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The Nature of Business Policy Business policy — or general management — is concerned with the following six major functions:

This paper aims to investigate the consequences of the coercive regulations for performance measurement and comparability that strengthened regional health authority’s control over organizations’ activities on management accountants’ relationship with clinician managers, who are the recipients of accounting information for decisional processes in health-care organizations. To achieve this aim, the research focuses on management accountants’ perception of their role and whether they perceive role conflict and role ambiguity.

A case study was undertaken in a public university hospital in the Emilia-Romagna region, Italy; 9 management accountants and 11 clinician managers were interviewed and secondary data analyzed.

Management accountants show low capabilities to support clinician managers’ decisional processes. Following the enactment of regulations, management accountants perform their role with a primary focus on functional responsibility. The focus on the provision of information to address regulations influenced management accountants’ capability to act as business partners in the organization. Because of the conflicting information needs from regulations and clinician managers, management accountants experience role conflict and ambiguity.

The paper has implications for policymakers, underlining the consequences of strict regulations on management accountants’ role. It also emphasizes the importance of revising accounting techniques to satisfy both regional requirements and clinician managers’ needs for decision-making.

The article contributes to knowledge related to the role of management accountants in health care. It explores, in particular, the consequences of coercive regulations in health-care organizations, adding knowledge to a field that remains quite unexplored.

Reports a study conducted to determine whether or not there were differences between descriptive and normative social responsibility values for managers who assume roles in different functional department clusters. The research findings support a conclusion that differences in CSRV profiles exist among three functional clusters: accounting/finance managers, marketing/distribution managers and general strategy/human resources/operations managers. These differences have implications for career and employment professionals in enhancing managerial recruitment, selection, placement, development and appraisal now and in the future.

Although much has been written about management competencies, the literature is sparse in its consideration of specific competencies for services marketing decision making. This article considers the pertinent literature surrounding management competencies in the context of decision making for services management. A case description of a consumer services company is used to develop the argument. The case description focuses on the progression of the management decision makers’ competencies over a three‐year period. The importance of continually developing the competencies of the key decision makers in an organisation is emphasised, particularly in relation to the changing nature of managerial roles and responsibilities.

In recognising the need to research the concept of customer satisfaction the study aims to develop a strategic approach to measuring a customer′s satisfaction with a particular enterprise. The study is an attempt to (1) develop an overall concept of customer satisfaction; (2) provide a detailed relationship structure for implementation within a company; and (3) identify potential research areas. A basic premiss of the study is that the focus should be on maximising total product value to the customer; and then, second, that customer satisfaction of external customers is inter‐dependent on the satisfaction of internal customers. The framework of the research centres on a proposed model which integrates all aspects so as to maximise the potential of the organisation and all its subsystems to create and sustain satisfied customers. The approach begins with a conceptualisation phase in which the concept of customer satisfaction is explored. Attributes are then classified into services and this is then extended to integrate the internal customer into a total service model; applying gap‐analysis to this model. Enterprise satisfaction provides the basis for extending the total service model; positioning is applied to the customer satisfaction strategy; and operationalising of this strategy is proposed through an implementation model.

This report discusses the problem of how to organise the activities of the firm in order to achieve efficient logistics performance. In reviewing over 50 books and articles (professional and academic) published before 1975, the author identifies seven major themes, ranging from timing the establishment of logistics departments to modern theories of “matrix” organisations. The results of a survey conducted by the author in 1974 are presented, and the difficulties of developing definitive conclusions or guides to action in this area are discussed. (This report was written while the author was a graduate student at the Harvard Business School.)

The purpose of this paper is to propose a business process management (BPM) governance model that sets BPM decision making, along with roles and responsibilities. The setting context of the study is a government‐owned corporation operating in Australia.

A qualitative case study examined and analysed organisational documents using a content analysis approach. Results of document analysis are used to inform a series of in‐depth interviews of key stakeholders in the organisation. Interviews are analysed using a constant comparison method to derive themes and build categories of description.

A BPM governance model is proposed. Results of thematic analysis are interpreted against the framework of the BPM governance model, leading to findings that include implications for theory and practice.

In practical terms, the research shows how BPM practice can be aligned and integrated with the corporate governance and management systems in the selected case study organisation.

Despite research identifying the importance of governance, along with associated capabilities, there has been little progress on how the abovementioned capabilities can be effectively deployed across an organisation. This paper addresses a gap in the literature relating to how to deploy BPM governance in an organisation.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how managers' abilities to design and implement organizational change initiatives affects supply chain (SC) responsiveness. Extant research focuses on specific process and resource options to address responsiveness, with only limited reference to managers' capabilities in adapting to new organization designs that organize processes and resources. Consequently, organizational theory that characterizes the implications of developing and implementing various designs is ignored. The study directly leverages organization adaption, organization design and the dynamic managerial capabilities literature to address the question of how to improve SC responsiveness.

Qualitative data are used to identify specific dynamic managerial capability constructs, as well as the expected relationships depicted in our conceptual model. The authors test these relationships using quantitative survey data collected from 199 SC leaders.

The authors find that capabilities in organization design, functional leader negotiations and workforce communications foster SC responsiveness via improved structural adaptability (SA). The findings explain how and when organization design actions impact SA and responsiveness, and more importantly, why managers should invest in developing a workforce communication capability as the foundation for organizational adaptability.

By applying organization adaption, organization design and dynamic managerial capabilities concepts, the research expands the existing study of responsiveness in the SC organizational context.

The purpose of this research is to develop a conceptual framework for implementing and managing supply chain flexibility in supply chain organizations. The framework suggests that supply chain flexibility should be implemented and managed using a three‐stage approach: required flexibility identification, implementation and shared responsibility, and feedback and control.

The major components of the proposed framework are based on a review of research in the manufacturing flexibility literature as well as the limited research in supply chain flexibility. The strengths and weaknesses of these frameworks, combined with a published empirical study were analyzed to identify the important issues that must be considered when implementing and managing supply chain flexibility, and those components that need to be incorporated into a new integrated framework.

This framework was constructed by synthesizing the strengths of other conceptual frameworks. As a result, the major components of the framework are supported by the current research on the implementation and management of manufacturing flexibility, as well as the current literature on supply chain management.

Empirical research is needed to examine the nature and level of responsibility sharing among different supply chain partners as suggested in this framework. It is also important to empirically investigate what constitutes flexibility in the supply chain taxonomy in various industries. Another issue of managerial interest concerns the way different supply chain flexibility types relate to one another, and whether supply chain organizations should acquire certain supply chain flexibilities as a pre‐requisite for developing others. Further studies are necessary to further explain the contribution made by key enablers, such as information technology and communication, the internet, process technology, and training and labor skills, towards the acquisition of supply chain flexibility.

The implication of this new conceptual framework for managers is that it is easy to understand and is based on best practices in the research literature on manufacturing flexibility and supply chain management.

To researchers, this framework provides a springboard for conducting exploratory and confirmatory research on the process of implementing and managing supply chain flexibility.

With production systems become more digitized, data-driven maintenance decisions can improve the performance of production systems. While manufacturers are introducing predictive maintenance and maintenance reporting to increase maintenance operation efficiency, operational data may also be used to improve maintenance management. Research on the value of data-driven decision support to foster increased internal integration of maintenance with related functions is less explored. This paper explores the potential for further development of solutions for cross-functional responsibilities that maintenance shares with production and logistics through data-driven approaches.

Fifteen maintenance experts were interviewed in semi-structured interviews. The interview questions were derived based on topics identified through a structured literature analysis of 126 papers.

The main findings show that data-driven decision-making can support maintenance, asset, production and material planning to coordinate and collaborate on cross-functional responsibilities. While solutions for maintenance planning and scheduling have been explored for various operational conditions, collaborative solutions for maintenance, production and logistics offer the potential for further development. Enablers for data-driven collaboration are the internal synchronization and central definition of goals, harmonization of information systems and information visualization for decision-making.

This paper outlines future research directions for data-driven decision-making in maintenance management as well as the practical requirements for implementation.