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General Management/Strategy.

Post-graduate/MBA.

Case A: Mr Grandhi Mallikarjuna Rao, founding chairman of GMR, was considering a proposal to bid for an upcoming international airport in Hyderabad, India. The strategic move would have marked GMR’s foray into the Indian airport infrastructure sector. GMR had been involved in the development and operation of power plants and had thrived on public–private partnerships for all its projects. Mr Rao is thinking: Should GMR make another major investment in infrastructure development by bidding to build the airport in Hyderabad, India? Further, how should the organization prepare itself for this strategic move? Case B: On April 4, 2013, the meeting of GMR’s Group Executive Council (GEC) was scheduled to take place. Srinivivas Bommidala, G.M. Rao’s son-in-law and Chairman of GMR’s airports business, was gearing up for the meeting. The meeting was called to discuss a proposal for bidding for an upcoming airport project in the Philippines. It had been more than a decade since GMR entered the airport infrastructure sector. The organization had built substantial airport operating expertise during that period. It adopted a joint venture (JV) model for expanding in the airport infrastructure business. Until now, the organization had always formed JVs for all its airport projects. JVs with existing airport operators were necessitated by the bid conditions that required a certain minimum airport operating experience for qualifying as a bidder for various projects. In some cases, a JV with a local player helped GMR with market knowledge for functioning in a foreign market. GMR also used JVs to access the capabilities it lacked for operating in this sector and gradually learnt from its partners for building capabilities in-house. The group now had the required operating expertise in the sector to qualify as a bidder. One of the key issues the GEC was contemplating was: Whether GMR should continue to form JV for bidding for the upcoming project or should it go solo? Further, if it had to form a JV then, in which areas should it seek a partner?

Case A: To understand the relationship between key concepts in strategic management, including diversification, capabilities and core competence. To help students understand the various factors managers consider when deciding on the diversification strategy of an organization. To create an understanding of the organizational processes required to facilitate diversification into a new segment. To teach students how to evaluate a potential market opportunity that may require a firm to take on a diversification strategy. Case B: To help students understand how companies use alliances as growth strategies. To understand the rationale for formation of various alliances. To explore various factors managers consider when deciding on alliance strategy of an organization. To understand the challenges associated with using alliances as a strategic option. To understand the pros and cons of internal development (i.e. going solo) vis-à-vis strategic alliances.

CSS 11: Strategy.

General management/strategy.

Case B: On April 4, 2013, the meeting of GMR’s Group Executive Council (GEC) was scheduled to take place. Srinivas Bommidala, G.M. Rao’s son-in-law and Chairman of GMR’s airports business, was gearing up for the meeting. The meeting was called to discuss a proposal for bidding for an upcoming airport project in the Philippines. It had been more than a decade since GMR entered the airport infrastructure sector. The organization had built substantial airport operating expertise during that period. It adopted a joint venture (JV) model for expanding into the airport infrastructure business. Until now the organization had always formed JVs for all its airport projects. JVs, with existing airport operators, were necessitated by the bid conditions that required a certain minimum airport operating experience for qualifying as a bidder for various projects. In some cases, JV with a local player helped GMR with market knowledge for functioning in a foreign market. GMR also used JVs to access the capabilities it lacked for operating in this sector and gradually learnt from its partners for building capabilities in-house. The group now had the required operating expertise in the sector to qualify as a bidder. One of the key issues the GEC was contemplating was: Whether GMR should continue to form JV for bidding for the upcoming project or should it go solo? Further, if it had to form a JV then, in which areas should it seek a partner?

Case B: To help students understand how companies use alliances as growth strategies; to understand the rationale for formation of various alliances; to explore various factors managers consider when deciding on alliance strategy of an organization; to understand the challenges associated with using alliances as a strategic option; and to understand the pros and cons of internal development (i.e. going solo) vis-à-vis strategic alliances.

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CSS 11: Strategy.

Modern supply chains have become increasingly vulnerable to disruptions, as evidenced by the recent COVID-19 crisis, the Suez Canal blockage and the war in Ukraine. The purpose of the study was to examine the impact of disruptions on organizations and their supply chains, and to examine which resilience principles and corresponding strategies were effective at maintaining and/or creating competitive advantage.

Anchored in contingent resource-based view theory and organizational information processing theory, the study uses an explanatory mixed-methods explanatory research design consisting of two surveys followed by semi-structured interviews to elaborate on the quantitative results.

The quantitative findings showed that data analytic capability combined with a data driven culture had a positive impact on competitive advantage through improved supply chain robustness. No similar effect for supply chain resilience on competitive advantage was found. This was explained by the qualitative findings which showed that insights enabled data analytic capability led to increased supply chain robustness by encouraging proactive measures such as safety stock and redundancies in the supply chain. However, supply chain resilience required these measures to be in place. Without them, supply chain managers were unable to act upon the insights enabled by visibility.

The empirical findings show that data analytic capability impacts supply chain robustness and resilience in different ways, especially in the context of unprecedented disruptions.

This study aims to determine (1) the effect of environmental management accounting on organizational performance and (2) the mediating effect of process innovation on the relationship between environmental management accounting and organizational performance.

This research uses survey methods designed for management accountants of large manufacturing companies in Indonesia. Data from 123 respondents were analyzed using the WarpPLS.

The implementation of environmental management accounting exerted a positive effect on organizational performance. It is evident that the implementation of environmental management accounting encourages companies to innovate processes which will improve how well the organization performs.

These findings still contained several limitations such as data were only collected from one province in Indonesia, and so the findings might not be generalizable to other provinces in Indonesia. Also, the number of variables studied only involved three. The study only focused on certain dimensions of environmental management accounting without considering other dimensions in-depth.

These findings extend the literature on environmental management accounting and demonstrate, from a practical perspective, environmental management accounting (EMA), which prioritizes the environment, will encourage companies to innovate their processes so that they are more environmentally friendly; EMA recognizes the important role of accountants in managing environmental issues.

This study documents the importance of environmental management accounting to assist companies in getting accurate information on environmental issues and environmental costs.

The purpose of this paper is three-fold: (1) this editorial viewpoint gives context to the manuscripts included in this special issue on pandemics and epidemics. (2) The viewpoint frames a research agenda for the vital work necessary to understand and make the humanitarian supply chain more resilient. (3) The authors hope that the viewpoint as well as the included papers contribute to the dialogue and facilitate a research program over the short- to medium-term about mass complex disasters, including epidemics and pandemics, and their effects on the humanitarian supply chain and logistics.

The paper examines COVID-19 response by focusing on the USA as a mini case study. It utilizes contemporaneous reporting in USA newspapers between February and July of 2020. Reports made during an incident or event provide some of the most accurate records of that event and point to gaps in our understanding of research in the humanitarian supply chain.

The novel COVID-19 pandemic highlights unanticipated ways that pandemics and epidemics impact HLSCM and display the supply chain's fragility in stark terms. The paper layouts some of the thematic issues that emerged from COVID-19 that could point the way for future research in the field in the short run.

The articles accessed for the paper dated February–July 2020. With the pandemic ongoing, many more thematic areas or more enduring ones might surface that could change the direction of the findings or recommendations. In addition, relying on secondary sources like newspapers for this research largely depends on the quality of the reports. Moreover, newspaper articles are not as scientifically robust as are academic journals as some. The viewpoints could be biased. It is also difficult to verify the best news sources, if they are not known a priori.

Thematic lessons from America's COVID-19 impact set the stage for future research agenda in the humanitarian supply chain and logistics response over the next few years. There will be other pandemics. The question is not if, but when.

The COVID-19 pandemic makes it impossible for us to ignore the link between the global supply chain, natural and human-made disasters, including epidemics and pandemics, environmental degradation and deforestation.

The paper's originality lies it being one of the first, if not the first, to deal with this topic within the operations/logistics/supply chain management field. It therefore helps to pave the way for other perspectives and approaches to understand and advance the field of humanitarian logistics and supply chain management.

This study investigated the effects of reward system (RS) and job conditions (JC) on employee retention (ER). In particular, this study addressed the mediating effect of employee engagement (EE) on the relationship between RS, JC and ER.

This paper employed descriptive survey approach and the unit of analysis consisted of public hospital nursing staff. Data were collected using questionnaires with a sample of 370 nurse respondents. Structural equation modelling with Smart-Partial Least Squares (PLS) 3.3.8 was used in a statistical analysis.

The results revealed that RS and JC significantly related to ER. The study also showed the direct effect of RS and JC on EE. These findings indicate that (EE) has a partial mediating role in the relationship between RS, JC and ER.

The study offers important policy insights for public nursing stakeholders who seek to increase retention of skills among their nursing staff. The findings are also crucial because they may help the health sector improve their ER strategies, especially in dynamic and competitive business situations where organisations are challenged to retain personnel from a limited skilled workforce.

The findings of this study contribute to the literature on retention of nursing employees by enhancing the understanding of the influences of EE, RS and JC on ER among public hospitals.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly applied by businesses to optimize their processes and decision-making, develop effective and efficient strategies, and positively influence customer behaviors. Businesses use AI to generate behaviors such as customer retention (CR). The existing literature on “AI and CR” is vastly scattered. The paper aims to review the present research on AI in CR systematically and suggest future research directions to further develop the field.

The Scopus database is used to collect the data for systematic review and bibliometric analysis using the VOSviewer tool. The paper performs the following analysis: (1) year-wise publications and citations, (2) co-authorship analysis of authors, countries, and affiliations, (3) citation analysis of articles and journals, (4) co-occurrence visualization of binding terms, and (5) bibliographic coupling of articles.

Five research themes are identified, namely, (1) AI and customer churn prediction in CR, (2) AI and customer service experience in CR, (3) AI and customer sentiment analysis in CR, (4) AI and customer (big data) analytics in CR, and (5) AI privacy and ethical concerns in CR. Based on the research themes, fifteen future research objectives and a future research framework are suggested.

The paper has important implications for researchers and managers as it reveals vital insights into the latest trends and paths in AI-CR research and practices. It focuses on privacy and ethical issues of AI; hence, it will help the government develop policies for sustainable AI adoption for CR.

To the author's best knowledge, this paper is the first attempt to comprehensively review the existing research on “AI and CR” using bibliometric analysis.

This study presents the development of a supply chain (SC) observatory, which is a benchmarking solution to support companies within the same industry in understanding their positioning in terms of SC performance.

A case study is used to demonstrate the set-up of the observatory. Twelve experts on automatic equipment for the wrapping and packaging industry were asked to select a set of performance criteria taken from the literature and evaluate their importance for the chosen industry using multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) techniques. To handle the high number of criteria without requiring a high amount of time-consuming effort from decision-makers (DMs), five subjective, parsimonious methods for criteria weighting are applied and compared.

A benchmarking methodology is presented and discussed, aimed at DMs in the considered industry. Ten companies were ranked with regard to SC performance. The ranking solution of the companies was on average robust since the general structure of the ranking was very similar for all five weighting methodologies, though simplified-analytic hierarchy process (AHP) was the method with the greatest ability to discriminate between the criteria of importance and was considered faster to carry out and more quickly understood by the decision-makers.

Developing an SC observatory usually requires managing a large number of alternatives and criteria. The developed methodology uses parsimonious weighting methods, providing DMs with an easy-to-use and time-saving tool. A future research step will be to complete the methodology by defining the minimum variation required for one or more criteria to reach a specific position in the ranking through the implementation of a post-fact analysis.

The aim of this study was to determine the impact of oral communication in improving the marketing and financial management skills of sweet potato farmers.

The study used a quasi-experimental design with a pre- and post-test approach. The sample was 540 sweet potato farmers that were randomly assigned to training (n = 270) and no-training groups (n = 270) with analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) as the method of data analysis. While the training group received oral training sessions for three farming seasons beginning in 2019, 2020 and 2021, the no-training group did not receive any intervention.

Before the training sessions, all the sweet potato farmers scored low on marketing skills like advertising, sales promotion and sales forecasting. Both groups also scored low on financial management skills like budgeting, investments, saving and controlling expenditures. Their annual income level was also low and both groups did not significantly differ. However, after the training and during the follow-up evaluation, the participants in the training group reported a significant improvement in their marketing skills and financial management skills. There was also an improvement in their income level from $238 (N109,480) at baseline to $523 (N240,580) after the training and $782 (N359,720) after the follow-up evaluation. On the other hand, the no-training group reported a staggered fluctuation in their income of $241 (N110,860) at baseline, $371(N170,660) during post-training evaluation and $214 (N98,440) at follow-up assessment.

The first limitation is that the study examined only one crop. There is a need to pay attention to farmers of other crops for better understanding. Another limitation of the study is that the researchers examined only oral communication. There is a need to compare more than one training to understand which is more effective. Finally, the current study did not consider the moderating effect of other factors like the source of labour and expenses.

This study has shown that oral communication is an effective tool for promoting the acquisition of marketing and financial management skills and enhancing agribusiness.