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Increased demand variability in supply chains (the bullwhip effect) has been discussed in the literature. The practical measurement of this effect, however, entails some problems that have not received much attention in the literature and that have to do with the aggregation of data, incompleteness of data, the isolation of demand data for defined supply chains that are part of a greater supply web. This paper discusses these conceptual measurement problems and discusses experiences in dealing with some of these problems in an industrial project. Also presents empirical results of measurements of the bullwhip effect in two supply chains.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how to strategically reengineer the government processes in e-governance to ensure the implementation of future-oriented and sustainable e-governance across developing countries.

This study has used learning from the theory of strategic intent. The present study has been conducted using exploratory sequential mixed method research. The findings of exploratory study, supported by extant literature on reengineering, core competencies and e-governance success, forms the basis for proposed research framework, which is empirically tested with 359 respondents from the two government departments in India using partial least square technique.

The findings of this study suggested that it is needed to reengineer the government processes with a view to develop the core competencies to ensure the long-term success of e-governance implementation in terms of future-orientation and sustainability. The reengineering transformations are found to have significant positive effect on the core competencies development that, in turn, has a positive effect on the success of e-governance.

The limitation of this study is the small sample size of qualitative and quantitative study owing to the missing willingness of government officials to respond to the research instruments.

The findings of this study would help e-governance practitioners to focus on the key strategic areas which will ensure the long-term success of e-governance and make the same valuable for the current and upcoming generations.

This study made an original contribution to e-governance literature by developing and validating a theoretical model for empirically assessing the strategic effect of business process reengineering changes on e-governance success (in terms of future orientation and sustainability) through mediating variable, core competencies.

Purpose – Agribusiness is crucial for the Brazilian trade balance surplus. Innovation, not only that focused on technology or productivity, is a basic condition for its development. The context of the agribusiness activities in a developing country is dynamic and requires a multilevel and multifaceted view. This suggests that these features need to be incorporated both in the theories and methods. Therefore, we propose a method, from within the perspective of Configurations Theory, of capturing this dynamic multidimensionality. The method was applied in the context of the rice-farming business in Southern Brazil.

Methodology/approach – The proposed method, which we refer to as a Case Study Method with Multiple Units of Analysis and Mixed Methods, was applied in a research organization in an attempt to identify the evolution of innovation while considering a theoretical perspective based on multilevel rules.

Findings – Six different configurations in the temporal organization of research were identified. These six configurations describe the evolution of four emphases given to innovation, the drivers associated with the evolution of these emphases, and the changes that have occurred over time.

Social implications – The results may provide support for new public policies for rice farming and lead to improvements in the organization's strategies for innovation.

Originality/value of chapter – The combination of methods used (Case Study, Qualitative Comparative Analysis, Social Network Analysis, Path Dependence, and Patterns of Decision Making) to study configurations, together with the dynamic approach to innovation based on multilevel rule, is unique.

The optimum quantity of money proposition, whose validity is agreed on, is actually open to criticism. The present paper argues that the weaknesses of the Friedman Rule from the application of the welfare theorems of general equilibrium theory to a monetary economy and shows how, the consistency of the criticism notwithstanding, the optimal solution can still be implemented.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically identify the themes of core-competencies required for future-oriented and sustainable e-governance practices, especially across the developing nations.

The present study has been conducted using the sequential mixed method research wherein the exploratory qualitative study is first carried out with the government officials involved in e-governance implementation across India to identify the themes of core-competencies. The findings of this exploratory study are then empirically tested with the 359 respondents from Group A and Group B officers of the two government departments in India using partial least square technique.

The findings suggested that to ensure the implementation of future-oriented and sustainable e-governance, it is required to develop the core-competencies. The significant core-competencies explored are, namely, process management, employee engagement, internal service quality, external service quality, citizen satisfaction, leadership, culture and technology.

As strategic implementation of e-governance is a relatively new area of study, the present study has used the learning from core-competencies studies in the non-government sector.

The findings of this study underscore the need for strategic implementation of e-governance to have long-term success of e-governance. The requirement is to develop the core-competencies. These core-competencies are the key to making the government departments proactive in dealing with any future contingency without compromising on the departmental performance.

The present research is one of the few research studies focusing on the implementation of sustainable and future-oriented e-governance. The current study has laid the stepping stone for investigating the role of core-competencies to ensure the implementation of sustainable and future-oriented e-governance.

Buyer power can be defined as the ability to obtain trade terms more favourable than a supplier’s normal trade terms. The purpose of this paper is to estimate existence of buyer power in the Italian market of fresh milk. The sector is characterised by high industrial and retail firms concentration and a significant gap between the downstream and upstream prices exists.

The authors applied the “first-pass” test proposed by Lloyd et al. (2009) on a set of monthly price indexes series from 2000 to 2013 in order to estimate if a buyer power exists in this sector. This in order to verify how prices are transmitted along the supply chain and to determine if buyer power contributes in conditioning the retail-producer price spread.

Estimated results suggest that buyer power exists in the Italian fresh milk supply chain and oligopsonistic behaviour affects the spread between downstream and upstream prices.

The paper gives a contribute on estimation of buyer power in the agro-food supply chains. However, more research needs to be carried out in order to precisely evaluate the nature and the causes of presence of buyer power.

To develop a numerical technique for solving the inverse source problem associated with the constant coefficients convection‐diffusion equation.

The proposed numerical technique is based on the boundary element method (BEM) combined with an iterative sequential quadratic programming (SQP) procedure. The governing convection‐diffusion equation is transformed into a Helmholtz equation and the ill‐conditioned system of equations that arises after the application of the BEM is solved using an iterative technique.

The iterative BEM presented in this paper is well‐suited for solving inverse source problems for convection‐diffusion equations with constant coefficients. Accurate and stable numerical solutions were obtained for cases when the number of sources is correctly estimated, overestimated, or underestimated, and with both exact and noisy input data.

The proposed numerical method is limited to cases when the Péclet number is smaller than 100. Future approaches should include the application of the BEM directly to the convection‐diffusion equation.

Applications of the results presented in this paper can be of value in practical applications in both heat and fluid flow as they show that locations and strengths for an unknown number of point sources can be accurately found by using boundary measurements only.

The BEM has not as yet been employed for solving inverse source problems related with the convection‐diffusion equation. This study is intended to approach this problem by combining the BEM formulation with an iterative technique based on the SQP method. In this way, the many advantages of the BEM can be applied to inverse source convection‐diffusion problems.

The research first and uniquely explores the antecedent relationship among three highly studied environmental forces – competitive intensity (CI), market turbulence (MT) and technological turbulence (TT) – in a service context. Next, given the importance of services to the USA and global gross domestic product (GDP) and the unique characteristics of services versus product firms, the research examines the impact of environmental forces on innovation speed capability, a less studied but critical enabler of service innovation. Finally, this study aims to suggest the importance of the sequential relationship between two dynamic capabilities – innovation speed and operational flexibility – to realize advantage.

This study surveyed 264 US service firms in a business to business context and tested this research model using structural equation modeling.

The results yielded three major conclusions: in a service context when examining the relationship among the three environmental forces, CI appears to have the driving influence on MT and TT, MT, however, was the only environmental force that this study found to bare positive and significant direct influence on innovation speed. Looking at the zero-order effect of MT and TT on innovation speed this study found each to be positive and significant suggesting a negative suppression effect and innovation speed’s influence on performance relative to competitors is fully mediated by operational flexibility.

The paper contributes to context, as service firms represent the majority of the USA and global GDP. This study extends the literature on the highly studied environmental forces (MT, TT and CI) by examining how they influence each other in an antecedent role and in service context. This study extends service literature by going beyond the influence of environmental forces on innovation to examine the dynamic capability of innovation speed, suggested as uniquely important to service context and distinct from the more highly studied innovation construct. The study also extends prior research in the manufacturing (product) context that suggests the importance of sequential congruence between two critical dynamic capabilities – innovation speed and operational flexibility – necessary to deliver competitive advantage.

The present study is concerned with assessing the factors which affect principals' roles as change facilitators in the area of curricular innovation. It is designed to identify the prevailing modes of principals' change facilitator leadership styles in curricular related activities and to estimate the relative predictive ability of policy, strategy (i.e. values), organizational and background factors in explaining the variance of these leadership styles. A random sample of 69 principals from the school district of one of the largest cities in Israel participated in the study. Three mutually exclusive modes of principals' change facilitator leadership styles — Responder, Manager and Initiator — emerged from the analysis. The totality of the factors in the research model explained 20, 31 and 48 percent of the variance respectively in the three styles. Results indicate that background and organizational factors contribute relatively more in explaining the variance in these modes than policy and strategy factors.

This study aims to ameliorate the strength and uniformity of the magnetic field in the air-gap of quartz flexible accelerometers. Quartz flexible accelerometers (QFAs), a type of magneto-electric inertial sensors, have wide applications in inertial navigation systems, and their precision, linearity and stability performance are largely determined by the magnetic field in operation air-gap. To enhance the strength and uniformity of the magnetic field in the air-gap, a magnetic hat structure has been proposed to replace the traditional magnetic pole piece which tends to produce stratiform magnetic field distribution.

Three-dimensional analysis in ANSYS workbench helps to exhibit magnetic field distribution for the structures with a pole piece and a magnetic hat, and under the hypothesis of cylindrical symmetry, two-dimensional finite element optimization by ANSYS APDL gives an optimal set of dimensions of the magnetic hat.

Three structures of the QFA with a pole piece, a non-optimized magnetic hat and an optimized magnetic hat are compared by the simulation in ANSYS Maxwell and experiments measuring the electromagnetic rebalance force. The results show that the optimized hat can supply stronger and more uniform magnetic field, which is reflected by larger and more linear rebalance force.

To the authors ' knowledge, the magnetic hat and its dimension optimization have rarely been reported, and they can find significant applications in designing QFAs or other similar magnetic sensors.