Strategic Planning In Retailing: Cases from Thai Retailing

ABSTRACT Preliminary desk researches suggested that strategic planing and management needs empirical evidence to broaden itsapplication to different industries, The purose of the study is to examine the practical framework for the plannng and development of strategy and strategic plans from the current practice of retail operations in Thailand. Theoretical reviews were carred out at early stage of the research on strategic decision making, planning systems, strategy and retailing to build a framework for research objectives and to form research questions. The main objective of the research is, therefore, to examine forms of strategy development process and the influence of marketing concepts to the planning processes of selected organisations. Fieldwork was planned to investigate at several modern retailers in Thailand, where retail competition has been intensive. Five retailers allowed their co-operation, and several methods of data collections, such as different types of interviews, observations and the analysis of achieval record, were employed to generate five case studies. The main conclusion drawn from the study would indicate that the term "strategic planning process", together with budgeting and long-range planning systems, are embedded in yearly periodical planning systems that react to external environment challenges only in the short term. The yearly periodical planing system together with an administrative system forms an on-going planning cycle. The strategic management process, on the other hand, is future-oriented planning process that has a time-span of more than a year. Strategic decisions generated by the strategic management process together with the outcome of other strategic decision-making are the inputs to both components of the on-going planning cycle. Therefore, short-term and long-term strategy development processes are distinct processes that require different approaches. However, the two processes are linked and both should be embedded within the overall strategic development process. The study also suggests that Thai retailers have to strengthen their strategy development process to be able to encourage learning and understanding of key business environments, business concepts and strategies before generating their own "winning formula". The outcome from the thesis is, therefore, a practical framework for the planning and development of strategy and strategic plans from the current practices of retail operations in Thailand that can be applied as a checklist for monitoring and evaluation in large-to-medium sized retailing organisations in similar trading environments

Some Observations on Recent Developments in the Financial Sector in South East Asia

The financial system in the South East Asian region during the last two decades has experienced radical changes, to a large extent, in response to changing domestic and external conditions. This paper discusses some of these evolutionary changes and the underlying factors that have led to these changes.

Some Observations on Training and Manpower Planning in a Deregulated Banking Environment

Some observations are made on the training and manpower planning of the banking sector in a deregulated environment. This paper discusses the implications of deregulation on the concept and ideas of manpower planning and development.

The impact of corporate entrepreneurship and human resources management practices on organisational performances: the mediating role of employee engagement

PhD (Business Management)Department of Business ManagementCorporate entrepreneurship positively impacts organisational growth and profitability by offering a competitive edge over innovation-driven technology advancements and a tumultuous global marketplace. As developing countries become more involved in international competition, the significance of human resources as a source of high organisational performance has become apparent. Combining corporate entrepreneurship activities and human resource management practices is vital for enhancing organisational performance. There has been increasing research on corporate entrepreneurship, however, research is scarceonthe influence of corporate entrepreneurship, human resources management, and employee engagement on the organisational performance of telecommunication organisations, particularly, in Zimbabwe. This study's purpose was to investigate the impact of corporate entrepreneurship and human resources management practices on organisational performance through the mediating role of employee engagement. This research followed a positivist research paradigm. Four hundred (400) employees in the telecommunication industry were selected using a stratified sampling method and an online questionnaire was utilised to gather data. Descriptive and inferential statistical techniques were employed to analyse data using Statistical Packages for Social Science (SPSS) version 27.0. The hypotheses were tested using multi-regression analysis. The results indicated asignificant relationship between corporate entrepreneurship and human resources management practices on organisational performance. In addition, the results showed that corporate entrepreneurship and human resources management practices, positively impacted employee engagement. Employee engagement emerged to have a positive impact on organisational performance. Employee engagement mediates the relationships between corporate entrepreneurship and organisational performance. Additionally, employee engagement mediates the relationships between human resources management practices and organisational performance. Theresearch broadens the knowledge base in corporate entrepreneurship, human resources management practices, employee engagement, and telecommunication's organisational performance. Policymakers and human resources practitioners, thus, may use this study as a reference point for adopting corporate entrepreneurship policies and human resources management practices strategies aimed at enhancing organisational performance in this unpredictable business environment. Lastly, a conceptual model was developed to link corporate entrepreneurship, human resources management practices, employee engagement, and organisational performance in the telecommunication sector of Zimbabwe.National Research Foundation (NRF

Readings in environmental management

xii, 416 hlm,; ilus,; 22 c

kINetic eMOTION: Beyond the object

Challenging the idea of buildings being identified as objects that merely house human experience and inhabitation, this dissertation argues for a "building machine" that adopts the notion of "performative architecture". Programmed as a Film School, kinetic architecture allows the building to be indeterminate whereby the flexibility to reconfigure itself enables a vast potential of spatial narratives. With the use of cinematic techniques the building machine in partnership with people creates multisensory spatial dimensions in what is seen as a continuous architectural carnival

The Weighted Stochastic Block Model

Community detection is an important task in network analysis, in which we aim to learn a network partition that groups together vertices with similar community-level connectivity patterns. By finding such groups of vertices with similar structural roles, we extract a compact representation of the network\u27s large-scale structure, which can facilitate its scientific interpretation and the prediction of unknown or future interactions. Popular approaches, including the stochastic block model, assume edges are unweighted, which limits their utility by throwing away potentially useful information. We introduce the weighted stochastic block model (WSBM), which generalizes the stochastic block model to networks with edge weights drawn from any exponential family distribution. This model learns from both the presence and weight of edges, allowing it to discover structure that would otherwise be hidden when weights are discarded or thresholded. We describe a Bayesian variational algorithm for efficiently approximating this model\u27s posterior distribution over latent block structures. We then evaluate the WSBM\u27s performance on both edge-existence and edge-weight prediction tasks for both synthetic and real-world weighted networks. In all cases, the WSBM performs as well or better than the best alternatives on these tasks

Reading in Development and Planning: volume II

v, 841 hal.: 29 cm