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The purpose of this paper is to identify the impact of enterprise systems (ESs), in particular radio frequency identification (RFID) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, on supply chain management (SCM). The results of this conceptual paper demonstrate that ERP and RFID systems contribute to SCM by improving supply chain integration. Supply chain integration occurs to facilitate the flow of financing, products, and information throughout the chain. In this regard, ERP and RFID contribute to integration by enhancing the information flow across the supply chain.

This paper proposes a conceptual model developed from the findings of literature review within the research domains of SCM, ESs, and supply chain integration.

This conceptual study contributes to the existing theory by linking the concept of information technology, ESs to SCM. The conceptual model in this paper may provide insights for executives who wish to implement ERP or RFID systems in their businesses in order to achieve higher integration, both within internal sectors and also with supply chain partners.

The findings in this study contribute to the theory base by linking the concept of information technologies, ESs to SCM. The conceptual model presented in this paper can provide insights for executives who wish to implement ERP or RFID systems in their businesses in order to achieve higher integration within internal sectors and with supply chain partners. This study offers new understandings by investigating the impact of ERP and RFID together on SCM.

The purpose of this paper is to explore, describe and categorise practices of managing product returns empirically in internet retailing.

A multiple case study was conducted involving 12 e-commerce firms and 4 logistics service providers. An integrative data collection approach of semi-structured interviews, documentation and observations was used to gain comprehensive managerial and operational descriptions of returns management (RM) processes.

The findings show inconsistent RM processes, with a plethora of practices implemented and organised differently across firms. RM processes are ambiguous; their design is a result of incremental changes over time, lacking strategy and goals. There is a mismatch between how they are described and understood in the literature and how they are actually used. Practices in gatekeeping, avoidance and reverse logistics are defined and categorised. These serve as a typology of practices for managers to (re)consider, along with 15 propositions on how RM is practised.

The range of RM practices and the processes reflect a lack of scholarly attention and strategic view. Research is needed to develop clear goals on how the RM process can be better aligned with business strategies.

The typology of practices is a benchmark for internet retailers in their design of efficient RM processes.

Systematic and empirical research on RM is scarce compared to forward management. The study bridges this gap as one of the first to describe RM practices in depth, define service as a key activity, and identify a mismatch between theory and practice.

The purpose of this paper is to increase the understanding regarding how managers attempt to make purposeful use of innovation management self-assessments (IMSA) and performance information (PI).

An interpretative perspective on purposeful use is used as an analytical framework, and the paper is based on empirical material from two research projects exploring the use of IMSA and PI in three case companies. Based on the empirical data, consisting of interviews and observations of workshops and project meetings, qualitative content analysis has been conducted.

The findings of this paper indicate that how managers achieve a purposeful use of PI is related to their approach toward how to use the specific PI at hand, and two basic approaches are analytically separated: a rule-based approach and a reflective approach. Consequently, whether or not the right thing is being measured also becomes a question of how the PI is actually being interpreted and used. Thus, the extensive focus on what to measure and how to measure it becomes edgeless unless equal attention is given to how managers are able to use the PI to make knowledgeable decisions regarding what actions to take to achieve the desired changes.

Given the results, it comes with a managerial responsibility to make sure that all managers who are supposed to be engaged in using the PI are given roles in the self-assessments that are aligned with the level of knowledge they possess, or can access.

How managers purposefully use PI is a key to understand the potential impact of self-assessments.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how operations decision-making may keep the growing firms within the boundaries of corporate and societal sustainability.

The authors classify operations decisions during growth periods according to the three dimensions of the triple bottom line (economic, social and environmental). By means of a longitudinal case study of a family-owned wood construction firm that is in a process of intense growth, the authors identify, visually represent and analyse the complex sequences of selected managerial operations decisions.

The empirical data suggest that operations decisions made by managers during growth periods follow specific patterns. From the analysis, the authors derive various research propositions that investigate how a well-understood and therefore efficient and effective decision-making process can facilitate sustainable business growth.

The findings offer opportunities for future studies to zoom in on specific parts of the decision-making process during growth periods. Moreover, given the exploratory nature of this study, future research should test hypotheses derived from the research propositions.

This study investigates operations decision-making during growth, which is crucial for guiding companies through this complex transition phase.

This conceptual and empirical analysis explores new theory and contributes to the vastly under-researched subject of sustainable business growth.

This paper aims to describe and investigate the mathematical models and numerical modeling of how a cell membrane is affected by a transient ice freezing front combined with the influence of thermal fluctuations and anisotropy.

The study consists of mathematical modeling, validation with an analytical solution, and shows the influence of thermal noises on phase front dynamics and how it influences the freezing process of a single red blood cell. The numerical calculation has been modeled in the framework of the phase field method with a Cahn–Hilliard formulation of a free energy functional.

The results show an influence scale on directional phase front propagation dynamics and how significant are stochastic thermal noises in micro-scale freezing.

The numerical calculation has modeled in the framework of the phase field method with a Cahn–Hilliard formulation of a free energy functional.

While scaling is a viable approach to respond to growing demand, service providers in contact-intensive services (CIS) – such as education, healthcare and social services – struggle to innovate their offerings. The reason is that the scaling of CIS – unlike purely digital settings – has resource limitations. To help ease the situation, the purpose of this paper is to identify and describe the practices used in scaling CIS to support ICT-enabled service innovation.

The research draws on an in-depth analysis of three CIS to examine service innovation practices. The analysis informs model development for service scaling.

The analysis uncovers three practices for service scaling – service interaction analysis, service pivoting and service validation – and their related activities that are applied in a cyclic and iterative logic.

While the findings reveal that the scalability of CIS is limited and determined by the formative characteristic of personal interaction, this study and its findings describe how to leverage scalability in CIS.

The insights into the practices enable service providers of CIS to iteratively revise their service offerings and the logic of creating value with the service.

This research identifies and describes for the first time the practices for the scaling of CIS as an operationalisation of ICT-enabled service innovation.

In this, the second part of a two‐part paper (Part I, Personnel Review, Summer 1977, pp 21–34) a survey of instances of work system design (WSD) experiments will be continued. As described in the Introduction to Part I, cases chosen for inclusion report the economic and human results of actual physical or structural innovations in a set or series of human tasks which, taken together, form some meaningful technical whole. The term ‘experiment’ is used in both Part I and II to refer loosely to change or manipulation of actual work activities, and not necessarily to well controlled laboratory experiments. In fact, most cases reported here are ‘natural’ and very few are carefully controlled.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the effectiveness of the information retrieval component of a daily newspaper publisher’s integrated library system (ILS) in comparison with the open source alternatives and observe the impact of the scale of metadata, generated daily by library administrators, on retrieved result sets.

In Experiment 1, the authors compared the result sets of the information retrieval system (IRS) component of the publisher’s current ILS and the result sets of proposed ones with human-assessed relevance judgment set. In Experiment 2, the authors compared the performance of proposed IRS components with the publisher’s current production IRS, using result sets of current IRS classified as relevant. Both experiments were conducted using standard information retrieval (IR) evaluation methods: precision, recall, precision at k, F-measure, mean average precision and 11-point interpolated average precision.

Results showed that: first, in Experiment 1, the publisher’s current production ILS ranked last of all participating IRSs when compared to a relevance document set classified by the senior library administrator; and second, in Experiment 2, the tested IR components’ request handlers that used only automatically generated metadata performed slightly better than request handlers that used all of the metadata fields. Therefore, regarding the effectiveness of IR, the daily human effort of generating the publisher’s current set of metadata attributes is unjustified.

The experiments’ collections contained Slovene language with large number of variations of the forms of nouns, verbs and adjectives. The results could be different if the experiments’ collections contained languages with different grammatical properties.

The authors have confirmed, using standard IR methods, that the IR component used in the publisher’s current ILS, could be adequately replaced with an open source component. Based on the research, the publisher could incorporate the suggested open source IR components in practice. In the research, the authors have described the methods that can be used by libraries for evaluating the effectiveness of the IR of their ILSs.

The paper provides a framework for the evaluation of an ILS’s IR effectiveness for libraries. Based on the evaluation results, the libraries could replace the IR components if their current information system setup allows it.

This paper aims to examine the interaction between formal and informal organisation of work inside the pit, with reference to the informal working or coping strategy of “making a plan” (planisa).

The research for this paper was ethnographic in nature and the participant observation was the main research technique used in the field.

The underground gold miners make a plan or engage in planisa to offset the production bottlenecks which affected their capacity to achieve their production targets and increase their bonus earnings. They “get on and get by” underground in order to cope with organisational constraints and management inefficiencies.

The paper highlights the limits of formal organisation of work and the significance of gold miners’ informal work strategy of making a plan (planisa) as an existing and alternative working practice that shapes their subjective orientation, agency and resilience to work structures and managerial strategies. Any strategy designed to improve the health, safety and productivity of underground miners must recognise, elaborate and systematically articulate the workplace culture of planisa as an existing work practice in the day‐to‐day running of the production process down the mine.