Innovative Supplier Selection: Key Success Factors

Due  to  the  emergence  of  globalization  and  shrinking  distances, companies don’t  mind  going   to new unexplored locations in search of suitable suppliers. However, the suitability of suppliers can be measured in terms of its technical competence and innovativeness. The aim of this paper is to find out the necessary parameters to check the innovativeness of suppliers. This paper looks at how the authors analyzed existing literature on supplier selection based on their innovativeness

Sustainability: Overview and Concepts

In this paper, the author discusses the sustainability and explores some seminal definitions and the background of sustainability. Due to the globalization and severe competition, organizations are working hard to get the edge over competitors. In such volatile situations, understanding sustainability, its concepts and applications can pave the path for success. In brief, this paper provides an overview of sustainability and its concepts

The role of energy consumption in Hotel Operations

Energy consumption represents between 3 and 6 percent of hotel operating costs and is responsible of 60 percent of its CO2 emissions. It has increased from 25-30 percent over the last decade, and is forecasted to continue growing due to more demanding standards and the development of electronic equipment. It may vary with the influence of various factors including building characteristics, hotel features, location and operations, however, the main hotel’s energy end-user is temperature regulation (including room heating, hot water and air conditioning), which represents 69 percent of hotel’s energy consumption (Beske et al, 2014). Various measures can be taken within hotels to reduce their energy consumption, some involving important technical costs, which is a crucial parameter when putting in place a sustainable plan, whereas others only need human care. The efficiency of these measures greatly depends on the collaboration and implication of all stakeholders. Among stakeholders, hotel chains are in the best position to promote and implement eco-friendly policies (Ricaurte, 2011). Indeed, due to their size, strength and international network, they are highly influential in setting up trends and best practices and dispose of a range of operational, communication, training, monitoring, certification and provide tools to do so (Sarkis et al, 2011). An efficient tool is operating agreement, which constrains the hotels to respect a list of technical, architectural, operational, requirements to enter a brand (Singh and Power, 2009). The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how hotel chains can use hotel operating agreements to regulate hotels energy consumption. Approach: What is energy consumption in hotels? Why hotel chains are in a favourable position to develop sustainability? Management agreements versus brand standards: what are the best tools to increase sustainability in hotels? In order to answer to these questions, the work was organised into two parts: a desk study, to find researches, reports and statistics already done on this topic. And an investigation directly towards hotel chains through a questionnaire, in order to ask them about the importance of sustainability issues in their firms, the actions they already put in place and the ones that they could do. For the desk study, the sources used were mainly consulting firms and international organisations reports, hotel chain brochures and press releases and academic books on this field. Even if this subject is currently a hot topic, the available literature is still limited and environmental issues are deal with in a more general way in the tourism industry and not specifically for the hospitality industry. This is mainly due to the diversity of this industry and the various specificities of the properties: each hotel is unique and its environmental impact in terms of energy will depend on lots of factors, including its location, architecture, size, category… It is therefore complicated to define and model a base case or delimit ranges of acceptable and not acceptable energy consumption strategies. Regarding the investigation, it was based on an interview of 40 of the largest international hotel brands, to whom a questionnaire with a series of questions related to their eco-friendly policy was sent. Once returned, their answer was analysed and compiled to produce recapitulating graphs to underline the associated findings. Findings: The combined results of the desk study and investigation shown that hotel chains are increasingly concerned about sustainability issues, both for their image and ethic as well as for economic reasons, as reducing their energy consumption is decreasing their energy bill. However, they still face difficulties to implement eco-friendly policies as they need to involve all the stakeholders, including investors, employees and clients, giving a crucial rule to training and communication to insure the success of these policies. As suspected, management agreements and brand standards appeared to be the main tools at the hotel chains disposal to clearly and efficiently set up sustainable policies, as these documents serve as guiding manuals to implement processes. Their propose are different, which make them complementary: management agreements define the legal square/the form whereas brand standards define the operational side/the content. Based on these findings, detailed recommendations on how to include sustainable policies within these documents were made in order to define what actions can be presented in each document and how, as they will not be mentioned in the same way. Sanctions and obligations of the parties were also underlined, as they are the basis of the partnership between a hotel and a chain. Contribution: As practical recommendations, they can be used in an operational way by hotels, hotel chains and legal consultants to help them in the formulation and redaction of management agreements and brand standards, as they can be used as a methodological guide. Regarding the contribution of this paper to the theory, it gives a new way of seeing sustainability in the hospitality industry, as it directly puts the responsibility on the hotel chains. In that sense, the approach is rather new as there are no researches on the subject, the main areas of analysis being concentrated on the property

Identification of environmental supply chain bottlenecks:A case study of the Ethiopian Healthcare Supply Chain

The increasing rate of environmental concern and awareness by society has attracted attention from researchers and organisations to consider how to proceed towards green supply chains. The purpose of this paper is to identify operational bottlenecks in the multi-tier supply chain to guide organisations towards where to concentrate their efforts to address their supply chain environmental challenges.acceptedVersion© 2021. This is the authors' accepted and refereed manuscript to the article. The final authenticated version is available online at: https://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/full/10.1108/MEQ-12-2019-027

Circular economy practices and environmental performance: Analysing the role of big data analytics capability and responsible research and innovation

This study employs dynamic capability view theory to comprehend the interplay between big data analytics capability (BDAC), responsible research and innovation (RRI) and circular economy practices (CEPs) as an execution strategy for improving environmental performance. The study uses partial least square structural equation modelling to analyse primary survey data collected from 326 manufacturers. The results indicate that BDAC, RRI and CEPs favourably affect environmental performance. Notably, RRI emerges as the most influential factor among the three. Furthermore, the findings suggest that implementing CEPs serves as a partial mediator for the influence of BDAC and RRI on environmental performance. Surprisingly, the study finds that the moderating impact of resource commitment is not statistically significant in any of the three pairwise interactions involving BDAC, RRI and CEPs with respect to environmental performance. The results have various intriguing implications for how manufacturers can enhance their circular economy strategies to achieve better environmental performance, representing a noteworthy contribution to the foundational theory of the dynamic capability view. Finally, these findings also provide valuable insights to managers, enabling a deeper understanding of the determinants that contribute to deploying CEPs and improving environmental performance within a manufacturing setting.publishedVersio

A Real Options Approach to growth opportunities and resilience aftermath of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Purpose Facing the challenges posed by the pandemic of COVID-19, this paper aims to contribute to the resilience of businesses through the development of a real options approach (ROA) that provides alternatives and opportunities for a decision process under situations when future events and outcomes are unknown and not capable of being known from current information. Design/methodology/approach This paper involves a stochastic modelling process in generating a set of absolute option values, using available data and scenarios from the COVID-19 pandemic event. The modelling and simulations using ROA suggest how strategic portfolios resolve the growing problem during the endemic to all but in the most isolated societies. Findings This study finds the emergent correlation between circuit breakers and lockdowns, which have brought about a “distorted gravity” effect (inverse growth of global businesses and trades). However, “time-to-build” real options (i.e. deferral, expand, switch and compound exchange) start to function in the adaptive-transformative capabilities for growth opportunities of both government and corporate sectors. Significantly, some sectors grow faster than others while the compound exchange remains primarily challenging. Clearly, the government and corporate sectors are entangled, inevitably, the decoherence allows for the former to change uncertainty in the latter; therefore, government sector options change option values in the corporate sector. Originality/value The ROA by empirically focusing on both government and corporate sectors demonstrates under conditions of uncertainty how options in decision-making generate opportunities that hitherto have not been recognised and exercised upon by research in the immediate context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Importantly, the ROA provides an insightful concatenation (capability–behaviour approach) that drives resilience.acceptedVersio

Evaluating hospital performance with plant capacity utilization and machine learning

This study extends the measurement of plant capacity utilization by incorporating undesirable outputs. We select indicators through feature selection in machine learning and also introduce an undesirable output for assessment in these models. By defining and applying four plant capacity concepts, we analyze plant capacity utilization in health institutions in 31 provinces in China over the last 11 years (2009 to 2019). This paper has two main contributions. First, we propose a refined by-production hospital technology by introducing the mortality rate into the performance evaluation of public hospitals. Second, we expand the measures of plant capacity utilization with undesirable outputs. The preliminary results show that after the introduction of the death rate, the long-run output-oriented plant capacity utilization of medical institutions is significantly impacted. Furthermore, we found a high level of long-run input-oriented plant capacity utilization tends to increase mortality.acceptedVersio