Search results

Strategic management, Strategic marketing, Entrepreneurship and Small business ventures.

This case study will be useful for undergraduate level students majoring in strategic management, entrepreneurship, small business ventures and marketing.

Just Fresh Juice is a small entrepreneurial venture in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), specialising in preparing all-fresh juices, special mixes and fruit salads. The purpose of this paper is to analyse how Just Fresh can maintain its competitive advantage, and how it could sustain its rapid growth in the market and gain more market share in the long run. Just Fresh focuses on satisfying its customers more effectively than its competitors through a competitive strategy of cost leadership (Papulova and Papulova, 2006), direct interaction with the customers through social media (Srinivasan, 2014) and creating a customer experience (Porter, 2008), as delivering a good customer experience is often more effective in building a competitive advantage than optimising internal processes.

The purpose of this case is to enable management students to evaluate and analyse a small business established in the United Arab Emirates. Students will gain a comprehensive understanding of new business set-up and build proper business strategy. They will be able to perform the company’s competitive standing using Porter’s Five competitive forces and analyse its business strategies as well. They will be able to analyse the current status of the company using SWOT analysis and to design alternative strategies for the company using TOWS analysis. Furthermore, students will be able to build a cost analysis model for the company.

Teaching notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes.

CSS 3: Entrepreneurship.

Supplier selection in the supply chain network (SCN) has strategic importance and involves multiple factors. The multi-criteria nature of the problem coupled with environmental uncertainty requires several procedures and considerations. The issue of decision-making in selecting the best among various qualified suppliers remains the major challenge in the pharmaceutical industry. This study investigated the multi-criteria multi-supplier decision-making process and proposed a model for supplier selection problems based on mixed-integer linear programming.

The concept of principal component analysis (PCA) was used to reduce data dimensionality, and the four best criteria have been considered and selected. The result is subjected to decision-makers’ (DMs’) reliability test using the concept of a triangular fuzzy number (TFN). The importance of each supplier to each measure is established using fuzzy technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution approach, and the suppliers have ranked accordingly.

This study proposes a mixed integer linear programming model for supplier selection in a pharmaceutical company. The effectiveness of the proposed model has been demonstrated using a numerical example. The solution shows the model's applicability in making a sound decision in pharmaceutical companies in the space of reality. The model proposed is simple. Readily commercial packages such as LINDO/LINGO and GAMS can solve the model.

This research contributed to the systematic manner of supplier selection considering DMs’ value judgement under a fuzzy environment and is limited to the case study area. However, interested researchers can apply the study in other related manufacturing industries. However, the criteria have to be revisited to suit that system and might require varying ratings based on the experts' opinions in that field.

This work suggests more insights practically by considering a realistic and precise investigation based on a real-life case study of pharmaceutical companies with six primary criteria and twenty-four sub-criteria. The study outcome will assist organizations and managers in conducting the best decision objectively by selecting the best suppliers with their various standards and terms among many available contenders in the manufacturing industry.

In this paper, the authors attempted to identify the most critical attributes to be preserved by the top managers (DMs) while selecting suppliers in pharmaceutical companies. The study proposed an MILP model for supplier selection in the pharmaceutical company using fuzzy TOPSIS.

The purpose of this paper is to make a numerical analysis on unsteady analysis of natural convection heat and mass transfer to obtain flow field, temperature distribution, and concentration distribution.

A finite element method is applied to solve governing equations of natural convection in curvilinear-shaped system for different parameters as thermal Rayleigh numbers (103=Ra_T=106), inclination angle (0°=φ=60°) and Hartmann numbers (0=Ha=100).

Both magnetic field and inclination angle can be used as control parameter on heat and mass transfer. Flow strength decreases almost 100 percent between Ha=0 and Ha=100 on behalf of the higher values of thermal Rayleigh number.

The originality of this work is to application of magnetic field on time-dependent natural convection flow, heat and mass transfer for curvilinear geometry.

Recently, there has been a lot of interest in the economics of quality control. Many researchers have considered the problem of determining the optimal target mean for a process, but almost all of them have assumed that the process variance is fixed and known in advance. The problem of simultaneously determining the optimal target mean and target variance for a process is considered. This might result in a reduction in variability and in the total cost of the production process. A reduction in variability upholds the modern concept of Taguchi’s loss function, which states that any deviation from the target value incurs economic loss, even when the quality characteristic lies within the specification limits. Taguchi’s loss function is incorporated to extend this study further to jointly determine the optimal target mean and variance.

The paper aims to propose an innovative two-stage decision model to address the sustainable-resilient supplier selection and order allocation (SSOA) problem in the single-valued neutrosophic (SVN) environment.

First, the sustainable and resilient performances of suppliers are evaluated by the proposed integrated SVN-base-criterion method (BCM)-an acronym in Portuguese of interactive and multi-criteria decision-making (TODIM) method, with consideration of the uncertainty in the decision-making process. Then, a novel multi-objective optimization model is formulated, and the best sustainable-resilient order allocation solution is found using the U-NSGA-III algorithm and TOPSIS method. Finally, based on a real-life case in the automotive manufacturing industry, experiments are conducted to demonstrate the application of the proposed two-stage decision model.

The paper provides an effective decision tool for the SSOA process in an uncertain environment. The proposed SVN-BCM-TODIM approach can effectively handle the uncertainties from the decision-maker’s confidence degree and incomplete decision information and evaluate suppliers’ performance in different dimensions while avoiding the compensatory effect between criteria. Moreover, the proposed order allocation model proposes an original way to improve sustainable-resilient procurement values.

The paper provides a supplier selection process that can effectively integrate sustainability and resilience evaluation in an uncertain environment and develops a sustainable-resilient procurement optimization model.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has undergone tremendous development over the past 20 years. This development has been so comprehensive as to include almost every sector of the economy. The next stage is to continue to expand as much as financial resources permit but, more importantly, to maintain and consolidate what has been achieved. This can only be done through a comprehensive maintenance programme. Discusses various maintenance‐related issues applicable to the Kingdom. In particular, describes the six development plans as they relate to maintenance, then analyses the Saudi budget, finding trends in the expenditure which help in foreseeing future needs for maintenance. Finally, suggests ways of improving maintenance management.

This paper examines what facilitates the swift reconfiguration of freight movements across transport modes in the wake of a major disaster.

A qualitative research approach focussing on the New Zealand (NZ) domestic freight transport operations in the wake of the 2016 Kaikōura earthquake is used with data collected through 19 interviews with 27 informants. The interviews are thematically analysed by using the framework method.

The paper provides rich and detailed descriptions of the ability of a freight transport system to recover from a disaster through rapid modal shifts. This paper identifies nine factors enabling modular transport operations and highlights the critical role of physical, digital, operational and inter-organisational interconnectivity in the aftermath of a disaster.

Although the management of freight disruptions has become a prevalent topic not only in industry and policy-making circles, but also in the academic literature, qualitative research focussing on the ability of commercial freight systems to adapt and recover from a disaster through rapid modal shifts is limited. This qualitative study sheds light on the mechanisms underlying the continuity of freight operations in the wake of a disaster and provides a comprehensive understanding of modular transport operations and the ability of freight systems to keep goods moving.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of thick wall parameters of a cavity on combined convection in a channel. In other words, conjugate heat transfer is solved.

Galerkin weighted residual finite element method is used to solve the governing equations of mixed convection.

The streamlines, isotherms, local and average Nusselt numbers are obtained and presented for different parameters. It is found heat transfer is an increasing function of dimensionless thermal conductivity ratio.

The literature does not have mixed convection and conjugate heat transfer problem in a channel with thick walled cavity.

The purpose of this study is to understand the situation of hotels and tourism industry in Malaysia during and in post Covid-19 and to mitigate indirect damage caused by COVID-19 to the hotel business and tourism industry by examining the factors that have an influence on hotel’s customer satisfaction rating and revisit intention through an integration of service quality (SERVQUAL) framework and expectation-confirmation theory (ECT).

The SERVQUAL and ECT were considered the underpinning theoretical models but are integrated and extended by including a few additional variables. Data were collected from 458 respondents of travelers and hotel customers in Malaysia and analysed by applying partial least squares structural equation model technique.

The empirical results established that significant positive relationships exist between the three newly emerged independent variables (IVs), namely, hygienic practice, greenness of service and digitalization and hotel customer satisfaction towards hotel revisit intention, and only two variables from SERVQUAL, namely, reliability and assurance, have a significant relationship with hotel customer satisfaction towards hotel revisit intention. The results reveal that customer satisfaction has significant direct effect between above-mentioned IVs and customers revisit intention.

The use of purposeful sampling method in only one country might limit the generalizability of the results. Future research should be planned to duplicate the current study using a sizable sample of participants from multiple countries and include other related factors related to the pandemic phenomena such as safety, hotel location and health value offered.

Theoretical findings imply that service quality is a dynamic theory that should be examined continuously to achieve sustainable and resilient performance in today’s competitive business environment, as some modifications inevitably occur over time and new factors could be emerged. Regarding practical implications, study findings proved the great significance of assurance, reliability, digitalization, greenness and hygienic practices on customer satisfaction towards intention to revisit to hotel. Therefore, it is critical for hotel management to retain hotel business industry in a way that fits and matches customer’s health protection, meets customer’s newly prompted expectations and needs and ensures resilience during unsettled times.

This study is unique as the newly emerged variables are included in the research framework, and thus it helps to close the literature gap by introducing an integrated SERVQUAL and ECT theoretical model, which rarely performs in this context and can be replicated or extended with validated scales. This study contributes to enhancing hotel and tourism sustainable service quality performance to achieve myriad economic and health values.

However, due to the huge number of studies and on the other hand to be new and creative, the represented models and methods – as the two main parts of this field – have been got more complicated, which consequently have been turned into unpractical research studies for the realistic situations. Therefore, the purpose of this study is the representation of a novel and simple method to deal with the aforementioned gap.

To this end, Fazl-Tash method have been proposed, in which a thorough and complete model including 114 criteria and a simple technique to rank and select the best supplier have been presented. Sustainability and resiliency are considered in collecting criteria effective on supplier selection.

The method was carried out in a case study in an industrial company. The efficiency of the proposed method is evaluated in comparison with other conventional approaches.

As selecting the supplier plays a crucial role to bring some important advantages for companies, such as coping with the cost and time problems and influencing the majority of contemporary markets’ requirements, in recent years, there have been representing more effective studies in the supplier selection literature.