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Delivery punctuality is essential in supply chain management, yet the cost of untimely delivery is usually assumed to be given or based on intuition and not quantified by facts.

The authors used a data set containing detailed transaction data for a nine-year period on orders and deliveries of sport goods. The methodology is based on applying a polynomial distributed lag model to longitudinal data on supply chain transactions.

The results indicate that small delivery delays up to two weeks decrease the sales by maximum 10% during a period of 3–4 weeks. Longer delays, up to 45 days, have a larger negative effect on sales, which can also last longer. For this case company, the estimated lost sales due to late deliveries (=5 days) were 5.1% of the delivery value. The longer delays got, the large the cost was: delays at least 45 days long were the most costly causing almost 40% of the estimated lost sales.

This study offers a methodology for quantifying lost sales due to delivery delays and estimating how long the poor delivery performance affects retailers' order behaviour.

The results give a quantitative decision-making tool for supply chain managers to estimate the profitability of investments in the supply chain performance, especially on improving punctuality.

Marketing strategies can be used to leverage business in the service sector, specifically in veterinary medicine; among other benefits, it can make a difference in satisfaction and consequent customer loyalty. Marketing should be used with ethics and professionalism due is one administration area that contributes to effective management in the continuous pursuit of quality in the provision of services and demonstrate that veterinary clinics have much to gain if managed with support of marketing strategies. This paper aims to analyze the applicability of marketing strategies in the management of small animal clinics, such as guidelines to the entrepreneurs of this services sector.

Marketing literature is plentiful in proposing alternative strategies, whether focused on the achievement and loyalty of customers, whether to raise the competitiveness of an organization or simply to its survival in the market. In this study, some marketing strategies were selected, on secondary data research, in theoretical framework, to investigate their application in the practice of veterinary medicine. This study emphasizes promotional strategy toward communication with the market and construction of organizational image, using public relations as marketing strategy.

The use of marketing strategies is recommended in the management of small animal clinical practice, especially with respect to the high customer satisfaction by streamlining the procedures and optimizing veterinary services provision.

This study is different because it proposes an integrated system of management techniques in veterinary organizations, which will lead to better efficiency of attendance, adding value to the service provided and generating greater profitability for the organization, which positively reflects on the economic point of view and for the image of the company and its professionals, providing a better quality of life for both clients and their pets.

This study investigates the corruption practices from a behavioral perspective, and aims to verify the impact of health Management Information System (MIS) institutionalization on corruption vulnerabilities and the intention to commit corruption. The studied vulnerabilities are related to management: lack of internal control, accountability, transparency and disburdened administration. This study was conducted in the Brazilian public health system.

A research model and instrument were created based on the literature. The model was later tested using the partial least squares technique. A survey of 355 valid responses followed a pilot test with 87 ones. The respondents were civil servants of the Brazilian public health system.

Seven of the eight hypotheses were confirmed, supporting the main hypothesis that MIS institutionalization impacts individuals’ behavior by reducing their intention to commit corruption. Institutionalized health MIS improves public management, enabling the prevention of favoritism when awarding service provision contracts, undue payments to corrupt employees and waste of medical and hospital supplies.

This research adds to the knowledge on corruption from an individual’s behavior perspective influenced by MIS institutionalization in a Latin American perspective. Corruption is a social and cultural-based phenomenon, which reinforces the importance of understanding the effect of Information Systems institutionalization on corruption vulnerabilities in this context. A research model and instrument were created and validated, confirming corruption vulnerabilities that influence behavior. The intention to commit corruption is reduced when mediated by institutionalized MIS. Consequently, the focus must be shifted from moral beliefs to creating and strengthening organizational capacity to systematically identify and reduce vulnerabilities and deter misbehavior and wrongdoings.

In total, 19 practices of circular economy divided into three groups, internal environmental management, ecological design and investment recovery were studied in a local network composed of small companies and individual entrepreneurs related to common product and by-product flows. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This research presents an applied nature, is characterized as exploratory and adopted the case study as a technical procedure using sources and methods of data collection. The primary data were collected through direct observation of the processes and semi-structured interviews with managers and owners.

The most widespread practices are related to product design. However, in most cases, the implementation was punctual and did not present continuous and corresponding actions, which highlights the embryonic contours of European Commission (EC) in the observed network. The practices from the management category were less observed, which revels the environmental variable is not included in the strategic business planning.

The research documents the application of CE practices in a local network and brings this current paradigm shift to the Brazilian context.

To overcome barriers to the implementation of EC practices, it is suggested to restructure commercial relations, to formulate public policies and to develop infrastructures that facilitate the materiality of flows and the market.

The study highlights the need of public policies that promotes cross-sectoral cooperation in accordance with NSWP objectives.

Despite the focus on EC implemented practices this study offers a framework of the research routes on the main barriers and suggests actions to overcome the challenges in the transition from the economy to the circular model.

This paper aims to assist higher education institutions (HEIs) in their decision-making process to define initiatives and foster research projects contributing to sustainable development (SD) and minimizing the deficits found in the municipalities.

A documental analysis was performed to select HEIs and Brazilian regional development indicators. Then, the assessment of the sustainable and institutional performance of Brazilian municipalities that have HEIs consisted of three parts: clustering with an unsupervised machine learning model, ranking with a hybrid multi-criteria decision making method and visualization of sustainability performance with the dashboard.

The critical analysis of institutional and sustainability indicators contributes to a more active role of HEIs in matters of social responsibility, with a more holistic view of the performance and quality of municipal education. Furthermore, this critical analysis creates a scenario where HEIs can develop public policy proposals in partnership with the government to mitigate the main issues identified.

With this study, HEIs will be able to direct their actions to minimize the deficits found in the municipalities, consolidating their social responsibility.

This study proposes a new decision-support tool with a dashboard of indicators so that HEIs can foster research projects with a focus on regional SD.

This work has as its main objective to discuss the nature of Brazilian Federalism and makes considerations on the origins and deepening of regional inequalities in Brazil. The approach of the work is the consideration that, from the perspective of spatial development, the interference of the Central Government in the economy may follow, in principle, four courses of action. First, the state may interfere in the free play of the market by directing its actions to counteract the automatic operation of the market forces, in order to prevent the trend towards increasing spatial inequality; second the state may adopt a neutral position, leaving market forces to follow their natural course; third, the state may pursue a course of action consistent with the natural trend of the market forces, but without biasing the allocative process; and fourth, the state, finally, may interfere in the free play of the market forces, in such a way as to distort the market‐price mechanism in the wrong direction – and thus, at variance with the precepts of market economic efficiency, without, however, pursuing any objective related to social justice or spatial equity. By analysing the Brazilian federalism in the light of these four possible forms of government actions, the work attempts to unveil the dominant nature of the Brazilian Central Government policies and their spatial implications, in critical moments of the history of the country.

The need for adequate access to documents continues to grow, as does the total volume of the world's publications. Improvements in bibliographic control in the last 10 years have led both to fuller coverage of documents and to better and faster access to references. Document access relies more and more on interlibrary access because the great growth in number and cost of publications is making libraries increasingly unable to provide their readers with all the publications they need. Alternative models of interlibrary provision, according to centralization or decentralization of collections form a useful framework for considering the best solutions for Brazil. In practice, models must always be mixed, and the most important element in planning is to find the optimum balance of centralization and decentralization appropriate to each country. In Brazil, the best solution would almost certainly be the creation of a core collection of scientific and technical journals (excluding medicine and agriculture), a decentralized system for monographs, except Brazilian monographs, and the creation of a single supply centre for report literature. No special provision would be made for conference proceedings, or foreign official publications. Dissertations would be made available by the relevant universities. Trade literature should be collected in major industrial centres for consultation purposes.

Entrepreneurial orientation (EO) is highly emerging in the management literature. However, recent studies highlight the necessity to associate with reflections on this theme, usually approached from an economic perspective, propositions also derived from relational approaches. This paper aims to investigate associations between EO and social networks, specifically about the still little explored relational coupling/decoupling theme.

This paper provides an empirical and qualitative study of religious entrepreneurs. A total of 18 pastors responsible for creating and leading independent neo-Pentecostal churches located in Belo Horizonte/Brazil, selected using the snowball technique, participated in this qualitative, case-study research. Two analysis categories guided data collection: pastors’ EO (behaviors suggestive of their innovativeness, proactivity, competitive aggressiveness, risk-taking and autonomy) and churches’ social framework (the resources and attributes that pastors obtain from their institutional structure).

The study concludes that pastors combine attributes representing their EO and their social structure in developing their religious endeavors.

Among the limitations are the restricted use of semi-structured interviews as a data collection source and the absence of data proving the churches’ performance.

The paper contributes by showing that entrepreneurs can influence the structure of their networks by using EO; proving that networks influence pastors’ EO; revealing recursivity between EO and networks; emphasizing a relational dimension of the EO construct and presenting new theoretical propositions that can be explored and tested in future investigations.

Brazil is characterized by the inexistence of a more robust system of guarantees and rules to minimize risks and protect agents in energy futures contracts. In this sense, this study aims to answer the question of how a centralized clearing agent can compute safety margin requirements to help reduce the systemic risk of the energy futures contracts market in Brazil.

The intermediate steps and specific objectives are to analyze the volatility behavior, identify the autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity effects and model the variance of the return series. Based on this, the authors calculate the value-at-risk and conditional value-at-risk metrics for the energy futures contracts. As a robustness test, the authors added a peak over threshold methodology from extreme values theory.

In general, monthly products require margins because of their higher variance. With the asymmetrical distribution of returns, the authors needed to consider different maintenance margins for the long and short positions. It was also shown that two guarantee margins were required to secure the contracts as follows: the initial margin and the maintenance margin. The three factors that defined the size of the maintenance margin the volatility, skewness and kurtosis of the return series.

The contribution of this study lies in promoting the understanding of the risk dimensions of the energy derivatives market in Brazil and it offers concrete recommendations for how to mitigate this risk through market mechanisms and structures. Similar arrangements can be applied to other emerging markets.

The main purpose of this paper was to evaluate the influence of the zein coating containing essential oils on the sensory characteristics of sodium-reduced mozzarellas.

Mozzarellas were prepared by dipping in brine containing 5, 10, 15 or 20% of NaCl (w/v) that correspond, respectively, to 25, 50, 75 and 100% of NaCl content used in industry. These salted mozzarellas and another one, unsalted, were coated by an edible zein film added with 3% of a mixture of thyme and garlic essential oils (1:1). They were subjected to sensory analysis in relation to salty taste and overall impression. The mozzarella without salt reduction (20% NaCl w/v), coated or uncoated with the edible film, was also subjected to the analysis of water loss and microbiological quality, in order to evaluate the impact of this film on product quality.

The zein coating added with oils did not compromise the sensory acceptance of the mozzarella prepared with up to 50% of salt reduction. Water loss and microbial growth were lower in zein-coated mozzarella than in uncoated mozzarella. These results showed that this film could be applied as natural additive, contributing to the microbiological and sensory characteristics of the mozzarella.

This paper contributes to reducing the lack of studies in relation to new technologies for food preservation and sodium reduction. In addition, the zein coating containing essential oils can be tested on other food categories.