Service Differentiation Research Articles

Diferensiasi Layanan Sebagai Basis Implementasi Strategi Bisnis (Studi Kasus pada PT. Xyz)

The purpose of this research is to identify the company’s internal and external factors, strategic planning, and service differentiation to implement the exact business strategy within the company. This research is a study case of XYZ company which moving in technology information business industry. The data in this research was collected through field and library method. The research results showed that XYZ company has implemented the service differentiation and has the above average response in facing threats and opportunities that exist in its business so that the company can use the SO strategy and expansion strategy as its business strategy.

Outsourcing as a Challenge for Achieving Competitive Advantage in Road Freight Industry – The Case of Croatia

The purpose of this study was to explore outsourcing as a possible source of competitive advantage for road freight operators, with the empirical research directed towards the road freight transportation sector. Methodologically, this study drew on the data collected from a sample of Croatian road freight transporters. Because a certain number of transportation companies tend to outsource their resources, the insight into outsourcing activities was gained through analysing (1) the number of hired vehicles in the fleet (outsourced vehicles), and (2) the number of hired drivers (outsourced drivers). A variance inflation test, correlation and multiple regression analysis were conducted to test the model assumptions. The research results confirmed the connection between the externalised resources and the differentiation of services and staff. The main contribution and managerial implications included that the companies with a more significant number of hired vehicles in their fleet should differentiate their services. In contrast, the companies that own the majority of their vehicles should build their competitive advantage through staff differentiation.

The Effect of Logistics Salience on Logistical Capabilities and Firm Performances

The purpose of the study is to evaluate the effect of logistics salience on logistics capabilities and performance. The two selected capabilities in the study are service differentiation and innovation. much of the literature has focused on the development of logistics through being customer focused, managing supply chain, integration of processes, measurement and exchanging information therefore, attention shall also be provided on some other and less talked about logistical capabilities which includes innovation and differentiation. The study used survey method for data collection and analysis. The sample size of the study is 150 regression and correlation techniques were applied on the data using SPSS. It was obtained from the results that logistics salience has a positive impact on logistic capabilities and performance. Furthermore, the study also found that logistics innovativeness and service differentiation goes hand in hand and are highly correlated.

Cross‐layer routing protocol for event‐driven M2M communication in IoT‐assisted Smart City Planning and Management: CWSN‐eSCPM

The robustness of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has broadened the use of wireless communication systems for modern machine-to-machine (M2M) communication. Internet-of-Things (IoT) being one of the most explored technologies has gained wide attention due to low-cost WSN communication systems. IoT is one of the dominant technologies used in Smart City implementation demands better communication paradigm including mobility assisted transmission paradigms; however, native IEEE 802.15.4 standard does not have mobility provision that limits its use for real-time applications. On contrary, implementing mobility with classical WSN might impose significantly great topological changes and node or network condition variations which cannot be dealt with the traditional reactive routing approach. Incorporating node and/or network awareness with proactive network management can enable classical WSN to support mobility, which can be vital for IoT based Smart City Planning and Management (SCPM). With this motivation, in this study, a robust Cross-Layer Architecture based WSN Routing Protocol for Event-Driven M2M Communication in SCPM (CWSN-eSCPM) is developed. CWSN-eSCPM encompasses Proactive Node Management Strategy, Data-Centric Service Differentiation and Fair Resource Scheduling (DCSDFRS), Packet Velocity Estimation, Cumulative Congestion Estimation, Dynamic Link Assessment that enables optimal Best Forwarding Node selection for deadline sensitive and reliable data communication. CWSN-eSCPM applies dynamic link quality, cumulative congestion degree, and packet velocity of a node to enable optimal routing decision. DCSDFRS enables optimal resource provision to the real-time data while assuring maximum possible resource for non-real-time data that assures Quality of Service provision for event-driven critical communication in SCPM. Noticeably, CWSN-eSCPM protocol has been applied on top of IEEE 802.15.4 protocol standard, while preserving backward compatibility feature, it can be used for WSN assisted communication purposes. The authors' proposed protocol has performed better in terms of packet delivery ratio, packet loss ratio and deadline miss ratio for both real-time data as well as non-real-time data.

Research on the Pricing Strategy of “Internet +” Recycling Platforms in a Two-Sided Network Environment

“Internet +” platform recycling is an emerging business model with two-sided market characteristics. How to meet the needs of consumers and manufacturers and how to formulate a reasonable two-sided pricing structure have become challenges faced by recycling trading platforms. Based on the theory of a two-sided market, the pricing mechanism of a monopoly platform and a model of competing platforms are studied. Consequently, a sensitivity analysis and comparison analysis are conducted, giving a pricing decision and the optimal profit of closed-loop supply chain systems. Finally, through a numerical simulation analysis, the impacts of the inter-group network externalities, service differentiation, and the matching efficiency on e-waste recycling prices and profits are obtained. The result indicates that the influences of inter-group network externalities on monopoly platforms and competing platforms are different; thus, platforms should choose pricing strategies according to their own market position. The pricing of the two types of platform is inversely proportional to the time-sensitive coefficient of the two platforms, while it is directly proportional to the matching efficiency. The improvement of the differentiation of service will increase the pricing of the platform for single-homing manufacturers without affecting the multi-homing consumers, and profits will increase accordingly.

On Designing a Socially-Optimal Expedited Service When Customers Have Heterogeneous Usage Rates

We consider the problem faced by a welfare-maximizing service provider who must make a decision on how to split a fixed number of servers between two variants of the service: a standard variant and an expedited variant. The service is mandatory, but customers can choose between the two variants. Choosing the expedited variant requires enrollment that incurs a fixed cost per period. Customers are strategic and have the same cost of waiting but are heterogeneous in the rate at which they use the service. The option of expedited security at US airports (TSA PreCheck) is an instance where this problem arises. As has been the case with the PreCheck program, providers that offer expedited service may face criticism from customers, with the main concern being that the diversion of servers to expedited services increases wait time for regular customers. This has important policy implications for the provider, especially a government organization such as the TSA. Existing literature has focused on service differentiation as a means to maximize profit or overall social welfare, but its effect on individual customers has received little attention. We find customer's equilibrium decisions for any allocation choice made by the provider. Using the equilibrium result, we solve for the allocation choice that maximizes social welfare. Even when customers behave strategically, an expedited service offered in parallel to a standard service can not only increase overall welfare, but also do so for each customer individually. We also find that in a scenario where some customers lose out because of the expedited service, improving the efficiency of the expedited service is more effective than decreasing the enrollment cost to help those who are worse off. The gains from offering expedited service do not have to come at the expense of regular customers. When they do, we provide recommendations for which decision levers are most effective at making the system fair.

Service Differentiation and Organization Performance: An Empirical Analysis of Deposit Taking Saccos in Nairobi City County, Kenya

The Sacco sub sector occupies a strategic position in the socio-economic development of the country. Cost of doing business and reduced saving power of the Saccos customers have reduced the revenue and access to cheap deposits that they use to give as loans to their members making them re-think their competitive strategy in order to remain competitive and increase performance. This study sought to determine the effects of service differentiation strategy on performance of deposit taking Saccos in Nairobi City County, Kenya. Descriptive research design was employed with respondents drawn from 123 deposit taking Saccos that were obtained using stratified random sampling technique. Data analysis was done by the use of descriptive statistics and simple linear regression statistics. The study found that staff provided consistent service to the members, gave commission incentives to the members who gave referrals, offered differentiated mobile platform financial services, gave unique service experience to the members, were prompt in handling customer’s complaints and members were happy with the services. The study also found that Deposit Taking Saccos were not using members’ feedback and quarterly surveys to improve service. The study found that Service differentiation had the following values (β=0.348, p=0.005<0.05). The study concluded that service differentiation had positive and significant effect on performance of deposit taking Saccos. The study recommends that Sacco management should come up with standard procedures and guidelines that will be used to reinforce the effective implementation of feedback received from customers to spearhead service improvement.

Behavior-based pricing in service differentiated industries

Firms often upgrade service level to enhance their profitability, which leads to competing firms at service disadvantages using behavior-based pricing (BBP) strategy to fight back. The interaction between service differentiation and BBP affects the profits of both competitors. In order to explore the impact of BBP on the competition of firms with service differentiation, we use game theory method to construct a two-period dynamic pricing model. We explore the optimal BBP strategy by comparing and analyzing firms sub-game equilibrium profits. The main conclusions are as follows: (ⅰ) the degree of service differentiation and the relative service cost interact to influence firms optimal pricing strategy. Specifically, when the degree of service differentiation is low (high) and the relative service cost is small (large), both firms do not adopt (adopt) BBP. When the degree of service differentiation is low (high) but the relative service cost is large (small), competing firms have mixed strategic Nash equilibrium, and both firms have a certain probability to adopt BBP. (ⅱ) BBP can help low-service firms to make up for the profits loss caused by the service disadvantage under certain conditions. However, it can lead to fierce price competition, which will damage the profits of both.

Analysis of marketing capabilities, service differentiation and performance of executive hotels in the State of Santa Catarina, Brazil

Analysis of marketing capabilities, service differentiation and performance of executive hotels in the State of Santa Catarina, Brazil

Класифікація маркетингових конкурентних стратегій закладів охорони здоров’я.

The subject of the study is a typology of marketing competitive strategies for healthcare organizations operating in the healthcare market. The article describes general approaches to the formation of M. Porter's competitive strategies, on the basis of which groups of healthcare organizations are identified, in which it is possible to use basic competitive strategies – cost leadership, differentiation, focus. The author interpreted M. Porter's generic strategies for health care organizations on the basis of a study of the conceptualstructure of competition in the health care market and identified the main strategies based on three competitive advantages - quality of healthcare services, improvement of the process of creating healthcare services, differentiation of healthcare services. Criteria for organizing and grouping competitive marketing strategies for healthcare organizations are proposed: cost orientation, focus on service quality, consumer oriented. The developed classification is based on the study of different models of competition and considers the peculiarities of the medical field. Separately, the author focuses on comparing «Red ocean» and «Blue ocean» strategies and examines the possibilities of introducing streamlined database technology (blockchain) in developing competitive strategies for health care organizations. The advantages of the combination of Blue ocean strategy and blockchain technology are substantiated in the article.

Differentiation of logistics services on the basis ABC analysis

The creation of a well-defined strategy and tactics of logistics services for various groups of customers with the definition of the range of services is extremely important for a service producer in terms of its competitiveness and market stability. The purpose of the study is to propose a method for classifying logistics services based on the use of ABC analysis, which allows Pareto to distribute services according to their degree of influence on the cost of production, which will enable the formation of an effective system of logistics services. A method for the classification of logistics services is proposed. The implementation of the proposed method made it possible to determine the types of services that should be differentiated.

Past intensification trajectories of livestock led to mixed social and environmental services

Recent studies highlighted the multiple positive and negative contributions of livestock to society. Livestock production, through its direct and indirect impacts on land use, is an important driver of services provision. Although a few studies provide an account on the multiple services in different livestock systems, there is still an important knowledge gap on the drivers that contribute to the differentiation of services provisioning across areas. We investigated the hypothesis that the current level of services has derived from past intensification trajectories of livestock. The objective of this study was to understand the influences of past changes in livestock, land-use and socio-economic variables on the current provision of social, environmental and cultural services by the livestock sector in France. We combined a long-term country-wide database on livestock intensification between 1938 and 2010 and a database on services provisioning in 2010. We used a set of multivariate methods to simultaneously analyse the changes in livestock intensification from 1938 to 2010 and the current level of services provisioning. Our analysis focused on a set of 60 French departments where livestock play a significant economic role in agricultural production. Our study revealed that the provision of services was spatially structured and based on three groups of departments, characterised by different rates of change in intensification variables. In the first group, ‘Intensive livestock areas’, the high level of employment in the livestock sector was mainly associated with high rates of change in monogastric stocking rates (+1045%) and milk productivity (+451%). In the second group, ‘Extensive livestock areas’, the high levels of environmental and cultural services were mainly associated with moderate rates of change in herbivores stocking rate (+95%) and the stability of grassland area (+13%). In the third group, ‘Transition areas’, the low provision of all services was associated with the decline in livestock due to crop expansion. This study provides knowledge to understand how past changes determined the current contribution of livestock areas in providing differentiated bundles of services, which might help steer the development of the current livestock sector towards more sustainable trajectories.

Predictive Traffic Control and Differentiation on Smart Grid Neighborhood Area Networks

Smart Grid (SG) networks include an associated data network for the transmission and reception of control data related to the electric power supply service. A subset of this data network is the SG Neighborhood Area Network (SG NAN), whose objective is to interconnect the subscribers’ homes with the supplier control center. The data flows transmitted through these SG NANs belong to different applications, giving rise to the need for different quality of service requirements. Additionally, other subscriber appliances could use this network to communicate over the Internet. To avoid network congestion, as well as to differentiate the quality of service (QoS) received by the different data flows, a congestion control mechanism with traffic differentiation capabilities is required. The main contribution of this work is the proposal of a new congestion control mechanism based on machine learning techniques to try to guarantee the different QoS requirements to the different data flows. A main problem when applying machine learning techniques is the need for datasets to be used in the training steps. In this sense, a second contribution of this article is the proposal of a method to generate such datasets by means of simulation techniques. The proposed mechanism is then evaluated in the context of a wireless SG NAN. The nodes of this network are the subscriber’s smart meters, which in turn perform the function of concentrating the data traffic sent and received by the rest of the home appliances. Besides, different machine learning classification methods are taken into account. The evaluation carried out shows significant improvements in terms of network throughput, transit time, and quality of service differentiation. Finally, the computational cost of the algorithms used in this proposal has also been evaluated, using real low-cost IoT hardware platforms.

MAC protocol for indoor optical wireless networks

Optical wireless communication has emerged as a promising candidate for future high data rate indoor applications such as virtual reality. Even though physical layer of optical wireless networks has rapidly developed during last decade, upper layer architecture that harness the physical layer capabilities has not yet been developed in the same pace. To this end, the authors develop a novel contention-based medium access control (MAC) protocol that accompanies a service differentiation mechanism and a dynamic contention window tuning algorithm. The proposed service differentiation mechanism can identify the diverse traffic types and facilitate their throughput and delay requirements. To add more robustness to the contention-based MAC protocol which depends on contention windows to avoid collisions, the authors also propose an algorithm that dynamically changes the contention window sizes to suit the congestion level. They analyse the performance of the proposed MAC protocol under diverse network configurations and they show that it is far more effective to use end-user network metrics such as throughput in dynamic adaptation algorithms in addition to collision rate due to the wide range of traffic types present in the network. The proposed results demonstrate that the proposed MAC protocol can handle next-generation traffic types and their stringent latency requirements in an effective manner.

On the spectrum-efficiency of QoS-aware protection in elastic optical networks

Elastic optical networks technologies feature several benefits including higher spectral efficiency, system capacity and therefore have been widely viewed as the promising paradigm for next-generation optical transport networks. Dedicated path protection for elastic optical networks has been of ever-increasing importance in the era of information society thanks to its near-immediate recovery speed and remarkably simple operations in guaranteeing the connectivity of information flows. Inspired by the observation that the today premium network traffic traveling in fiber links accounts for roughly 25% of total traffic and the best-effort traffic constitutes the remaining, we propose a new design for elastic optical networks with dedicated path protection tailoring to the actual traffic profile rather than enforcing the same protection service for both traffic types as with conventional approaches. Our proposal exploits the flexible baud-rate transponders shared between the working and protection mode, featuring lower baud-rate operation for protection mode to provide just enough bandwidth for premium traffic. To maximize the impact of protection service differentiation, we present a novel integer linear programming taking into account the proposed quality-of-service-aware protection aiming at minimizing the spectrum usage. Numerical results on a realistic topology, COST239, are provided to assess the efficiency of our proposal compared to the traditional approach and it has been highlighted that having quality-of-service-aware protection being adapted to the actual traffic characteristic presents significant spectrum savings. With the current estimate of premium traffic of 25%, our study suggests that more than 30% spectral saving could be achieved and generally the low-load condition is more profitable than the medium and high-load ones.

Experimenting with open source tools to deploy a multi-service and multi-slice mobile network

With network slicing, the infrastructure is divided into separate networks, each one customized to provide a specific service. Network slicing is a key technology to efficiently support services with very diverse requirements, such as the ones that should support 5G networks. While the architectural work for 5G is well advanced, and many theoretical solutions that address diverse aspects such as resource assignment or service composition exist, the experimental work lags behind. In this paper, we aim at filling this gap by describing our implementation experiences when deploying a small-scale multi-service prototype. We consider a video streaming service and an augmented reality service, each one provided over a different network slice, and extend existing open-source software solutions for a better provision of them. Our implementation showcases key features of future 5G networks, such as radio slicing with service differentiation, support for local breakout, or multi-slice orchestration with QoE-triggered optimization. With the core of our implementation being open-source, we believe that our results will prove very useful to researchers and practitioners working on this area of research.

MIMETIC: Mobile encrypted traffic classification using multimodal deep learning

Mobile Traffic Classification (TC) has become nowadays the enabler for valuable profiling information, other than being the workhorse for service differentiation or blocking. Nonetheless, a main hindrance in the design of accurate classifiers is the adoption of encrypted protocols, compromising the effectiveness of deep packet inspection. Also, the evolving nature of mobile network traffic makes solutions with Machine Learning (ML), based on manually- and expert-originated features, unable to keep its pace. These limitations clear the way to Deep Learning (DL) as a viable strategy to design traffic classifiers based on automatically-extracted features, reflecting the complex patterns distilled from the multifaceted traffic nature, implicitly carrying information in “multimodal” fashion. Multi-modality in TC allows to inspect the traffic from complementary views, thus providing an effective solution to the mobile scenario. Accordingly, a novel multimodal DL framework for encrypted TC is proposed, named MIMETIC, able to capitalize traffic data heterogeneity (by learning both intra- and inter-modality dependences), overcome performance limitations of existing (myopic) single-modality DL-based TC proposals, and support the challenging mobile scenario. Using three (human-generated) datasets of mobile encrypted traffic, we demonstrate performance improvement of MIMETIC over (a) single-modality DL-based counterparts, (b) state-of-the-art ML-based (mobile) traffic classifiers, and (c) classifier fusion techniques.

Competition in multichannel expert services in duopoly

Purpose This study aims to describe the general picture of the competition in multichannel expert services in duopoly market and discuss how the quality difference may affects the competition between service providers with different quality levels, where both providers offer face-to-face channel and one of providers offers online channel additionally and service quality that consumers have heterogeneous preferences for is vertically differentiated. These results can be used to determine which service providers should offer online expert services and understand the competition in multichannel expert services in duopoly. Design/methodology/approach This paper uses the stylized vertical differentiation model to investigate the role of quality in expert services market, assuming that two services providers offer the same services with different quality levels and one of them having additional online services. Taking into account the differences of services from products and the particularity of online service, this paper extends the vertical differentiation model to expert services market. Findings The quality difference is the key factor in the competition of expert services. Service prices and the profits of providers, independent of the quality levels, are positively related to the quality difference, whereas the demand of online services is in the opposite direction regardless of which provider offers online channel. It demonstrates that provider with low-quality level should open online channel from the point of view of social welfare if it is closely related to the expert services, even though any provider can make more profits by opening online channel. Research limitations/implications This extended vertical differentiation model, taking into account the importance of vertical differentiation in expert service, ignores the horizontal differentiation. More accurate strategies for multichannel expert services providers with what level of the quality a provider should offer is needed in future work. Moreover, this paper does not consider the different waiting costs of consumers in face-to-face channel and assumes that their problem will be solved eventually. Originality/value To the best of the author’s knowledge, no study has focused on the quality difference in multichannel expert services market or discussed how to offer online expert services in the duopoly market. This study extends the vertical differentiation model to the multichannel expert service market. Therefore, it fills this research gap and extends research to expert services market in the new network environment, aiming to help understand the competition in multichannel expert services.

A Literature Review on Collaborative Caching Techniques in MANETs: Issues and Methods used in Serving Queries

Collaborative cache management in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) environment is considered as an efficient technique to increase data accessibility and availability, by sharing and coordination among mobile nodes. Due to nodes’ mobility, limited battery power and insufficient bandwidth, researchers addressed these challenges by developing many different collaborative caching schemes. The objective of this paper is to review various collaborative caching techniques in MANETs. Collaborative caching techniques are classified by methods used in serving queries, such as: hop-by-hop discovering, broadcasting messages, flooding, and query service differentiation. This review reveals that techniques utilizing hop-by-hop methods have better performance compared to others, especially techniques using additional strategies.

Understanding the operating landscape of the global airline industry: A DEA integrated alternating conditional expectation approach

Purpose: This study investigates the relationships between service efficiency in 5 major cost centres (namely, business orientation, network coverage, physical resources, maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO), and human resources) and profitability in the global airline industry.Design/methodology/approach: The study integrates the Slack-based Model (SBM) of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) with the Alternating Conditional Expectation (ACE) regression to understand the relationships between an airline’s profitability and its efficiencies in 5 identified operations areas.Findings: Based on the observational data obtained from 75 international airlines, the relationships between operational performances and profitability are found to be curvilinear and contingent on an airline’s operating model.Research limitations/implications: The omission of non-IATA airlines and many low cost carriers may hinder a holistic view of the airline industry.Practical implications: Management can influence the profitability of an airline through its strategic operations decisions that affect an airline’s cost, service quality, and financial structure after the influences of location and size have set the stage. Airlines pursuing cost leadership should seek to increase productivity especially in MRO, human resources and physical resources; whereas airlines pursuing service differentiation may choose to provide quality service at lower efficiencies or pursue an approach to improve quality and efficiencies simultaneously.Originality/value: Identifying operations practices that are consistent with a firm’s competitive priorities is important in the multifaceted service environment today. An integrated SBM-ACE regression model, which permits different input-output mix, variable return to scale and non-linear relationship, is proposed and applied to analyze the profit impact of service efficiencies in the five key operations areas.