Swift trust and commitment: the missing links for humanitarian supply chain coordination?

Coordination among actors in a humanitarian relief supply chain decides whether a relief operation can be or successful or not. In humanitarian supply chains, due to the urgency and importance of the situation combined with scarce resources, actors have to coordinate and trust each other in order to achieve joint goals. This paper investigated empirically the role of swift trust as mediating variable for achieving supply chain coordination. Based on commitment-trust theory we explore enablers of swift-trust and how swift trust translates into coordination through commitment. Based on a path analytic model we test data from the National Disaster Management Authority of India. Our study is the first testing commitment-trust theory (CTT) in the humanitarian context, highlighting the importance of swift trust and commitment for much thought after coordination. Furthermore, the study shows that information sharing and behavioral uncertainty reduction act as enablers for swift trust. The study findings offer practical guidance and suggest that swift trust is a missing link for the success of humanitarian supply chains

Development and implementation of dashboards for operational monitoring using participatory design in a lean context

The need to increase employees’ productivity in a hypermarket online delivery services is the persuader of the present work. A costumer’ request, through the hypermarket website, initiates the process of collection and delivery of the ordered products. This process briefly comprises to gather the products from the shelves and to report the right indicators, at the right time, to store supervisors. To present the corresponding data and to follow this activity, quantitative dashboards were developed. These dashboards contained all the key indicators through graphs facilitating the reading and comparisons. Also, a dashboard in real time with the identification of employees without activity over a predetermined period of time and indicating the percentage of daily objectives already achieved, helping managers, was developed. All the actors, the project team, decision makers, designer, were involved in the design of the dashboards in a sharing process with the identification of aspects that should be reported or improved. At the end, dashboard enhances decision-making and has a positive impact in operational monitoring.(UID/CEC/00319/2013)info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Fostering Learners’ Performance with On-demand Metacognitive Feedback

Activating learners’ deeper thinking mechanisms and reflective judgement (i.e., metacognition) improves learning performance. This study exploits visual analytics to promote metacognition and delivers task-related visualizations to provide on-demand feedback. The goal is to broaden current knowledge on the patterns of on-demand metacognitive feedback usage, with respect to learners’ performance. The results from a between-group and within-group study (N = 174) revealed statistically significant differences on the feedback usage patterns between the performance-based learner clusters. Foremost, the findings shown that learners who consistently request task-related metacognitive feedback and allocate considerable amounts of time on processing it, are more likely to handle task-complexity and cope with conflicting tasks, as well as to achieve high scores. These findings contribute to considering task-related visual analytics as a metacognitive feedback format that facilitates learners’ on-task engagement and data-driven sense-making and increases their awareness of the tasks’ requirements. Implications of the approach are also discussed

Designing the Function of Health Technology Assessment as a Support for Hospital Management

Investment in Health Technologies (HTs) is one of the crucial points for hospital managers. It affects the goals and strategic orientation of the whole Health Organization. Decision-making regarding the employment of new technologies involves, prevalently, the hospital level, which directly concerns the healthcare delivery process and its design. Hospital-Based Health Technology Assessment (HB-HTA) is aimed at selecting the portfolio of new HTs that provides the best balance between competing targets, namely, cost containment and quality improvement. This objective is achievable by thinking about how to improve the service delivered, through the use of innovative cost-effective HT. Accordingly, the HTA role deals with the operational modalities of hospital departments, and it is strictly related to outcomes desired and in respect to budgets. This evaluative process should be coherent with specific health organization necessities given that each one is concerned with its own geographic area, its own specific patients’ epidemiology, the social environment, and financial resources’ availability. However, HTA is usually run by practitioners whose competences contemplate mainly clinical and technical aspects; hence, the absence of a focus on performance management (PM) represents the main weakness of this function. Thus, starting from the current body of literature in the fields of PM and HT management, this work theoretically identifies how to design an HB-HTA func- tion and which the main relevant evaluation perspectives are. By explaining the implementation stages, it will be shown how HTA at the hospital level should be able to combine the different perspectives of business performance (financial and nonfinancial) with clinical needs