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During the first half of this year the Association has continued to expand its exhibition programme by increasing its presence at overseas shows. Two DTI sponsored joint venture groups have been formed, one to Nepcon West, the other to Nepcon Beijing. Anaheim saw the biggest UK group for over 10 years, with CEMA taking three separate blocks in different sectors of the show. There is no doubt from the reception we received that CEMA is now firmly established at Nepcon West. We enjoyed tremendous support from both the British Consulate and the British‐American Chamber of Commerce with their President making several visits to the CEMA booth.

This paper aims to examine changes of non-financial voluntary reporting practices over time in response to episodes of employee-related distress. It investigates employee-related disclosures by the four largest electronic manufacturing services firms in China between 2008 and 2013 during a series of employment-related incidents, to investigate how the firms re-legitimate their reputation in response to the media coverage on those incidents.

A series of employee-related incidents that occurred in 2010-2012 is selected as the focus of this study, with total coverage of employee-related disclosures between 2008 and 2013. These incidents are directly linked to three of the four sample companies: Foxconn, Pegatron and Compal Electronics. Employee-related disclosures in corporate social responsibility (CSR) stand-alone reports are coded by a set of specifically designed instructions, and newspaper articles about employee-related incidents are coded for sentiment. Results are interpreted through two theoretical lenses: the media agenda setting theory and the legitimacy theory.

Newspapers reported the employee-related incidents in a way detrimental to the legitimacy of firms that directly involved in the selected industry. In the process of legitimation, firms switch between disclosing more employee-related information and reducing disclosures. The self-expectation on organizational legitimacy also affects how CSR reporting is used in legitimation. The employee-related disclosure analysed is closer to symbolic legitimation than substantive legitimation.

This study contributes to reporting practice by showing that employee-related disclosure is largely vacuous and to a greater extent is used as symbolic legitimation. The quality of disclosure requires significant improvement. This study contributes to the literature by using the legitimacy theory to interpret employee-related disclosure in China, addressing inadequate research efforts in the context of social and human rights dimensions of CSR reporting.

The purpose of this paper is to review Lean Six Sigma (LSS) literature and report different definitions, demographics, methodologies and industries.

This paper highlights various definitions by different researchers and practitioners. A total of 235 research papers has been reviewed for the LSS theme, research methodology adopted, type of industry, author profile, country of research and year of publication.

From the review, four significant LSS classifications were identified that deal with the spread of LSS in different industries followed by observation for classification.

LSS is a strategy for success, but it did not examine its presence in various Industries. From this paper, readers can understand the quantum of its spread before implementing LSS. For academicians, it will be a comprehensive list of papers for research.

This paper reviews 235 research papers for their year, author profile, research methodology and type of industry. Various characteristics of LSS definitions and their theme are also reviewed.

This paper aims to develop an initial understanding of the Lean Six Sigma methodology since its inception and examine the few Lean Six Sigma dimensions as a research domain through a critical review of the literature.

The paper is structured in two-part. The first part of the paper attempts to dwell on the evolution of the Lean Philosophy and Six Sigma methodology individually and the emergence of Lean Six Sigma methodology, covered under the Lean Six Sigma: a historical outline section. The second part of the study examines the dimensions associated with Lean Six Sigma such as frameworks, critical success factors, critical failure factors, type of industry, performance metric, year, publisher and journal, based on a total of 223 articles published in 72 reputed journals from the year 2000 to 2019 as a literature review.

The adoption of Lean Six Sigma, as a continuous improvement methodology, has grown enormously in the manufacturing and few service sectors such as health care and higher education during the past decade. The study revealed that researchers came out with conceptual frameworks for the implementation of Lean Six Sigma, whereas the validation through case studies seems to be lacking. The integration of Lean Six Sigma and other approaches with a focus on sustainability and the environment has emerged as a research field. A few of the most common critical success and failure factors were identified from the articles studied during the study.

This paper may not have included some of the studies due to the inaccessibility and selection criteria followed for the study.

This paper will provide an initial introduction on Lean, Six Sigma and Lean Six Sigma and research insights Lean Six Sigma to beginners such as students, researchers and entry-level professionals.

This paper aims to advance research that portrays the semantic web as the future web where computer software agents can carry out sophisticated tasks for users.

The paper discusses the major factors that affect the performance and reliability of information services for the web, namely the distribution of information, which has resulted from the globalization of information systems, the heterogeneity of information sources and the sources' instability caused by autonomous evolution.

Man stands at the threshold of being able to create the semantic web, in terms of declaratively representing objects that are already human‐readable on the web. The next step is to make it the dynamic semantic web by encoding procedures in web material as first‐class objects.

Semantic web technology will work with extensible mark‐up language, which will enable electronic commerce by: defining languages that provide support in defining, mapping, and exchanging product data; functioning from the development of standard ontology that will cover various business areas; and utilizing efficient translation services that will require areas of standard ontology.

The paper tackles one of the most pressing issues of the creation of programs that collect web content, process the information and exchange the results with other programs from diverse sources.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the strategy of contract manufacturers (CMs). The research question is the following: how can the strategy of CMs be explained? The purpose is to better understand this activity though using different theoretical approaches and analyzing two customer relationships of a Hungarian CM, Videoton Holding.

The primary theoretical background is the relational view of strategy, and the concept of the business model is used for the analysis. The authors confront the literature about this topic in strategic management using the industrial marketing and purchasing approach to strategy; namely, strategizing. Through the case study of Videoton the authors explore how the company became a highly developed CM from its origins as an original equipment manufacturer company.

Through comparing theory the authors have created a research framework which is adapted to the empirical findings. In the CM’s strategy it is crucial to understand how partners are able to synchronize key propositions, key resources and key actors while taking the network of the firms into consideration.

The paper is novel in that the authors investigate the strategy of a supplier from their own perspective, not that of a customer. Applying and contrasting different theoretical approaches to this particular topic may considered to be valuable as well.

The objective of this paper is to analyze the critical success factors (CSFs) for lean Six Sigma (LSS) implementation and its impacts towards company performance in multinational electronic manufacturing service (EMS) industries.

A pilot study has been conducted to identify the top ten CSFs for LSS implementation. Based on these factors, a structured questionnaire has been constructed. The questionnaire will be distributed to multi‐sites of six EMS industries to obtain the data across Malaysia and other sites globally. The target population is the LSS program implementer such as master black belts, black belts and LSS champions in the EMS industries.

These EMS industries provide outsourcing platform for the original equipment manufacturing (OEM) industries to outsource their products in order to reduce operational cost. With the proposed LSS implementation success model, a practical guide of the LSS program has been implemented. The practical guide helps the LSS practitioners to focus on certain CSFs and it prevents the LSS execution from loosing momentum when faces roadblock.

The paper is relevant to most EMS industries and provides guidelines to small and medium enterprises in Malaysia through improving their competitiveness and capability in the globalization market.

The EMS industries compete among themselves to gain more business from OEM industries through implementation of many improvements via cost reduction activities. LSS program is recognized among the EMS industries as one of the effective business strategy of cost reduction and to improve company's profitability and growth. The success of the LSS program in achieving the expected gain and return relies on CSFs; henceforth it renders the undertaking of this paper.

The electronic manufacturing service (EMS) industry recognizes Lean Six Sigma (LSS) as an effective business strategy to strive for cost reduction and improve the profitability and growth of a company. There are many factors affecting the success of an LSS program to meet desired profitability and growth. The purpose of this paper is to identify the critical success factors (CSFs) in successful LSS programs and to evaluate the CSFs’ impact on company performance.

This study is carried out using the quantitative survey method containing structured questionnaires. The study population comprises the six multinational EMS industries in Malaysia that have successfully implemented LSS programs. The LSS practitioners, namely the holders of the Master Black Belt (MBB), the Black Belt (BB) and the LSS champions of the various international manufacturing sites of the six multinational EMS in Malaysia form the respondents.

The significance of this research is the identification of CFSs for the successful implementation of LSS within the EMS industry. It has identified management engagement and commitment as the most critical to the success of implementing the companies’ LSS programs. Moreover, an effective LSS training, an established LSS dashboard, a frequent communication among all value streams of organizations and a supportive organizational culture are also found to be essential ingredients for the implementation of LSS.

The paper advises of the nurturing of appropriate CSFs for successful implementation of LSS in the EMS industry and to evaluate its impact on the company performance.

This research adds a new body of knowledge containing factors in the implementation of LSS that are significant in their relationships with operational and organizational performances in the EMS industry, using primary data. The results would provide the EMS industry and other Malaysian SME companies with guidelines for the successful implementation of Lean Six Sigma with the intention to remain competitive.

The purpose of present study is to expose the detailed review for benefits and challenges about implementation of Lean Six Sigma (LSS) in business organization and spread of LSS literature in term of various sectors wise, research methodology wise and journal wise.

This paper covers the literature on LSS from 2000 to 2018. The authors have selected a large number of research papers using the keywords as Lean Six Sigma implementation in automotive, micro small medium enterprises, health care, education, financial sectors and many more. A total of 216 research papers have been reviewed on LSS distribution of sector wise, research methodology adopted, active countries, year of publication and critical barriers in implementation of LSS.

The present literature classifies the spread of LSS in four important sectors of manufacturing, health care, human resource, financial and education. It presents the critical barriers and benefits of LSS implementation in various sectors mentioned above and an important research gap, where practitioner/researcher can focus more during their research on LSS.

It is important for industry, researchers and LSS practitioners to be aware about challenges and success factor during LSS implementation in various sectors such as manufacturing, education, financial, human resource and health care. Hence, this paper could provide significant and valuable insights to industry and practitioners for successful implementation of LSS projects.

LSS results in reduced waste, defects and improve process, which in turn provide high-quality products at minimum cost, and this leads to customer delight, which ultimately raises the societal living standard. The results encourage LSS practices without fear because there is a huge discussion of near about all success and failure parameters about LSS.

To the authors’ best knowledge, no studies have still covered the literature review of LSS implementation in three different sectors: manufacturing, service and process. The present study was mainly focused on presenting a systematic review of literature in said sectors and found the gap between current status and future direction for the implementation of LSS in different areas.

The purposes of this study are to introduce the concept of service quality (SQ) in E-Supply chain management (E-SCM) and its impact on increasing customer satisfaction (CS) and provide insightful enhancements to the literature. In addition, the paper also examines the influence of SQ of E-SCM on CS in online shopping.

After a comprehensive literature review, four key factors for measuring the E-Supply chain (process control, interaction with supplier, management support and focus on customers), four key factors for measuring CS (informing customers, attention to customers’ needs, staff performance accuracy and easy access to services) and four factors for measuring the quality of identification services (assurance, accountability, tangibility and reliability) were selected. The proposed conceptual model was then presented. This model was validated by data collected through a survey of 150 respondents to identify CS, including that of customers of online websites in Iran. The sample data was analyzed using SPSS21, after which the interrelationships between the model and factors were examined based on the partial least square-structural. Model fit indices were then calculated for the data set. The proposed model was validated by using factor analysis and structural equation modeling techniques.

The results indicated that E-SCM has a direct impact on CS. The effect of SQ was also confirmed. A positive and significant relationship was identified between E-SCM and CS, E-SCM and SQ, as well as SQ and CS (P> 0.05).

The first limitation was to convince respondents to cooperate with the researchers. The second one was the lack of research-related background due to the subject being relatively new.

This study, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, is the first empirical analysis on the CS assessment of SQ of E-Supply Chain in online shopping. This important link to online shopping has rarely been explored. It is expected that by filling this gap, this study will help in strengthening online shopping, which needs a change in the marketing area.