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Any business that opts to adopt a recommender engine (RE) for various potential benefits must choose from the candidate solutions, by matching to the task of interest and domain. The purpose of this paper is to choose RE that fits best from a set of candidate solutions using rule-based automated machine learning (ML) approach. The objective is to draw trustworthy conclusion, which results in brand building, and establishing a reliable relation with customers and undeniably to grow the business.

An experimental quantitative research method was conducted in which the ML model was evaluated with diversified performance metrics and five RE algorithms by combining offline evaluation on historical and simulated movie data set, and the online evaluation on business-alike near-real-time data set to uncover the best-fitting RE.

The rule-based automated evaluation of RE has changed the testing landscape, with the removal of longer duration of manual testing and not being comprehensive. It leads to minimal manual effort with high-quality results and can possibly bring a new revolution in the testing practice to start a service line “Machine Learning Testing as a service” (MLTaaS) and the possibility of integrating with DevOps that can specifically help agile team to ship a fail-safe RE evaluation product targeting SaaS (software as a service) or cloud deployment.

A small data set was considered for A/B phase study and was captured for ten movies from three theaters operating in a single location in India, and simulation phase study was captured for two movies from three theaters operating from the same location in India. The research was limited to Bollywood and Ollywood movies for A/B phase, and Ollywood movies for simulation phase.

The best-fitting RE facilitates the business to make personalized recommendations, long-term customer loyalty forecasting, predicting the company's future performance, introducing customers to new products/services and shaping customer's future preferences and behaviors.

The proposed rule-based ML approach named “2-stage locking evaluation” is self-learned, automated by design and largely produces time-bound conclusive result and improved decision-making process. It is the first of a kind to examine the business domain and task of interest. In each stage of the evaluation, low-performer REs are excluded which leads to time-optimized and cost-optimized solution. Additionally, the combination of offline and online evaluation methods offer benefits, such as improved quality with self-learning algorithm, faster time to decision-making by significantly reducing manual efforts with end-to-end test coverage, cognitive aiding for early feedback and unattended evaluation and traceability by identifying the missing test metrics coverage.

Social media channels provide an avenue for expressing views about different services/products. However, unlike merchandise/company websites (where users can post both reviews and ratings), it is not possible to understand user's ratings for a particular service-related comment on social media unless explicitly mentioned. Predicting ratings can be beneficial for service providers and prospective customers. Additionally, predicting ratings from a user-generated content can help in developing vast data sets for recommender systems utilizing recent data. The aim of this study is to predict ratings more accurately and enhance the performance of sentiment-based predictors by combining it with the emotional content of textual data.

This study had utilized a combination of sentiment and emotion scores to predict the ratings of Twitter posts (3,509 tweets) in three different contexts, namely, online food delivery (OFD) services, online travel agencies (OTAs) and online learning (e-learning). A total of 29,551 reviews were utilized for training and testing purposes.

Results of this study indicate accuracies of 58.34%, 57.84% and 100% in cases of e-learning, OTA and OFD services, respectively. The combination of sentiment and emotion scores showed an increase in accuracies of 19.41%, 27.83% and 40.20% in cases of e-learning, OFD and OTA services, respectively.

Understanding the ratings of social media comments can help both service providers as well as prospective customers who do not spend much time reading posts but want to understand the perspectives of others about a particular service/product. Additionally, predicting ratings of social media comments will help to build databases for recommender systems in different contexts.

The uniqueness of this study is in utilizing a combination of sentiment and emotion scores to predict the ratings of tweets related to different online services, namely, e-learning OFD and OTAs.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the application of business process reengineering (BPR) and benchmarking principles to redesign an undergraduate course on BPR to achieve continuous improvements. The principles are applied on a course on BPR in the curriculum of engineering management (EM) program at Stevens Institute of Technology. The EM program aims to provide the students the knowledge and skills, which are necessary to work effectively at the interface between technology, management, and engineering. BPR course (EM435) is recently added to EM program's curriculum to support the need for providing the bridge between the engineering of systems and business operations.

The research approach design is laid out from the time the EM435 course is first offered in the fall of 2006 to the senior year EM students. The students are surveyed and areas of redesign and improvements are identified based on benchmarking against ABET criteria and their associated outcomes, student expectations, similar academic courses, and industry expectations of skills and knowledge.

The identification of the improvement areas in the BPR curriculum leads to a continuous process improvement (CPI) initiative, which has been continued in a more structured manner. Research findings indicate a strong support for more case studies, use of BPR tool, and real‐life project in their investigation of effective pedagogy for teaching BPR to engineering undergraduates.

This paper demonstrates the value of applying benchmarking and CPI methodology in maintaining effective teaching and learning of BPR concepts. More empirical metrics can be developed in future to measure the success of course, improvements.

The findings of this research will promote adoption of courses on BPR and lay a foundation for BPR curriculum in engineering. The CPI approach will provide opportunities to analyze improvements over a period of time.

This paper is unique in its application of benchmarking and CPI for improving BPR curriculum at an undergraduate engineering level.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze and illustrate the needs and expectations of the industry from a newly hired engineering candidate for an entry‐level position involving business process reengineering (BPR). The paper aims to highlight the changing role and the new emerging face of business process design, analysis, and management, its relevant contents and methodologies, its new role, and emergence of a value of BPR, which has been redefined.

The growing interest and the importance of the role of business processes in organizations have promoted the development and implementation of an undergraduate level course on BPR at Stevens Institute in 2006. This research involved a survey of some potential employers during a recent redesigning of this course. The survey collected information from the employers on how important and relevant are the topics on BPR that are covered in the course for an entry‐level BPR related position.

The findings indicate a strong support from the employers for BPR curriculum. Of the 19 BPR topics on which information was collected from the employers, 63 percent were rated as “extremely important” and “very important”. The two highest rated areas of BPR were ability to research and collect process related data (3.8), and ability to use graphical methods to map the current or reengineered processes (3.5).

One of the limitations of this research is the size and representation of the data collected. A more broader sample would extend this work into a framework for BPR skill set and knowledge at various levels of experience.

The implications of this research are to both the academic community and potential employers. This paper provides useful knowledge on what skill sets are relevant for an entry level BPR professional in an economy, which is predominantly going to be dependent on efficiencies from business processes.

The paper provides value to those seeking entry‐level positions in terms of the knowledge and skill sets required to fulfill such a role effectively. The paper also provides guidance to faculty on areas needed to focus on in a BPR curriculum content and pedagogy and prepare students for practical situations. With the increasing role of service orientation in managing information systems – the importance of business process definitions and their reengineering cannot be undermined.

One of the most decisive objectives of human resource management (HRM), essential for business performance, is to attract, maintain and engage a qualified workforce. This study aims to identify and prioritize the antecedents of employer branding, which are considered extremely important by potential applicants when they choose to join a particular employer.

The authors have adopted a popular multicriteria decision-making technique fuzzy analytical hierarchy process, to prioritize the identified antecedents. The modified Delphi techniques with the 22 experts have been conducted to validate the identified antecedents. Structured questionnaires were discussed, and their reliability was assessed using the expert’s opinion.

Results of this study indicate that potential applicants consider career advancement opportunities as the most important enabler that persuades them to join a particular employer. Future employees are also motivated to join if they are offered attractive compensation packages, which are distinct from competitors. Furthermore, corporate social responsibility is evolving as an antecedent of employer branding as potential candidates are attracted to employers who are socially responsible.

Employer branding can serve as a strategic HRM technique for any business seeking to attract, recruit, retain and involve outstanding employees, as the success of the organization is determined by how its image is built, communicated and promoted. This study provides insights for HR managers and practitioners who can think of developing an effective employer brand communication that offers a distinct and in-imitable image and reputation as an employer of choice.

This study is unique, as it offers meaningful visions to HR practitioners and experts for designing employer branding strategies for attracting potential applicants to join their organizations.

This paper aims to examine the strategic issues of risk for independent theatrical film distributors in the Hindi film industry in India.

The study adopted qualitative grounded theory approach to explore contextually relevant strategic issues of risk for independent theatrical film distributors. Semi-structured in-depth interviews with Hindi film distributors helped to gain explorative insights about the risk behaviour of film distributors operating in Mumbai “circuit”.

The findings suggest that risk faced by distributors is a function of product (film content) features, contractual terms, resources such as finance and strength of strategic alliances with the producers. The study develops a business risk model for the film distributors from a series of propositions.

The paper contributes to the literature on motion picture industry by highlighting the importance of distribution risk in the film value chain.

In today's era of a digital world, mobile phones have now become an essential part in everyday life. The selection of the best mobile phone among the available alternatives is a complex decision making it a problem for the customers. Mobile phone manufactures are facing a lot of problems for launching/introducing a mobile phone according to the requirement of customers and it depends on a number of criteria/attributes such as: technical specifications, price, brand etc.

In the presented work, the above-discussed problem has been considered as a Multi-Criteria Decision Making MCDM problem and an approach based on Kano model with Fuzzy AHP and TOPSIS has been proposed to solve the problem. The Kano model has been used for identifying the different Kano categories of all the features through a customer survey. Fuzzy AHP has been applied to achieve the weights of each feature in order to introduce a best mobile phone for the customers. TOPSIS has been used for ranking of alternatives.

main features with different other sub-features have been selected for the study. Different features have been considered as categories and their Kano categories have been found out. The importance of these features has also been calculated by Fuzzy-AHP in terms of their evaluated weights. Different mobile phones have been ranked by TOPSIS according to their features calculated by Fuzzy-AHP. The proposed approach seems effective for identifying/classifying different attributes/features of mobile phones according to customer's requirements.

Here, different features of a mobile phone have been considered for designing a suitable mobile phone. Thus, this work can help a designer to design and select a suitable feature for a customer-oriented mobile phone.

This paper aims to investigate the effect of parent–adolescent conflict in step versus biological families on family communication patterns (FCPs) and the conflict resolution strategy adopted by adolescents during family destinations or holiday planning (where to visit?).

The literature on family conflict (i.e. parent–adolescent conflict) and the different types of families (step vs nuclear) supported the proposed framework. The survey was conducted in the Indian subcontinent with a sample size of 437 adolescents. SPSS 22.0 was used for factor analysis (exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis) and structural equation modelling was used through AMOS 26.0 for data analysis.

Significant relationship was observed between the types of families (step and biological), FCP and the resolution strategy chosen by Indian adolescents. Adopting a resolution strategy by adolescents in both families depends on the type of FCP in the family. Adolescents in stepfamilies have socio-oriented FCP and use “positive problem-solving” and “conflict withdrawal” as a resolution strategy. In contrast, adolescents in biological families have concept-oriented families and use “conflict enhancement” as a resolution strategy. It has also been found that adolescents who fall into high-stress categories used conflict enhancement strategies. In contrast, those who fall under low-stress categories used positive problem-solving and withdrawal strategies.

This study will add a new chapter to adolescents’ decision-making literature in line with the previous research. It has practical implications for tourism marketers, academicians/researchers and policymakers. Marketers can segment adolescents into step versus biological families, and the choice of resolution strategies may introduce efficient and competent marketing strategies and promotional campaigns.

This study favours that family type is a robust construct to predict adolescents’ choice of resolution strategy. So, it is one of the most influential variables in adolescents’ resolution strategy adoption.

The prevalence of diabetes has increased manifold and now become a public health problem from being mild disorder. There is a need to discover more effective and safer antidiabetic agents by utilizing the rich heritage of medicinal plants. Tannins are polyphenols that are obtained from various parts of different plants belonging to multiple species and considered as potential drugs for the treatment of non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The study was conducted in three phases: incorporation of Babul powder in biscuits: assessment of Glycemic Index (GI): suitability of Babul powder on diabetic subjects statistical analysis: area under curve (AUC) for increase in blood glucose was calculated by trapezoidal rule and means were tested for significance by paired t-test. Mean glucose levels of all subjects were calculated for each time point. p<0.05 was considered statistically significant.

Tannins are polyphenols that are obtained from various parts of different plants belonging to multiple species. As an indigenous plant of Rajasthan, Babul contains high amount of tannin levels ranging from 18 to 27 percent in deseeded pods from ssp. indica, whereas ssp. nilotica reached up to 50 percent. Hence, Babul was selected as the source of tannin and subjected to diabetics for its suitability. The study concluded that Babul powder is effective in management of blood glucose levels even the simple sugars also and can be considered as suitable for diabetics. The active component for the purpose may be the presence of tannin in the Babul.

The study was conducted on limited number of subjects. A confirmation study is suggested on the diabetic population.

The prevalence of diabetes is rapidly rising all over the globe at an alarming rate. Over few decades, the status of diabetes has changed from being considered as a mild disorder of the elderly to one of the major causes of morbidity and mortality affecting the youth and middle-aged people. Therefore, the present study focused on the development of tannin-based nutraceutical for incorporation in common foods and its health-promoting effect on diabetes.

This case study aims to understand the criticalities of hiring in a knowledge-based start-up; the various ways of retaining talent in a knowledge-based start-up; the competency requirements of human resource professionals in start-up organizations; the trade-off between business profitability and the R&D drive of the company; and the various organizational structures available for a knowledge-based start-up.

Ayush Jain, a first-generation entrepreneur, is facing a challenge with his start-up, TechShlok. TechShlok is an IT solution provider with its headquarters in Jaipur, India. The company is doing very well and is able to achieve many accolades. As the company grows in business and employee strength, it is facing talent acquisition and retention challenges. Ayush is in a fix to solve the talent issue and retain the key talent of the organization.

The case can be taught in a Human Resource Management course, including “talent management” and “human resource planning”. The case may be taught at upper undergraduate levels. It can also be taught in courses of entrepreneurship and knowledge-based start-ups.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 11: Strategy.