Service Suppliers Research Articles

Building digital servitization ecosystems: An analysis of inter-firm collaboration types and social exchange mechanisms among actors

The servitization literature has evidenced that the development and provision of Smart Product-Service Systems usually happen through collaborative ecosystems, but little is known about the different arrangements that ecosystem's actors can follow to provide digital solutions. We aim to define collaborative configurations of ecosystem actors in digital servitization based on their value creation and capture and their social base of collaboration. We propose four configurations of inter-firm collaboration, based on the level of joint value creation activities and value capture interdependence among the actors: expanded business, enhanced business, platform business and symbiotic business. We analyze how these different collaboration types operate based on a multi-case study approach using the Social Exchange Theory (SET) to examine actors' interactions. We focus on four elements of SET: trust, commitment, reciprocity, and power. We found that trust, commitment and reciprocity are related to value creation and capture dynamics, while power is mostly affected by other external factors. These four elements allow to define the operationalization of the four types of inter-firm collaboration in digital servitization ecosystem. We contribute to the theory showing how service and digital suppliers interact with the servitized product firm in the ecosystem. Managers can learn the elements involved in different business models and collaboration arrangements for the provision of servitized digital solutions aiming to better decide the servitization strategy they want to follow.

Product Briefs

Items listed here are new or improved products on the market. See the AWWA Sourcebook (http://sourcebook.awwa.org) for a full list of product and service suppliers. Send press releases about new products to opflow@awwa.org.

Summaries of Articles

Summaries of Articles

Analisis Pengaruh Harga dan Promosi terhadap Keputusan Pembelian Konsumen pada PT. Astra International, Tbk-Auto 2000 Karawang

PT. Astra International, Tbk – Auto2000 Karawang is a sales service network, maintenance, repair and supplier of Toyota spare parts located at Jalan Surotokunto No. 80, East Adiarsa, East Karawang District, Karawang Regency. Auto2000 Karawang branch often carries out promotions such as holding exhibitions, discounts, and giving gifts to customers, however the prices set by the company often change suddenly so that salesmen and customers feel confused which results in delays in their purchase plans. So the purpose of this study is to analyze the effect of price and promotion on purchasing decisions of four-wheeled vehicles at PT. Auto2000 Karawang. This research uses validity and reliability test data processing, regression analysis, T test and simultaneous test which in processing the data using SPSS software. The results showed that the t value for the price variable was 1.209 < t table (2.051) and the significance value was 0.237 > 0.05, which means 15H0"> is accepted and 15H1"> is rejected so that partially the price does not have a significant effect on purchasing decisions. For the promotion variable, the value of t count is 3,499 > t table (2,051). and a significance value of 0.02 <0.05, which means 15H0"> is rejected and 15H1 "> is accepted so that partially there is a significant influence between promotions on purchasing decisions at Auto2000 Karawang Branch. This means that the delivery of a good promotion will improve purchasing decisions.

How Internet of Things can influence the sustainability performance of logistics industries – A Chinese case study

The introduction of new information technologies has started reshaping global industrial sectors and supply chains. Due to the introduction of the Internet of Things (IoT) real-time management strategies have been adopted by the global logistics industry, turning the branch into an intelligent service supplier. This paper assesses the influence of IoT on the Chinese logistics sector and related environmental performance between 2011 and 2018. This paper establishes an evaluation framework for the logistics performance under social, economic and environmental dimensions by using time entropy weighting. Using a grey correlation approach, we identify a strong positive correlation between the logistics performance and the IoT market scale. We further find a significant and increasing correlation trend for an expansion of the IoT market and the reduction of carbon and PM 2.5 intensity. The environmental regulation though positively correlated with logistics sustainability, shows less potential to directly improve economic and social performance. It also indirectly promotes sustainability performance of the logistics industry through support for technological innovation. High investment in IoT is estimated to limit the potential of small and medium-sized enterprises to increase their labor compensation and expand the scale of employment. Finally, we project China’s IoT market developments for 2021–2025 using a grey forecasting model considering the influence of investment confidence and COVID-19. The results indicate that China’s share of the global IoT market will likely rise from 18% to 30% by 2025.

Are State-Owned Enterprises Equally Reliable Information Suppliers? An Examination of the Impacts of State Ownership on Earnings Management Strategies of Chinese Enterprises

Earnings management refers to a company’s use of either accounting techniques (accrual-based earnings management) or real economic activities (real earnings management) to manipulate reported earnings and mislead users of financial information. It often indicates serious ethical issues in a company’s management, which will affect the reliability and sustainability of a firm’s services in the supply chain. Using A-share listed Chinese firms on the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges, we investigated the impacts of state ownership on management’s decision to select real or accrual-based earnings management strategies. We found that state-owned enterprises (SOEs) tend to favor real earnings management over accrual-based earnings management more than non-SOEs. Furthermore, those SOEs that are controlled by the central government engage in real earnings management more often than those controlled by local governments. We also examined whether media attention and litigation interact with state ownership to affect earnings management. We found that SOEs, especially central SOEs, with a high level of media attention or an incidence of litigation, are more likely to use real earnings management. Our research can assist firms in making better decisions in selecting business partners and service suppliers in an emerging market through the assessment of management integrity.

The Improved CURLI Method for Multi-Criteria Decision Making

Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) investigates the best available choice in the presence of multiple conflicting criteria, whereas the Collaborative Unbiased Rank List Integration (CURLI) method has been proposed recently and has been applied in various fields of daily life. However, most previous works concentrated on analyzing cases in which the factor of a criterion is a specific quantity. The present paper proposes an approach developed from the original CURLI method, named Improved CURLI. This improvement helps solve a problem when the factors of the criteria can be linguistic variables or a data set. The proposed method is applied to rank the alternatives for two case studies: choosing the best grinding wheel and the best service suppliers. The ranking results are compared to those obtained using other methods. Furthermore, sensitivity analysis is also conducted to examine the stability and reliability of the ranking results in various scenarios. The results demonstrate the validity of the Improved CURLI method and prove that it is applicable for making decisions in various fields.

Improving tilapia biosecurity through a value chain approach

AbstractTilapia aquaculture is a major source of animal protein, with global production reaching over 6 million tonnes in 2020. The rapid growth of the tilapia sector has led to a number of emerging disease threats and subsequent production losses. Risk analysis can provide a targeted approach for improving biosecurity in the tilapia sector. The aim of this work was to describe the tilapia value chain and review the important infectious agents of tilapia that may affect the different points along the value chain; such points include input and service suppliers, producers (i.e., hatcheries, nurseries and grow‐out farms), and processors, traders and marketers. We then describe how risk analysis can be used to identify critical controls points along the value chain and describe potential risk mitigation measures that may be implemented at those points. The control of diseases of tilapia requires a multi‐faceted approach, with risk‐based control measures chosen based on their feasibility, effectiveness and sustainability. The Progressive Management Pathway for Improving Aquaculture Biosecurity, as a risk‐based, collaborative and progressive management approach combined with the systematic preventive principles of Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point, offers a strategic and practical way of improving biosecurity in the tilapia value chain.

Exploring barriers to collaborative innovation in supply chains – a study of a supplier and two of its industrial customers

PurposeThe purpose is to identify and explore barriers to overcome for developing collaborative innovation between a global service supplier and two of its industrial customers in Sweden.Design/methodology/approachThe research had an action-based research approach in which the researchers were interacting and collaborating with the practitioners in the companies. The empirical part includes primary data from multiple interviews, and two workshops with dialogues with participants from the involved companies. The use of complementary data collection methods gave rich input to understanding the context for collaborative innovation, and to uncovering barriers, to develop solutions for collaborative innovation. The empirical barriers were analysed using theoretically derived barriers from a literature review. The analysis generated four broad themes of barriers which were discussed and led to conclusions and theoretical and practical implications on: the customer's safety culture, the business model, the parties' understanding of innovation and the management of collaborative innovation in supply chains.FindingsThe thematic analysis generated four broad themes: the customer's safety culture, the business model, the parties' understanding of innovation and the management of collaborative innovation. These themes where analysed using theoretically derived barriers from a literature review. The industrial context, the understanding of innovation and its management created barriers.Originality/valueThe unique access to the service supplier and its two independent industrial customers adds a rich contextual framing to the process of identifying and exploring the barriers to collaborative innovation. The conclusion emphasizes the importance of an industrial business context, the business logic in terms of business models and for the understanding and management of collaborative innovation.

Condition-based maintenance optimization for deteriorating systems considering performance-based contracting and destructive inspections

As a novel contracting approach, the performance-based contracting (PBC) utilizes defined performance goals and structured incentives to improve the system availability and reduce the cost by tying the compensation to the service supplier to the system performance outcome. In this paper, two new CBM optimization models within the PBC framework are proposed considering the impacts of destructive inspections on the system degradation behavior. The average maintenance cost rate and the system availability within the contract horizon are estimated. Under the inspection-based replacement scheme, the objectives are to maximize the expected profit rate to the supplier and/or the resulting system average availability. A solution procedure based on the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) combining with the weighted sum method (WSM) is introduced to derive the optimal CBM policies. Numerical examples and sensitivity analysis are conducted to examine the applicability of the proposed models.

The development of Islamic banking and of some Halal services in the Republic of Tatarstan

The article explores the ideas of Muslim women about the development of the Halal industry in the Republic of Tatarstan. The relevance of the study lies in the significant number of Muslims who are interested in the development of the production of goods and services that meet the norms of Islam. The research considers the services provided in the field of Islamic banking (mortgage, lending), beauty and health services, the development of Halal Lifestyle in the Republic of Tatarstan. Thus, the paper reveals the problems of the industry, connected with the purchase of housing on a mortgage; overpriced beauty and health services; discrepancy between the cost and the quality of the products; lack of halal certification for some services etc. Attention is focused on the joint work of the official clergy, state authorities, employees of the Halal Committee under the Spiritual Administration of Muslims of the Republic of Tatarstan, manufacturers and suppliers of goods and services, as well as Muslim consumers to coordinate efforts and receive feedback. Within the framework of the study, the author relies on a semi-structured interview – the method of qualitative research.

Product Briefs

Items listed here are new or improved products on the market. See the AWWA Sourcebook (http://sourcebook.awwa.org) for a full list of product and service suppliers. Send press releases about new products to opflow@awwa.org.

ASSESSMENT OF THE IMPLEMENTATION OF THE EDUCATIONAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

Functioning in today's rapidly changing market requires a new look at the issue of quality management. A developed competitive environment, in turn, becomes important in determining the competitiveness of suppliers of goods and services that require constant improvement of their quality. In the article, the author examines the features of the quality management system in the management mechanism of higher education institutions; the relationship between the expected results of its implementation and implementation, as well as conducted a sociological study and presented the results of the analysis in order to study the attitude of the faculty and staff of the university to this management resource.

Game theory system optimization in a supplier-customer transport network

The development of modern IT technologies and resources, offer in many economic-industrial applications, efficient solutions for planning and managing of specific activities. New research directions in the field of management and optimization of supply-customer (SC) systems are defined and evaluated. The paper proposes a management model based on a causal graph structure, which expresses the connection and interdependence between the two entities involved in the specific activities of the field, the suppliers of goods and services and the consumers of these goods and products. Information related to production and storage capacity, up-to-date requirements for customer needs, delivery planning, production and consumption dynamics are considered. The transport between the actors involved in the system is an important component with weight in the costs of supply-sale activities. The optimal solution for the supply-customer transport system is proposed based on different strategies of game theory.

Системный подход к оценке эффективности государственных закупок

The scientific literature reflects different views on the criteria and methods of evaluating the effectiveness of public procurement. Currently, the issue of determining the effectiveness of public procurement is poorly understood and remains open. The article proposes a systematic approach that provides the best choice of the supplier’s offer of goods, works or services. The offer evaluation system includes five stages of using procurement efficiency criteria and can be used to determine the best offer of a supplier of works, goods and services. The elements of the system provide a comprehensive description of the price criteria to achieve the effectiveness of procurement procedures. The use of efficiency criteria in procurement based on the selection of the best supplier allows you to increase efficiency in procurement activities

The European Union and the international intergovernmental organizations: the legal basis of the relationship

This article discusses the legal aspects and analytical considerations on building relationships between the European Union (EU) and international intergovernmental organizations (IIO). The European Union today is a major interstate association, as well as the largest supplier of goods and services at the global level. However, this does not exclude the interaction of the EU with various international organizations. In the process of narration, different forms and criteria for EU participation in the IIO are defined. The article considers the role of the external competence of the European Union on the example of building relationships with such international organizations as the United Nations (UN), the International Labor Organization (ILO), the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the World Intellectual Property Organization ( WIPO) and many others.

МОДЕЛИ УПРАВЛЕНИЯ РИСКАМИ В ЗАКУПОЧНЫХ ПРОЦЕДУРАХ

The article is devoted to the construction of an effective risk management model during procurement procedures both within the framework of Law No. 44-FZ, Law No. 223-FZ, and commercial procurement. The article discusses changes in the classical risk model in conditions when insurance services are purchased. In order to reduce the risks of customers, a step-by-step scheme for selecting a supplier of goods, works, and services is proposed, which allows you to adjust the input parameters of the requirements for potential contractors. The work examines in detail the current methods for generating risk profiles and describes their main advantages and disadvantages. In the course of the article, a hybrid model of risk management in the procurement of goods, works and services is proposed and described in detail, which makes it possible to implement in practice a model of an intelligent risk management system with the possibility of permanently adjusting the list of criteria for assessing customers.

Data Ecosystem for Industrial Product- Service Systems (IPS2) Based on a Decentralized Data Architecture

Industrial Product-Service Systems (IPS2) confront design organizations with new challenges. One of those is the need for co-designing products with services, and their underlying service provider and supplier networks including the business models driving their cooperation for value delivery to the end users. In this context, data collected about all the organizations involved in IPS2 design and delivery are becoming increasingly valuable assets for both, the design as well as the continuous improvement, adaptation, and optimization of IPS2. In today's company IT infrastructures, data is typically managed in centralized data warehouses or data lakes. In order to cope with the dynamic nature of IPS2 design and operation, agile de-centralized data organizations would be appropriate. Qualitative statements about the feasibility of some decentralized architectures realized with data mesh principles are given from practical use cases. This work focuses on a decentralized data architecture to enabling IPS2 design and operation. Therefore, this work investigates the related challenges from centralized databases and proposes a decentralized concept solution tackling the requirements data privacy, data traceability, data accountability and data usability for the use case of a Mobility as a Service (MaaS) data ecosystem. For this purpose, compared to existing use cases, modern technology solutions such as blockchain technology and smart contracts are integrated in the concept.

Churn Rate Modeling for Telecommunication Operators Using Data Science Methods

The telecommunication company functioned in the market with extremely high competitiveness. Attracting new customers needs 5-10 times more expenses than maintaining an existing one. As a result, effective customer churn management and analysis of the reasons for customer churn are vital tasks for telecommunication operators. As a result, predicting subscriber churn by switching on the competitors becomes very important. Data Science and machine learning create enormous opportunities for solving this task to evaluate customer satisfaction with company services, determine factors that cause disappointment, and forecast which clients are at a greater risk of abandoning and changing services suppliers. A company that implements data analysis and modelling to develop customer churn prediction models has an opportunity to improve customer churn management and increase business results. The purposes of the research are the application of machine learning models for a telecommunications company, in particular, the construction of models for predicting the user churn rate and proving that Data Science models and machine learning are high-quality and effective tools for solving the tasks of forecasting the key marketing metrics of a telecommunications company. Based on the example of Telco, the article contains the results of the implementation of various models for classification, such as logistic regression, Random Forest, SVM, and XGBoost, using Python programming language. All models are characterised by high quality (the general accuracy is over 80%). So, the paper demonstrates the feasibility and possibility of implementing the model to classify customers in the future to anticipate subscriber churn (clients who may abandon the company’s services) and minimise consumer outflow based on this. The main factors influencing customer churn are established, which is basic information for further forecasting client outflow. Customer outflow prediction models implementation will help to reduce customer churn and maintain their loyalty. The research results can be useful for optimising marketing activity of managing the outflow of consumers of companies on the telecommunication market by developing effective decisions based on data and improving the mathematical methodology of forecasting the outflow of consumers. Therefore, the study’s main theoretical and practical achievements are to develop an efficient forecasting tool for enterprises to control outflow risks and to enrich the research on data analysis and Data Science methodology to identify essential factors that determine the propensity of customers to churn.

Cloud Computing for Supply Chain Management and Warehouse Automation: A Case Study of Azure Cloud

In recent times, organizations are examining the art training situation to improve the operation efficiency and the cost of warehouse retail distribution and supply chain management. Microsoft Azure emerges as an expressive technology that leads optimization by giving infrastructure, software, and platform resolutions for the whole warehouse retail distribution and supply chain management. Using Microsoft Azure as a cloud computing tool in retail warehouse distribution and supply manacle management contributes to active and monetary benefits. At the same time, potential limitations and risks should be considered by the retail warehouse distribution and the supply chain administration investors. In this research summary of the cloud figuring tool, both public and hybrid in supply chain administration and retail, warehouse distribution is addressed. A brief introduction to the use of Microsoft Azure technology is provided. This is followed by the application of cloud computing to warehouse retail distribution and supply chain management activities. At the same time, the negative and positive aspects of familiarizing this Microsoft Azure technology in the modern supply chain and retail distribution are debated. Also, the circumstance for the third-party logistics services suppliers has indicated respect for automation and cybersecurity solutions in a cloud environment. Lastly, the upcoming research practices and following technological trends are offered as the conclusion.