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The purpose of this study was to improve the overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) of the production process of the shredder operation of ABC company, an industrial waste management company which supplies pre-processed industrial waste as alternative fuel to a cement plant.

This case study investigated all possible availability and performance losses that caused the shredder system’s OEE and various problem-solving techniques, such as root cause analysis and Pareto analysis, were used to find the root cause of the reduced OEE.

After analysing this case study, three significant loss factors were identified from all the availability and performance losses, which caused the shredder system’s OEE losses. Practical solutions were found for the effect of those loss factors to improve the machine’s OEE and productivity.

This case study has been concentrated on only analysing of losses and improvement of OEE in the production process and not about cost analysis between loss and improvements.

This paper shows how to improve the OEE of a production process through various problem-solving techniques by identifying its losses and how to achieve the best solutions for those losses in a practical manner.

The main purpose of this paper was to evaluate the validation process of food safety control measures.

The validation of control measures has been analyzed at 50 food companies in Serbia. The sample included companies that produce food of both plant and animal origin and have certified food safety management systems. A total of 156 control measures that combat physical hazards (41.6%), followed by microbial hazards (34.0%) and chemical hazards (24.4%), have been analyzed. To enable quantification of the validation protocols, each control measure was assigned a score.

The validation scores showed that the highest level of validation was observed in large companies, as opposed to small and medium-sized companies (p < 0.05). The type of food safety hazards and the food sector did not reveal any statistical differences in-between the scores. The main approach to validating control measures was referring to the technical documentation of equipment used (52.6%), followed by scientific and legal requirements (30.7%). Less than 20% of the analyzed control measures were validated with operational data collected on-site. No mathematical modeling was observed for the sampled food companies. Future steps should include the development of validation guides for different types of control measures and training modules.

This study can serve as an improvement guide for food safety consultants, food safety auditors, certification bodies, inspection services, food technologists and food managers.

This study is one of the first to provide an insight into how food companies validate their control measures to combat microbial, chemical and physical food safety hazards.

In 2020, an outbreak of Salmonella Stanley linked to imported dried wood ear mushrooms affected 55 individuals in the United States of America. These mushrooms, commonly used in Asian cuisine, require processing, like rehydration and cutting, before serving. The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention advise food preparers to use boiling water for rehydration to inactivate vegetative bacterial pathogens. Little is known about how food handlers prepare this ethnic ingredient and which handling procedures could enable Salmonella proliferation.

This study used content analysis to investigate handling practices for dried wood ear mushrooms as demonstrated in YouTube recipe videos and to identify food safety implications during handling of the product. A total of 125 Chinese- and English-language YouTube videos were analysed.

Major steps in handling procedures were identified, including rehydration, cutting/tearing and blanching. Around 62% of the videos failed to specify the water temperature for rehydration. Only three videos specified a water temperature of 100 °C for rehydrating the mushrooms, and 36% of the videos did not specify the soaking duration. Only one video showed handwashing, cleaning and sanitising of surfaces when handling the dried wood ear mushrooms.

This study found that most YouTube videos provided vague and inconsistent descriptions of the rehydration procedure, including water temperature and soaking duration. Food preparers were advised to use boiling water for rehydration to inactivate vegetative bacterial pathogens. However, boiling water alone is insufficient to inactivate all bacterial spores. Extended periods of soaking and storage could be of concern for spore germination and bacterial growth. More validation studies need to be conducted to provide guidance on how to safely handle the mushrooms.

This study will make a distinctive contribution to the field of food safety by being the first to investigate the handling procedure of a unique ethnic food ingredient, dried wood ear mushrooms, which has been linked to a previous outbreak and multiple recalls in the United States of America. The valuable data collected from this study can help target food handling education as well as influence future microbial validation study design and risk assessment.

This study aims to assess the facilities management (FM) strategies used in multi-tenanted purpose-built office buildings (Mt-POBs) in Ghana and the drivers that influence the decision to use such strategies.

This study was conducted via a survey and key informant interviews. The survey was conducted using a questionnaire targeted at 65 multi-tenanted office building owners in the Greater Accra region. The data from the survey revealed the views of building owners on FM strategy and the extent to which 20 facility management decision drivers influenced their decisions to use a particular strategy and the responses were descriptively analysed. The key informant interviews were conducted among six leaders of the property owners’ association who use in-house FM to further understand their perspectives and decisions on using such strategy. The interviews were conducted over telephone using an interview guide and analysed using thematic analysis.

The results showed that 88% of Mt-POBs in Ghana are managed in-house. The results also showed that the decision to use the in-house strategy was driven by the innovative, strategic and cost-saving advantages associated with the in-house strategy.

This study shows the factors that drive the decision of multi-tenanted office building owners in Ghana to use the in-house strategy. The findings of this study will be useful for prospective owners of office buildings in Ghana.

This study aims to explore the opposite effects of single-category versus multi-category products information diversity on consumer decision making. Further, the authors investigate the moderating role of three categories of visitors – direct, hesitant and hedonic – in the relationship between product information diversity and consumer decision making.

The research utilizes a sample of 1,101,062 product click streams from 4,200 consumers. Visitors are clustered using the k-means algorithm. The diversity of information recommendations for single and multi-category products is characterized using granularity and dispersion, respectively. Empirical analysis is conducted to examine their influence on the two-stage decision-making process of heterogeneous online visitors.

The study reveals that the impact of recommended information diversity on consumer decision making differs significantly between single-category and multiple-category products. Specifically, information diversity in single-category products enhances consumers' click and purchase intention, while information diversity in multiple-category products reduces consumers' click and purchase intention. Moreover, based on the analysis of online visiting heterogeneity, hesitant, direct and hedonic features enhance the positive impact of granularity on consumer decision making; while direct features exacerbate the negative impact of dispersion on consumer decision making.

First, the article provides support for studies related to information cocoon. Second, the research contributes evidence to support the information overload theory. Third, the research enriches the field of precision marketing theory.

This study aims to test the complaints of tourists who visit five-star hotels in Antalya, Turkey, on those same hotels’ websites.

In the study, the data were collected with qualitative methods but analyzed with the mixed analysis method. In this context, the authors collected 1,012 comments on the website between 2016 and 2019.

According to the results of the study, the most intense complaints were found to be concentrated in categories such as ambience, food and staff.

First of all, it is thought that it will make an important contribution to the literature, since different methodologies are adopted in the study. In addition, online shares, evaluations and comments produce positive or negative results for the destination or business in question. It is necessary to closely monitor such activities in electronic environments, as they may have negative consequences, thus revealing the need to take corrective or preventive measures. For this reason, the research is important in terms of not having such a large-scale study in the literature and contributing to the hospitality industry.

Heating, ventilating, air-conditioning and cooling (HVAC) systems are crucial in daily health-care facility services. Design-related defects can lead to maintenance issues, causing service disruptions and cost overruns. These defects can be avoided if a link between the early design stages and maintenance feedback is established. This study aims to use experts’ experience in HVAC maintenance in health-care facilities to list and evaluate the risk of each maintenance issue caused by a design defect, supported by the literature.

Following semistructured interviews with experts, 41 maintenance issues were identified as the most encountered issues. Subsequently, a survey was conducted in which 44 participants evaluated the probability and impact of each design-caused issue.

Chillers were identified as the HVAC components most prone to design defects and cost impact. However, air distribution ducts and air handling units are the most critical HVAC components for maintaining healthy conditions inside health-care facilities.

The unavailability of comprehensive data on the cost impacts of all design-related defects from multiple health-care facilities limits the ability of HVAC designers to furnish case studies and quantitative approaches.

This study helps HVAC designers acquire prior knowledge of decisions that may have led to unnecessary and avoidable maintenance. These design-related maintenance issues may cause unfavorable health and cost consequences.

Recently emerged Packaging-as-a-Service (PaaS) systems adopt aspects of access-based services and triadic frameworks, which have typically been treated as conceptually separate. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the implications of blending the two in what we call “access-based triadic systems,” by empirically evaluating intentions to adopt PaaS systems for takeaway food among restaurants and consumers.

We derived relevant attributes of PaaS systems from a qualitative pre-study with restaurants and consumers. Next, we conducted two factorial survey experiments with restaurants (N = 176) and consumers (N = 245) in Germany to quantitatively test the effects of those system attributes on their adoption intentions.

This paper highlights that the role of access-based triadic system providers as both the owners of shared assets and the operators of a triadic system is associated with a novel set of challenges and opportunities: System providers need to attract a critical mass of business and end customers while balancing asset protection and system complexity. At the same time, asset ownership introduces opportunities for improved quality control and differentiation from competition.

Conceptually, this paper extends research on access-based services and triadic frameworks by describing an unexplored hybrid form of non-ownership consumption we call “access-based triadic systems.” Empirically, this paper addresses the need to account for the demands of two distinct target groups in triadic systems and demonstrates how factorial survey experiments can be leveraged in this field.

The development of information technologies has led to a considerable transformation in human resource management from conventional or commonly known as personnel management to modern one. Data mining technology, which has been widely used in several applications, including those that function on the web, includes clustering algorithms as a key component. Web intelligence is a recent academic field that calls for sophisticated analytics and machine learning techniques to facilitate information discovery, particularly on the web. Human resource data gathered from the web are typically enormous, highly complex, dynamic, and unstructured. Traditional clustering methods need to be upgraded because they are ineffective. Standard clustering algorithms are enhanced and expanded with optimization capabilities to address this difficulty by swarm intelligence, a subset of nature-inspired computing. We collect the initial raw human resource data and preprocess the data wherein data cleaning, data normalization, and data integration takes place. The proposed K-C-means-data driven cuckoo bat optimization algorithm (KCM-DCBOA) is used for clustering of the human resource data. The feature extraction is done using principal component analysis (PCA) and the classification of human resource data is done using support vector machine (SVM). Other approaches from the literature were contrasted with the suggested approach. According to the experimental findings, the suggested technique has extremely promising features in terms of the quality of clustering and execution time.

The aim of this study is to examine the agency problems that arise between retail property owners and outsourced facility management (FM) service vendors in Ghana.

This study was carried out using telephone and face-to-face interviews. Nine facility managers (n =9) and six retail property owners (n = 6) purposively selected participated in the interviews. The responses from the interviews were analysed using content analysis. To begin with the analysis, the recorded audio for each respondent during the interviews was transcribed to augment what was written during the interviews. The next step was the development of a coding framework where each of the agency problems was assigned unique codes and grouped under themes. Each response was assigned a predefined code based on the agency problems identified in the literature. The research team discussed the consistency of the thematic codes assigned to each of the responses to ensure that each response was captured under the appropriate agency problem theme it best represents.

The results showed that agency problems in FM outsourcing in the Ghanaian retail sector are related to disagreement on expenditure associated with maintenance and repairs and improper tenant information sharing and use by FM service providers. Based on the findings, it is recommended that property owners explore the mixed approach to FM to mitigate the risks of complete outsourcing of FM services. It is also recommended that a clear path on how tenant information can be shared be pre-agreed in FM contracts.

This study provides new literature relating to agency problems in outsourcing and may be the first of its kind for FM in the Ghanaian retail industry. The findings could serve as a starting point for service providers and their principals to find common grounds to understand each other and mitigate the agency problems that could arise and their overall impact on performance.