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Visibility management is essential to sustainable supply chains (SSCs), allowing the ability to see the chain end-to-end, with opportunities to derive benefits, including competitive advantage. Central to visibility management is visibility assessment and identification of areas for improvement. This paper aims to propose a method of assessing visibility in SSCs and the generation of proposals for improvement.

A hierarchically structured assessment template is developed that comprises of dimensions, factors and attributes of visibility in SSCs. The template permits the use of linguistic variables. A fuzzy logic approach is adopted to calculate visibility levels and generate improvement areas based on linguistic data captured through the template. An industry-based case study is used to illustrate the process.

This study reveals that visibility can be measured straightforwardly using the method developed in this paper. It is found that automation and contextual factors can significantly impact visibility levels, so also is sustainability awareness and practices adopted.

This paper describes a visibility assessment model that incorporates linguistic variables, fuzzy logic and the use of an adaptable visibility assessment template. The assessment model can identify potential inhibitors of visibility for SSC under study.

The purpose of this paper is to present findings derived from research work carried out by a team of six university lecturers who are members of a teaching quality improvement network. The aim is to increase the motivation of the lecturers involved, so that better performance can be achieved, and the teaching‐learning process enriched.

Three complementary performance measures are used: students' active participation; lecturers' personal reflections; and lecturer peer‐to‐peer assessment.

These tools have provided the teaching staff with information about their strengths and weaknesses, as a consequence of which they have learned to deploy their skills inside the classroom and prepare their subjects more effectively. In this way, it is shown that the public teaching system can assess the potential of its human resources, and increase their motivation.

From an institutional point of view, performance quality assessment practices can also help to design training and development programmes that adapt the individual needs identified to the educational goals of today's universities.

The purpose of this study is to assess the lean performance of a tyre manufacturing firm in India. The key objective is to find key strategic and operational decision‐making dimensions for developing effective lean manufacturing environment in a tyre manufacturing organization.

This research is empirical in nature where the opinions of a group of experts of an Indian tyre manufacturing firm were consulted to formulate an interpretive structural model (ISM) of the critical success factors of lean manufacturing implementation in a tyre manufacturing organization. The authors have developed an Excel‐based template for quantitative assessment of lean performance indicators on the basis of feedback from the operational staff.

This research work suggests that financial capability of an organization drives the top‐management commitment for incorporating lean manufacturing practices in a tyre manufacturing organization. Organizational culture and human resource management are the important enablers for developing change management paradigm, which in turn leads to performance improvement. This study also reveals that over‐processing as well as excessive defects are the most detrimental wastes in radial tyre manufacturing, which accounts for high manufacturing cost of radial tyre manufacturing in India.

Since this study is carried out in a single (case) organization, a relatively small sample size restricts the outcome from being considered for generic industrial application. This study none the less is useful for practicing managers and academicians for the development of lean manufacturing strategy in context with the tyre industry since it encompasses insightful views of experienced lower to upper middle level managers.

This paper provides some key enablers for the successful implementation of lean tools in Indian tyre manufacturing, where lean practices are still in the early stage and little literature is available in this context with tyre manufacturing. Also an attempt has been made to develop a simple Excel‐based template for lean assessment in the tyre industry. This template can be used in other industries by simply modifying the key attributes.

This paper seeks to contribute to the debate on the usefulness of institutional theory to critical studies. It pursues this topic by exploring some of the possibilities for allocating local authority funds more fairly for poor residents. This paper aims to shed light on the institution of budgeting in a democratically elected local government under austerity.

This paper uses world culture theory, the study of the devolution of cultural authority to individuals and organisations through which they turn into agentic actors. Based on a field study of Newcastle City Council’s (NCC’s) budget-related practices, the paper uses the notion of actorhood to explore the use of fairness in austerity budgets.

This paper documents how new concerns with fairness gave rise to new local authority practices and gave NCC characteristics of actorhood. This paper also shows why it might make sense for a local authority that is managing austerity budget cuts and cutting back on services to make more detailed performance information public, rather than attempting to hide service deterioration, as some prior literature suggests. This paper delineates the limits to actorhood, in this study’s case, principally the inability to overcome structural constraints of legal state power.

The paper is suggestive of ways in which local government can fight inequality in opposition to central government austerity.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first qualitative accounting study of actorhood. It coins the phrase fairness assemblage to denote a combination of various accounting technologies, organisational elements and local government practices.

This paper aims to present an alternative practical framework to classify the skill and knowledge of the individual trainees by comparing it with the expert in an organization. This framework gives the benefit to the organization in order to know the ability level of the personnel and to be able to provide the personnel development method both in academic learning and workplace learning.

This research develops the framework based on relevant methodologies. Competency-Based Development is applied to investigate the knowledge and skill of the specific task. Knowledge Engineering is used to capture the experiences and construct knowledge model from relevance parties. Capability Maturity Model is then adapted to develop the capability and maturity level of the personnel. It can then be used to cluster the knowledge and skill. Finally, the Substation Maintenance Department of Provincial Electricity Authority (PEA), Thailand, is selected as a case study to test the proposed framework.

The results have shown that the proposed framework can be utilized to identify the capability level of the individual personnel. Furthermore, the appropriate maturity development of the employees in each level can also be identified. This proposed framework provides better results when comparing to the current PEA competency model, as the criteria in this framework are systematically derived from experts rather than relying solely on the proficiency level. Although, this framework was tested with the switchgear maintenance task, the results and its systematic approach have indicated that it can also be used to develop the capability maturity model for other fields of work.

The main originality of this research is the proposed competency analysis table, which integrates human resource development with knowledge management, risks management and management information system. Rather than performing these tasks separately for continuous quality improvement, organization can practically plan and perform the quality improvement-related tasks spontaneously. Moreover, the application of the capability maturity model to classify knowledge and skill of the maintenance tasks into maturity level is another academic value presented in this paper. The proposed framework gives the benefit to organization to classify the capability of the personnel. This is potentially beneficial to the human resource development personnel than traditional methods in the sense that it provides the information on how to develop the specific skill of the employees.

Strategic planning is a misunderstood and maligned managerial tool. Most organizations have tried it but relatively few actually achieve success in strategic planning.

The experience of Countrywide Financial Corporation demonstrates how strategic planning can be used as a key lever for change and describes the benefits that accrued to it through this process. Stanford Kurland, the Company’s COO, engaged Eric Flamholtz to assist with developing a more sophisticated approach to strategic planning at Countrywide. Flamholtz introduced: a template for organizational assessment and development; and a systematic process for strategic planning that had been applied elsewhere with considerable success. The new planning process s became a corporate priority.

The planning system has also led to a variety of other significant organizational benefits including: a constructive forum for elevating management’s focus from tactical and operational concerns to broader strategic challenges; a shift away from a “silo mentality” to a “Countrywide perspective”; a clear set of priorities to guide operating unit activities and decision‐making; measurable objectives that emphasize linkages across organizational boundaries; and greater understanding and communication of the plan throughout the organization.

Kurland was focused on longer‐range issues for the company, but most of the other members of Countrywide’s senior management were more focused on short‐term competitive success in their own divisions. It led to significant changes and benefits at Countrywide, including a strategic shift in corporate direction.

Amidst the current economic climate, which places many constraints on expensive flood defence schemes, the policy makers tend to favour schemes that are sympathetic to the needs of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and which promote empowering local communities based on their individual local contexts. Research has shown that although several initiatives are in place to create behavioural change among SMEs in undertaking adaptation approaches against flooding, they often tend to delay their responses by means of a “wait and see” attitude. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper argues that unless there are conscious efforts in the policy-making community to undertake explicit measures to engage with SMEs in a collaborative way, the uptake of adaptation measures will not be achieved as intended. With the use of the “honest broker” approach the paper provides a conceptual way forward of how a sense of collaboration can be instigated in an engagement process between the policy makers and SMEs, so that the scientific knowledge is translated in an appropriately rational way, which best meets the expectations of the SMEs.

The paper proposes a conceptual model for engaging SMEs that will potentially increase the uptake of flood adaptation measures by SMEs. This could be a useful model with which to kick start a collaborative engagement process that could escalate to wider participation in other areas to improve impact of policy initiatives.

The paper lays the conceptual foundation for a new theoretical base in the area, which will encourage more empirical investigations that will potentially enhance the practicality of some of the existing policies.

Supply chain risk management (SCRM) is of growing importance, as the vulnerability of supply chains increases. The main thrust of this article is to describe how Ericsson, after a fire at a sub‐supplier, with a huge impact on Ericsson, has implemented a new organization, and new processes and tools for SCRM. The approach described tries to analyze, assess and manage risk sources along the supply chain, partly by working close with suppliers but also by placing formal requirements on them. This explorative study also indicates that insurance companies might be a driving force for improved SCRM, as they now start to understand the vulnerability of modern supply chains. The article concludes with a discussion of risk related to traditional logistics concepts (time, cost, quality, agility and leanness) by arguing that supply chain risks should also be put into the trade‐off analysis when evaluating new logistics solutions – not with the purpose to minimize risks, however, but to find the efficient level of risk and prevention.

This paper seeks to highlight the role of entrepreneurship education in encouraging the growth of graduate entrepreneurship in the UK to help overcome the over‐supply of university graduates in a very difficult employment market. This paper aims to discuss the design principle for entrepreneurship education that facilitates graduate entrepreneurship, and the design methodology that allows multi‐faculty collaboration in the provision of entrepreneurship programmes.

This paper begins with the conceptualisation of design principles and frameworks based on current concepts found in the literature, followed by practitioner‐based reflection to shed insights into the process of developing entrepreneurship education in higher education institutions (HEIs).

The authors have developed the “30/70 methodology” to guide the future design of entrepreneurship education, and the “80/20 methodology” to support cross‐faculty entrepreneurship programmes to serve non‐business students. Factors that impede or support academic entrepreneurship and effective integration of entrepreneurship programmes in HEIs are discussed.

This paper shares the authors' experiences, and their unique design principles and methodology to support the development of education for entrepreneurship.

The resources needed to develop assessments of the twenty-first century skills, such as problem solving and collaboration, are huge, and require the introduction of cost-effective methods (Griffin and Care, 2015). The intention of the design template is to identify whether the presented approach to game development is viable for measuring collaborative problem solving (CPS) and if so, by using the template the same measures can be captured regardless of the specific task context. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper demonstrates a design template which utilises learning analytics and applies a measurement model to transform games into the twenty-first century assessments. The design template provides parameters for game design that provide sufficient data capture in which a measurement model can be applied. The learning analytics approach allows for capture of student behaviours in game play. By applying the measurement model, inferences can be made about demonstrated behaviours that are indicative of student ability.

Following the task design template, it is evident that games can be designed taking into consideration the requirement for generalizability and measurement principles. In turn, tasks developed using a defined set of common characteristics and structure allow consistent measurement processes to be applied in an efficient and sufficient manner. In summary, this paper identifies a viable task design template in regards to design principles and scoring protocols for games generating measures of CPS.

This approach combines various fields of research to present an approach that is a feasible, effective and efficient method for capturing data that are useful for understanding complex social and cognitive skills. The design template presents a method by which games can be designed in a way that assesses cognitive and social skills and provides a platform on which additional games can be readily created.