is applied for weighting the criteria and fuzzy VIKOR is used for ranking the technical factors of competitive tourism industry. The findings show that tourism companies should mainly focus on designing services for the customers to use easily. In this context, website of the tourism companies should be redeveloped so that the users should understand all details regarding the tourism companies much easily. In addition, technological competency should be provided by the tourism companies to increase their competitive power

The Integration of Systems Dynamics and Balanced Scorecards in Strategic Healthcare Policy Simulation Analysis

This paper uses simulation modelling techniques and presents summarized model outputs using the balanced scorecard approach. The simulation models have been formulated with the use of empirical health, clinical and financial data extracted from clinical data warehouses of a healthcare group. By emphasising the impact of strategic financial and clinical performance measures on healthcare institutions, it is argued that hospitals, in particular, need to re-focus cost-cutting efforts in areas that do not impact clinicians, patient satisfaction or quality of care. The authors have added a real time component to business activity monitoring with the executive dashboards shown as graphs in this paper. This study demonstrates that it is possible to understand health policy interactions and improve hospital performance metrics through evaluation using balanced scorecards and normalized output data. Evidence from this research shows that the hospital executives involved were enthusiastic about the visual interactive interface that provides the transparency needed to isolate policy experimentation from complex model structures that map strategic behaviour

Consumer Generated Advertising in Blogs

Blogs are the newest and potentially most attractive online media available to marketers. This chapter discusses the unique nature of blogs and the growing power of consumer generated content. This raises a number of questions as well as new opportunities. As the authors point out that existing literature on blog marketing only discusses the possible advantages of using blogs as a marketing tool and the addition of blogs into the marketing mix. However, the problem is that these studies totally ignored consumers’ perception towards blogs that carry advertisements. The rise of advertising companies that have stepped in to fill the gap between companies and bloggers, are discussed. Some examples of successful blog advertising campaigns are also provided. This chapter also presents a conceptual model that examines the salient factors that are likely to influence consumer attitude towards blogs and towards advertising in blogs, and more specifically on sponsored posts on blogs. It is hoped that this chapter would encourage other researchers to take a look at this unique media which in turn will help shed new light on how blogs are enabling a new model of consumer collaboration and consumer generated advertising