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The rapid growth of the Internet has provided tremendous opportunities for service companies to offer quality services. The prime drivers and motivations for offering such services through the Net are to reduce transaction costs and to provide efficient and effective service to customers. But what are the determinants essential for building a successful electronic service (e‐service) operation? This paper addresses this specific issue by isolating the essential determinants from the available literature, and assessing them individually to obtain better insights and understanding. This could help companies to design and develop robust foundations on which to build successful e‐service operations. The boundaries between e‐service, e‐business and e‐commerce are blurred and sometimes confusing. This paper aims to clarify some of these ambiguities.

The aim of this paper is to offer a conceptual model that demonstrates Chinese consumers’ value perceptions towards luxury products based on the recent literature reviews and the findings from focus groups.

Focus group discussion is used to explore how Chinese consumers construct their value perceptions towards luxury products.

This research has integrate different perspective values into one multidimensional model to explain directly why Chinese consumers choose to buy luxury products, and what are these variables that influence their luxury value perceptions. It also provides a broader perspective in exploring the Chinese customer‘s self- and societal perceptions for purchasing luxury products.

The primary data were only collected from three cities; thus, the findings may not be generalisable across all Chinese consumers. Moreover, this qualitative study was based on a relatively small sample size; thus, a future study is planned by designing a measurement instrument based on the proposed conceptual model and also testing the proposed theoretical model that scholars can apply in related empirical work in the future.

This study has offered a wide range of understanding about how Chinese luxury consumers’ luxury value perception reflect their purchasing behaviours and habits; it has also provided a new theoretical insight into the phenomenon of luxury consumption and contributed to the relatively limited literature on the concept of luxury in the context of Chinese market. It could also provide good implications for the effective marketing strategy actions in the context of Chinese luxury market.

This research develops value stream mapping (VSM) for L'Oreal's artwork process, to eliminate waste, reduce lead time and identify stages that can be automated, which makes the process less prone to human error and more responsive to fulfilling business-to-business customer requirements. In addition, amendments frequently occur slowing down the artwork process. In this context, VSM is applied to L'Oreal's artwork process to reduce lead time, human error and missed deadlines.

This study uses data from L'Oreal's artwork tracker from 2018–2019, which is manually tracked by the launch team. The service level agreement and task time data have been collected from 12 employees representing the launch, factory and marketing teams working on the artwork process. Qualitative feedback was also obtained from nine employees to validate the VSM for L'Oreal's artwork process.

VSM identified stages that can be streamlined and automated in L'Oreal's artwork process, which makes the process more efficient and responsive to changing scope of the artworks. 50% of the stages have been eliminated from the manual artwork process, resulting in a reduced lead time of 10.5 days and a reduction of 28% spent on the process. This allows the artwork process to be more agile to the requirements of business-to-business customers. The proposed VSM shows a 73% increase in value-added time for a renovation and a 75% increase in value-added time for new product developments.

VSM has been specifically designed, developed and analyzed for L'Oreal's artwork process, in order to make the process more efficient and responsive to business-to-business customer’s requirements.

There is no doubt that quality has become a major feature in the survival plan of many organisations today. Statistical process control (SPC) is a powerful technique for monitoring, managing, analysing and improving the process performance through the use of statistical methods. In this paper, the implementation of SPC is examined and analysed, based on a survey of 33 manufacturing small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The results presented here are focused on 12 critical success factors (CSFs) identified from the literature. The results of the analysis have shown that the critical success factors, in order of importance, are: management commitment, process prioritisation, control charting, teamwork, measurement system evaluation and so on. Moreover, this research has revealed that the least important factor is the use of pilot study in SMEs.

E‐service operations that attract and influence customers to buy products and/or services from specific sites is a complex process involving service design, marketing, and delivery, and encompass a number of essential determinants. Determinants that integrate all the three service processes form the basic framework on which a survey was conducted involving e‐service companies, and their views were ascertained on those determinants affecting e‐service operations. The aim of this paper is to provide a specific solution that isolates the critical determinants for e‐service operations. This paper demonstrated the usability of optimisation technique in isolating critical determinants based on companies’ responses. It was found that optimisation technique works well and is able to isolate optimum number of key determinants that are critical to e‐service operations. Pareto analysis and statistical significance test were also used to explore the relative importance of the determinants; however, it was found that they failed to identify specific and optimum number of critical determinants. The rationale and limitations of each technique and their applicability were also critically assessed.

Many industrial engineers perform one‐factor‐at‐a‐time (OFAT) experiments to examine situations of process improvement and for problem‐solving activities. However, OFAT experiments can prove to be inefficient and unreliable, leading to false optimal conditions. Moreover, they often consist largely of “trial and error”, relying on luck, intuition, guesswork and experience for their success. Design of experiments (DOE) takes an alternative, more structured approach. DOE is a powerful technique for discovering a set of process or design variables which are most important to the process/product/system and then assisting experimenters to determine at what levels these variables should be set/kept to optimise performance. In order to demonstrate the power of designed experiments over the traditional OFAT approach, the authors use a simple catapult experiment. They suggest that such an experiment could act as a powerful weapon in the training of engineers and managers who might be intimidated by a more “up front” statistical approach.

Service quality is a growing concern for many service firms in the UK. Today service firms are paying more attention than ever to the needs and expectations of the customers by consistently improving the quality of service provided to their customers. This paper briefly explores the relation between service quality and business performance followed by an assessment of service quality as a framework. The case study focuses on a hotel group in UK, where service quality was measured at six different locations. The findings from the research unveiled that there were significant variations for service quality between the six hotels.

The ability of small businesses to make and adjust to the paradigm shift needed to benefit from the Japanese production theory has been questioned in the literature. Zangwill (1992) questioned the limits of the Japanese Production Theory (JPT) and in a subsequent paper (Zangwill, 1994) held on to his argument about the limits of the Japanese Production Theory. In this paper, the Japanese Production Theory is first discussed, followed by a discussion of the consistency between the traditional EOQ theory and the Japanese production theory, critique of the Zangwill’s argument, and issues related to the relevance of the Japanese production theory to small businesses.

We examine the dividend pay out patterns for all UK listed industrial companies featured in the FTSE All Share Index for the period 1992‐1998. Then we match the pay out patterns to different dividend policies. From our empirical observations, we argue that dividend signalling does not universally apply to all firms. We also report our evidence that there is no industry norm for dividend policy, particularly when firms have decided whether to use dividends to signal or not. In addition, we found that the percentage of insiders’ share holdings, market capitalisation and as set book values are statistically significant for determining whether firms use dividends to signal or not.

Outlines previous research on the effects of insider trading on share prices and reactions to the tightening up of US laws against illegal trading. Calculates returns for a sample of large managerial purchases made after the new legislation (1993‐1995) and announced in the Wall Street Journal to test for the presence of asymmetric information, agency conflicts and undervaluation; using firm size, market‐to‐book ratio, Q ratio and price‐earnings ratio as proxies. Finds that share prices react positively to large managerial purchases, especially if the firm is small, undervalued and/or experiencing conflicts between managers and shareholders; and that this effect is not reversed within a year.