Search results

This study aims to confirm the inverse relationship between scheduled corrective maintenance (SCM) and corrective maintenance (CM) in health-care facility management. That is, the higher the SCM, the lower the demand for CM, and the lower the SCM, the higher the demand for CM. Furthermore, the study shows the importance of SCM as compared with CM in healthcare facilities.

This study investigated 28 services in facility engineering services for an exploratory study by using the open-ended approach of the grounded theory. Five years of data with a total of 20,480 SCM work orders and 84,837 CM work orders were extracted from the central management information system database. Data were analyzed using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences program. Data were presented in the form of mathematical scores using descriptive statistics and correlation test to elaborate the variable characteristics and make conclusions.

This study provides empirical insights about the effectiveness of proactive maintenance in reducing breakdowns for systems or equipment in health-care facilities. Findings suggest that increasing SCM will reduce CM demands.

The location approach, with restrictions to the comparison between CM and SCM, still allows for exploration, especially on the factors that can reduce the demand for correction. These factors include planned preventive maintenance, work flow process, level of competency of maintenance workers and health-care maintenance strategic planning.

Proactive maintenance is important in preventing dangerous occurrences in hospitals. Reducing breakdowns increases customer satisfaction. Therefore, this study shows implications to health-care maintenance organizations in the context of business strategic development.

Data are crucial in proving a hypothesis. This study confirms the evidence of facility management demand theory and highlights the inverse relationship between SCM and CM.

Green building development practices reduce carbon footprint and promote sustainability in the built environment. To foster green building construction in Malaysia, several strategies and sustainability metrics like the Malaysian Carbon Reduction and Environmental Sustainability Tool (MyCREST) have been established. Yet, the implementation of green office building development in Sarawak still remains low. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to develop MyCREST Embedded Framework (MEF) for enhancing the adoption of green office building construction in Sarawak.

To achieve the research aim, document analysis of the overarching MyCREST Reference Guide was conducted. Then, questionnaire was used to survey 120 green construction professionals in Kuching, the capital of Sarawak. Afterwards, data from the questionnaire was analyzed using Statistical Package for Social Science software version 22. As a result, the significant strategies for enhancing the adoption of green office building construction in Sarawak were identified, and ranked hierarchically using the Relative Importance Index.

The established significant strategies include: government policies and incentives, sustainable technological practices, defined process for executing green building projects and adequate information for the public. Moreover, this study recommends MyCREST as the suitable Green Building Assessment Tool for developing green office buildings in Sarawak due to its integration of carbon reduction strategies with sustainability indicators.

This study is limited to Kuching; hence future study should be extended to other cities in Sarawak.

Based on the findings, the MEF is developed to enlighten the industry practitioners on the approaches that will elevate green office building development in Sarawak.

This study aims to find out the problems of family Takaful (Islamic Life Insurance) operations in Bangladesh and proposes strategies to overcome the problems.

Qualitative data were collected through interviews with 32 respondents from two family Takaful operators in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

The study finds a number of problems of family Takaful which relate to the government, Takaful company and the Shariah board. Lack of governing guidelines for Takaful companies in Bangladesh is causing numerous operational problems of family Takaful. To overcome these obstacles, the government should propose separate Act for Takaful. This requires support from the stakeholders along with Islamic scholars in the country.

It is anticipated that the findings and suggestions of the study will assist the policymakers in improving the situation of family Takaful companies particularly in Bangladesh.

If the proposed suggestions are implemented in Takaful companies, the problems facing Takaful will likely be solved and more people will take part in Takaful. This would contribute to developing the country economically, raise Islamic values and foster peace and harmony in the society.

Mainly, this study is based on the primary research that has been conducted in family Takaful companies in Bangladesh.

The purpose of this study is to examine the acceptability of tawarruq in the banking industry in Somalia, focusing on awareness, need, compatibility, relative advantage, behavioral attitude and the role of Shariah scholars. This study is governed by the Theory of Islamic Consumer Behavior.

A questionnaire survey was conducted involving 150 customers of Islamic banks in Mogadishu, Somalia. This research adopts a quantitative methodology, using descriptive and survey analyses by employing SPSS 23. Smart-PLS-4 SEM was used to test the six hypotheses established in the study.

This study provides evidence that the customers of Islamic banks in Somalia are looking forward to Islamic banks offering tawarruq in the country. Respondents viewed tawarruq as a very attractive product compared to other existing products of Islamic banks in the country. The need for tawarruq, its compatibility and relative advantage have a positive and significant influence on the intention to use tawarruq products for cash financing purposes, whereas customer awareness, behavioral attitudes and the role of Shariah scholars have insignificant influence.

The findings of this study can be beneficial to all Islamic financial institutions in Somalia by applying tawarruq contract to facilitate cash financing.

This study contributes to the literature by enhancing the awareness of tawarruq in Somalia. The study also shed light on the need of Islamic banks’ customers on tawarruq for cash financing purposes in Somalia.

The purpose of this paper is to use SERVQUAL to measure Generation Y’s (Gen Y) perceived service quality and its effects on their satisfaction toward the Malaysian hotel industry.

The required data were collected through questionnaire, distributed to 200 respondents in four areas of Klang Valley. The collected data were put through multiple regression to identify the effect of SERVQUAL dimensions on service quality.

The results reveal that all the elements of SERVQUAL, except tangibility, had a significant and positive relationship with customer satisfaction.

It is a niche area research which is done on a small population in a specified geographical area within Malaysia, though its research implications are significant and add significantly to the tourism literature with respect to Gen Y.

This research holds importance in the growing service tourism and hoteling industry in Malaysia, where Gen Y holds a key economic position and is predicted to grow even further in the near future.

It is a niche area research done on very specific consumers in Malaysia. It, therefore, adds to the emerging field of tourism in relation to Gen Y.

This paper presents a sustainability assessment model to holistically guide sustainable construction and green retrofitting of affordable housing from the Ghanaian perspective.

A comprehensive review was carried out, which yielded 16 sustainability indicators. Then, a questionnaire survey was conducted among respondents in the Ghanaian housing sector. Forty-seven valid responses were received and analysed using fuzzy synthetic evaluation (FSE) technique.

A four-index model was developed that includes: Housing and Transportation (H + T) index, household-satisfaction index, efficient stakeholder-management index and quality-related index. These indices account for 25.3%, 26.3%, 23.6% and 24.9% of sustainability attainment in affordable housing, respectively. Accordingly, household-satisfaction has the greatest contribution to sustainability attainment in affordable housing.

Due to challenges in obtaining responses to the questionnaire, the study was conducted with relatively small number of responses.

The model serves as a tool that could be used to objectively and comprehensively assess sustainability performance in affordable housing. Besides, it could be used as a baseline to calibrate future projects and for benchmarking success levels of comparable housing projects. Finally, the estimated indices are applicable in decision making for optimum resource allocation for sustainable low-cost housing in the Ghanaian perspective.

This study aims to numerically examine mixed convection of CuO-water nanofluid in a three-dimensional (3D) vented cavity with inlet and outlet ports under the influence of an inner rotating circular cylinder, homogeneous magnetic field and surface corrugation effects. In practical applications, it is possible to encounter some of the considered configurations in a vented cavity such as magnetic field, rotating cylinder and it is also possible to specially add some of the active and passive control means to control the convection inside the cavity such as adding nanoparticles, corrugating the surfaces. The complicated physics with nanofluid under the effects of magnetic field and inclusion of complex 3D geometry make it possible to use the results of this numerical investigation for the design, control and optimization of many thermal engineering systems as mentioned above.

The bottom surface is corrugated with a rectangular wave shape, and the rotating cylinder surface and cavity bottom surface were kept at constant hot temperatures while the cold fluid enters the inlet port with uniform velocity. The complicated interaction between the forced convection and buoyancy-driven convection coupled with corrugated and rotating surfaces in 3D configuration with magnetic field, which covers a wide range of thermal engineering applications, are numerically simulated with finite element method. Effects of various pertinent parameters such as Richardson number (between 0.01 and 100), Hartmann number (between 0 and 1,000), angular rotational speed of the cylinder (between −30 and 30), solid nanoparticle volume fraction (between 0 and 0.04), corrugation height (between 0 and 0.18H) and number (between 1 and 20) on the convective heat transfer performance are numerically analyzed.

It was observed that the magnetic field suppresses the recirculation zone obtained in the lower part of the inlet port and enhances the average heat transfer rate, which is 10.77 per cent for water and 6.86 per cent for nanofluid at the highest strength. Due to the thermal and electrical conductivity enhancement of nanofluid, there is 5 per cent discrepancy in the Nusselt number augmentation with the nanoadditive inclusion in the absence and presence of magnetic field. The average heat transfer rate of the corrugated surface enhances by about 9.5 per cent for counter-clockwise rotation at angular rotational speed of 30 rad/s as compared to motionless cylinder case. Convective heat transfer characteristics are influenced by introducing the corrugation waves. As compared to number of waves, the height of the corrugation has a slight effect on the heat transfer variation. When the number of rectangular waves increases from N = 1 to N = 20, approximately 59 per cent of the average heat transfer reduction is achieved.

In this study, mixed convection of CuO-water nanofluid in a 3D vented cavity with inlet and outlet ports is numerically examined under the influence of an inner rotating circular cylinder, homogeneous magnetic field and surface corrugation effects. To the best of authors knowledge such a study has never been performed. In practical applications, it is possible to encounter some of the considered configurations in a vented cavity such as magnetic field, rotating cylinder and it is also possible to specially add some of the active and passive control means to control the convection inside the cavity such as adding nanoparticles, corrugating the surfaces. The complicated physics with nanofluid under the effects of magnetic field and inclusion of complex 3D geometry make it possible to use the results of this numerical investigation for the design, control and optimization of many thermal engineering systems as mentioned above.

This study aims to understand how perceived desirability and perceived feasibility influence Portuguese higher education students' social entrepreneurial intention and general entrepreneurial intention and explore how gender attitudes can affect these relationships.

This study's sample comprises 391 participants. The hypotheses formulated in the research model were tested through structural equation modelling, using the bootstrapping method to perform decomposition tests and multigroup analyses to assess the effect of gender on perceived desirability, perceived feasibility and social and general entrepreneurial intention.

The sample data reveal that women have a greater social entrepreneurial intention, and men have a greater general entrepreneurial intention. The results regarding the research model reveal that perceived desirability positively influences social and general entrepreneurial intention, with stronger relationships for men than for women. However, perceived feasibility positively influences overall entrepreneurial intention but is insignificant in explaining social entrepreneurial intention. When the differences between genders are analysed, the perceived feasibility by women is significant and positively influences the social entrepreneurial intention, not being significant when men are considered. Contrary to previous studies about higher education students, men have a higher perceived desirability in both general and social entrepreneurial intentions, while women have a stronger perceived feasibility in both general and social entrepreneurial intentions.

This paper contributes to the development of the social entrepreneurship literature, demonstrating that social entrepreneurial intention can be influenced by gender. The results show the importance of considering the spatial and organisational context in examining the relationships between perceived desirability/perceived feasibility and social entrepreneurial intentions of men and women.

This is a national study which aims to determine the average waiting time in Malaysian public hospitals and to gauge the level of patient satisfaction with the waiting time. It also aims to identify factors perceived by healthcare providers which contribute to the waiting time problem.

Self‐administered questionnaires were the main method of data collection. Two sets of questionnaires were used. The first set solicited information from patients on their waiting time expereince. The second set elucidated information from hospital employees on the possible causes of lengthy waiting time. The questionnaires were administered in 21 public hospitals throughout all 13 states in Malaysia. A total of 13,000 responses were analysed for the patient survey and almost 3,000 were analysed for the employee survey.

The findings indicate that on average, patients wait for more than two hours from registration to getting the prescription slip, while the contact time with medical personnel is only on average 15 minutes. Employee surveys on factors contributing to the lengthy waiting time indicate employee attitude and work process, heavy workload, management and supervision problems, and inadequate facilities to be among the contributory factors to the waiting time problem.

Public healthcare in Malaysia is in a state of “excess demand”, where demand for subsidised healthcare far outstrips supply, due to the large fee differential between public and private healthcare services. There is a need for hospital managers to reduce the boredom faced by patients while waiting, and to address the waiting time problem in a more scientific manner, as has been carried out in other countries through simulation and modelling techniques.

Healthcare organisations are keen to address their waiting time problem. However, not much research has been carried out in this area. The study thus fills the lacuna in waiting time studies in healthcare organisations.

The purpose of this study is to validate the psychometric properties of the Self-Perceived Employability Scale in the context of the United Arab Emirates (UAE-SPE) and to verify the model fit of the UAE-SPE and University Commitment Scale (UC) (Rothwell et al., 2008) for undergraduate students.

A cross-sectional survey study was carried out to collect the data using a web-based survey tool (Qualtrics) at a public university in the UAE. The sample was 646 undergraduate students.

As a result of the factor analysis, the study validated three factors of SPE for undergraduate students in the UAE that explain their perceptions of their university reputation, their field of study, the state of the UAE labour market and confidence in their skills. Confirmatory factor analysis verified good model fit indices of UAE-SPE and the UC scale. In addition, the study found a statistically significant positive relationship between the UC scale and the three factors of UAE-SPE.

Currently, there is a scarcity of published research on self-perceived employability amongst undergraduate students in higher education institutions in the UAE and the Arab region. This article not only contributes to research on this topic but also validates two scales, allowing cross-cultural comparisons of SPE and UC of undergraduate students in the Arab region and worldwide.