Search results

Information and communications technology (ICT) offers enormous opportunities for individuals, businesses and society. The application of ICT is equally important to economic and non-economic activities. Researchers have increasingly focused on the adoption and use of ICT by small and medium enterprises (SMEs) as the economic development of a country is largely dependent on them. Following the success of ICT utilisation in SMEs in developed countries, many developing countries are looking to utilise the potential of the technology to develop SMEs. Past studies have shown that the contribution of ICT to the performance of SMEs is not clear and certain. Thus, it is crucial to determine the effectiveness of ICT in generating firm performance since this has implications for SMEs’ expenditure on the technology. This research examines the diffusion of ICT among SMEs with respect to the typical stages from innovation adoption to post-adoption, by analysing the actual usage of ICT and value creation. The mediating effects of integration and utilisation on SME performance are also studied. Grounded in the innovation diffusion literature, institutional theory and resource-based theory, this study has developed a comprehensive integrated research model focused on the research objectives. Following a positivist research paradigm, this study employs a mixed-method research approach. A preliminary conceptual framework is developed through an extensive literature review and is refined by results from an in-depth field study. During the field study, a total of 11 SME owners or decision-makers were interviewed. The recorded interviews were transcribed and analysed using NVivo 10 to refine the model to develop the research hypotheses. The final research model is composed of 30 first-order and five higher-order constructs which involve both reflective and formative measures. Partial least squares-based structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) is employed to test the theoretical model with a cross-sectional data set of 282 SMEs in Bangladesh. Survey data were collected using a structured questionnaire issued to SMEs selected by applying a stratified random sampling technique. The structural equation modelling utilises a two-step procedure of data analysis. Prior to estimating the structural model, the measurement model is examined for construct validity of the study variables (i.e. convergent and discriminant validity).

The estimates show cognitive evaluation as an important antecedent for expectation which is shaped primarily by the entrepreneurs’ beliefs (perception) and also influenced by the owners’ innovativeness and culture. Culture further influences expectation. The study finds that facilitating condition, environmental pressure and country readiness are important antecedents of expectation and ICT use. The results also reveal that integration and the degree of ICT utilisation significantly affect SMEs’ performance. Surprisingly, the findings do not reveal any significant impact of ICT usage on performance which apparently suggests the possibility of the ICT productivity paradox. However, the analysis finally proves the non-existence of the paradox by demonstrating the mediating role of ICT integration and degree of utilisation explain the influence of information technology (IT) usage on firm performance which is consistent with the resource-based theory. The results suggest that the use of ICT can enhance SMEs’ performance if the technology is integrated and properly utilised. SME owners or managers, interested stakeholders and policy makers may follow the study’s outcomes and focus on ICT integration and degree of utilisation with a view to attaining superior organisational performance.

This study urges concerned business enterprises and government to look at the environmental and cultural factors with a view to achieving ICT usage success in terms of enhanced firm performance. In particular, improving organisational practices and procedures by eliminating the traditional power distance inside organisations and implementing necessary rules and regulations are important actions for managing environmental and cultural uncertainties. The application of a Bengali user interface may help to ensure the productivity of ICT use by SMEs in Bangladesh. Establishing a favourable national technology infrastructure and legal environment may contribute positively to improving the overall situation. This study also suggests some changes and modifications in the country’s existing policies and strategies. The government and policy makers should undertake mass promotional programs to disseminate information about the various uses of computers and their contribution in developing better organisational performance. Organising specialised training programs for SME capacity building may succeed in attaining the motivation for SMEs to use ICT. Ensuring easy access to the technology by providing loans, grants and subsidies is important. Various stakeholders, partners and related organisations should come forward to support government policies and priorities in order to ensure the productive use of ICT among SMEs which finally will help to foster Bangladesh’s economic development.

This paper aims to identify the state of the art of performance measurement and management in humanitarian supply chains; to categorize performance measurement indicators in the five supply chain phases of Gunasekaran and Kobu (2007) and evaluate them based on the evaluation criteria of Caplice and Sheffi (1995); and to define gaps and challenges in this field and give insights for future research in this domain.

A literature review has been conducted using a structured method based on Denyer and Tranfield (2009) and Rousseau et al. (2008). The state of the art on humanitarian supply chain performance management with a focus on measurement frameworks and indicators and their applications in practice is classified in three categories. The first category is the definition and measurement of success in humanitarian supply chains. The second category is managing performance, which focuses on describing and analyzing the actual practice of managing performance. The third category shows the challenges in performance management that humanitarian supply chain actors deal with.

Findings reveal that performance measurement and management in humanitarian supply chains is still an open area of research, especially compared to the commercial supply chain sector. Furthermore, the research indicates that performance measurement and management in humanitarian supply chains has to be developed in support of the supply chain strategy. Based on the findings of the literature review on performance measurement and management in the commercial and humanitarian field, a first classification of 94 performance measurement indicators in humanitarian supply chains is presented. Furthermore, the paper shows key problems why performance measurement and management systems have not been widely developed and systematically implemented in humanitarian supply chains and are not part of the supply chain strategy. The authors propose performance measurement guidelines that include input and output criteria. They develop a research agenda that focuses on four research questions for designing, deploying and disseminating performance measurement and management in humanitarian supply chains.

The result helps the humanitarian supply chain community to conduct further research in this area and to develop performance measurement frameworks and indicators that suit humanitarian supply chains.

It is the first systematic approach to categorize research output regarding performance measurement and management in humanitarian supply chains. The paper shows the state of the art in performance measurement and management in humanitarian supply chains and develops a research agenda.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of research and development in the measurement of maintenance performance. It considers the problems of various measuring parameters and comments on the lack of structure in and references for the measurement of maintenance performance. The main focus is to determine how value can be created for organizations by measuring maintenance performance, examining such maintenance strategies as condition‐based maintenance, reliability‐centred maintenance, e‐maintenance, etc. In other words, the objectives are to find frameworks or models that can be used to evaluate different maintenance strategies and determine the value of these frameworks for an organization.

A state‐of‐the‐art literature review has been carried out to answer the following two research questions. First, what approaches and techniques are used for maintenance performance measurement (MPM) and which MPM techniques are optimal for evaluating maintenance strategies? Second, in general, how can MPM create value for organizations and, more specifically, which system of measurement is best for which maintenance strategy?

The body of knowledge on maintenance performance is both quantitatively and qualitatively based. Quantitative approaches include economic and technical ratios, value‐based and balanced scorecards, system audits, composite formulations, and statistical and partial maintenance productivity indices. Qualitative approaches include human factors, amongst other aspects. Qualitatively based approaches are adopted because of the inherent limitations of effectively measuring a complex function such as maintenance through quantitative models. Maintenance decision makers often come to the best conclusion using heuristics, backed up by qualitative assessment, supported by quantitative measures. Both maintenance performance perspectives are included in this overview.

A comprehensive review of maintenance performance metrics is offered, aiming to give, in a condensed form, an extensive introduction to MPM and a presentation of the state of the art in this field.

We examine how design and implementation practices for supply chain performance management that have proven successful in commercial organisations apply to humanitarian organisations (HOs) to guide the process of designing and implementing performance management in humanitarian organisations.

We identify from the literature ten successful practices regarding the design and implementation of supply chain performance management in commercial businesses. We apply these, using action research over a four-year period, at Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) Belgium and draw conclusions from this.

We find that tools and techniques, such as workshops and technical sheets, are essential in designing and implementing supply chain performance measurement projects at HOs. Furthermore, making a link to an IT project is crucial when implementing performance measurement systems at HOs. Overall, our case study shows that performance management practices used in business can be applied and are relevant for humanitarian supply chains.

Previous research has argued that there are few empirical studies in the domain of performance management at humanitarian organisations. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to provide a longitudinal understanding of the design and implementation of supply chain performance measurement at HOs.

Indicators of economic and social phenomena can be useful descriptive and analytical inputs for public policy. The “social indicators movement” has emerged in the last decade and is devoted to the measurement of widely‐ranging dimensions of human welfare. For the most part, questions of systematic measurement for public policy are explored here. Drawing initially on some traditions of measurement in economics, the principal aim is to provide a broad theoretical frame of reference for policy indicator design. Questions of indicator development necessarily involve ideas of suitability or validity of indicators designed for a purpose. Approaches to indicator design for the purpose of enhancing collective decision‐making—including formal model building approaches—are subsumed as special cases once a more general theory is espoused in sections II and III.

Most empirical balanced scorecard (BSC) studies have shown a tendency to wrongly employ reflective indicators instead of the more theoretically suitable formative indicators. However, formative indicators are difficult to apply due to the lack of statistical software support and a standardized model testing method. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This study empirically compares the reflective and formative measurement method with standardized model comparison criteria. After collecting 217 valid questionnaires from companies in South Korea, the authors applied a structural equation modeling technique to analyze the data.

The result shows that the formative measure provides greater validity for the corporate performance measurement using BSC. Further, this study shows the indicators’ relative influence on each BSC perspectives using the formative measure.

This study proved the usefulness of the formative measure analysis method and suggested its practical use, focusing on the indicators most useful in developing corporate strategies. In addition, the authors showed that formative indicators could be used in the corporate environment by overcoming the limitations of conventional studies that were confined to causal relationships with latent variables.

This study may be the pioneering work that compares formative and reflective indicators simultaneously, addressing the usefulness of formative measurement and its application validity in the existing empirical studies using reflective measurements.

The literature on warehouse performance assessments is mainly focussed on the efficiency and effectiveness of an action or activity due to customer demand and tailored fulfilment, with less attention being given to the performance measurement of each function of the warehouse and its overall productivity. Therefore, this study was aimed at revising the key warehouse performance metrics to a set of productivity measurement indicators that can be adopted internationally for benchmarking productivity performance.

A literature review and semi-structured survey questionnaire were used for this study. The importance of warehouse productivity performance was reviewed to revamp the measurement indicators. Through the use of a directed content analysis and descriptive analysis, an extensive study was carried out to analyze existing warehouse productivity indicators.

The findings of this study provide comprehensive references for practitioners and academicians for improving the classification of productivity measurements from existing key performance metrics for warehousing. Also, this paper highlights the warehouse resources related to the respective warehouse operation activities.

The study was limited to productivity performance indicators adapted from Staudt et al. (2015). Furthermore, the samples for this study comprised Malaysian academicians and practitioners in the related field. The findings can be adapted on a global scale as this study implemented general warehouse operation processes.

Consequently, the contributions of this study are that it provides relevant benchmarks for key productivity performance indicators in the warehousing sector that has worldwide applicability and the developed model provides a conceptual platform from which further theoretical and empirical developments can be carried out.

Research on international marketing usually involves comparing different groups of respondents. When using structural equation modeling (SEM), group comparisons can be misleading unless researchers establish the invariance of their measures. While methods have been proposed to analyze measurement invariance in common factor models, research lacks an approach in respect of composite models. The purpose of this paper is to present a novel three-step procedure to analyze the measurement invariance of composite models (MICOM) when using variance-based SEM, such as partial least squares (PLS) path modeling.

A simulation study allows us to assess the suitability of the MICOM procedure to analyze the measurement invariance in PLS applications.

The MICOM procedure appropriately identifies no, partial, and full measurement invariance.

The statistical power of the proposed tests requires further research, and researchers using the MICOM procedure should take potential type-II errors into account.

The research presents a novel procedure to assess the measurement invariance in the context of composite models. Researchers in international marketing and other disciplines need to conduct this kind of assessment before undertaking multigroup analyses. They can use MICOM procedure as a standard means to assess the measurement invariance.

The purpose of this paper is to present an overview of the concept of early warning signs in projects and explain how a performance measurement system can be utilized as a source of data for an early warning approach signaling that a project is about to experience problems at some stage in the future.

Combination of action research and semi‐structured interviews and document analysis supplemented by a post‐mortem analysis after project close‐out.

Detection of early warning signals in projects can be better enabled through the application of a performance measurement system with properly defined key performance indicators. Utilization of this tool can positively affect the overall success of the project.

The case study involved only one project from the oil and gas industry.

The empirical case study was developed to illustrate the usefulness of exploiting a performance measurement system in a project. A procedure was demonstrated for developing and implementing an early warning system based on performance measurement, and specific performance indicators have been described for other projects to copy.

This paper highlights the gap in the literature concerning the link between early warning and project management and the link between early warning and performance measurement. It offers a new idea on how performance measurement can be used as an effective early warning system and is intended to be primarily of use to project management practitioners and practically‐oriented academics who are interested in developing fresh insights into new approaches for better management of projects.

The purpose of the study is to verify the theoretical assumptions based on literature review regarding the issue of brand effectiveness evaluation and the potential measurement framework, as well as to provide insights into the nature of effectiveness measurement of city brand strategies. The findings are considered important foundations for designing a place branding measurement system, which is the next step and final purpose of the author’s research project.

A total of 12 international academic experts from eight countries (in four continents) were individually interviewed. A semi-structured individual interview was applied as a research method. Sampling was purposive and the respondents represented the fields of marketing, place branding and public management. The standardized set of 19 open-ended questions was categorized into four themes (city brand effectiveness, methodology, measurement process and indicators).

The measurement of effectiveness of city branding should be treated as a strategic endeavor; however, it is a complex issue where political, social and methodological challenges overlap. Barriers to the development of a well-functioning measurement system include: too narrow understanding of what brand is, lack of knowledge or culture of measurement, conflicting political interests, reluctance to involve internal stakeholders, insufficient funding and complexity of the brand itself. The reliable measurement system should be characterized by attributes such as simplicity and durability, stakeholder inclusion, political rationale, adjustment to the specificity of the city and the independence of the measuring body/institution.

Up-to-date, common standards or universal measurement frames of the place branding measurement system do not exist. No discussion can be found in the literature on how such a system should be designed and implemented. Opinions of the experts interviewed provide important insights into the components and conditions of the reliable measurement system that would meet both methodological standards and practical needs. Further studies and analyses are however necessary to eventually compose the optimal city brand measurement system.