With the intensification of Globalization, customers’ environment-friendly attitude and stringent environmental regulations, the manufacturers have been orienting their manufacturing and other value additive processes towards the development of more environment-friendly products and use of relevant processes including taking back of used products after their end-of-use or end-of-life from the end users. Remanufacturing is one of the prominent and popular options. Remanufacturing perhaps has drawn maximum attention because of its economic viability and environmental cleanliness. The remanufacturing operation depends upon the quality and quantity of the used. Better the quality lesser the remanufacturing cost. A remanufacturer is unaware about the condition of used product before its acquisition. It may also be noted that the remanufactured product may be taken after a period of its use by users. So it is really difficult to judge how many cycles does the product go for remanufacturing. This has drawn the attention of the authors and the problem is studied with developing some mechanism on the possible frequency of the remanufacturing of a new product. This paper is a study report on this area of research which is expected to contribute immensely to the remanufacturing business. © 2017, Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany.

This investigation seeks to explore the effectiveness of alternative approaches to supply chain management for developing the base of the pyramid (BoP) community. Using case research methodology, we investigate the issue of supply chain alignment when the supply base consists of BoP producers. We consider the handloom supply chains in Odisha, India, as the context of our analysis. The study analyzes the supply chains of four handloom retailers. The retailers represent cooperative and private organizational systems with varied levels of operational integration. In light of the insights from these case studies, we theorize factors contributing to operational cost-effectiveness and conceptualize approaches and considerations for improving the BoP community. Specifically, we clarify the usefulness of alternative supply chain alignment practices in promoting efficiency, innovation, and equitability among the BoP constituents and advance a set of propositions linking the motivations, strategies, practices, and performance in handloom supply chains. Limitations, theoretical and managerial contributions, and future research directions are discussed. © 2019 Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the application of vendor rationalization strategy for streamlining the supplies and manufacturing cycle time reduction in an Indian engineer-to-order (ETO) company. ETO firms are known for a large number of vendors, co-ordination hassles, rework problems and its impact on cycle time and operational excellence. Design/methodology/approach: The research demonstrates the case-based application of Kraljic’s matrix for supply and leverages items, on-the-job observations, field visits, discussions and analysis of supplies reports. Findings: The study guides on the rationalization of supplies and the necessary strategic alignments that can significantly reduce supply risk, costs, manufacturing and delivery cycle time along with co-ordination hassles. The study depicts the challenges of ETO environment with respect to supplies, and demonstrates the effectiveness of vendor rationalization application for the case company and weaknesses of commonly practiced vendor management approaches. Practical implications: To be competitive, companies should rationalize supply items and vendors based on the nature of items and their subsequent usage by applying Kraljic’s matrix-based classification. The immediate implication of vendor rationalization is misunderstood as reducing supply base, but it does much more and includes review of supplies, nature of items and strategic alignments, leading to win-win situation for company and suppliers. Originality/value: For the rationalization of supplies, while procuring and dealing with vendors, executives should envisage engineering nature of components, considering cross-functional requirements and integration of components in context to ETO products/projects environments. There is a dearth of studies focusing on vendor rationalization aspects in ETO setups in fast-developing country context. © 2019, Emerald Publishing Limited.

We attempt to demonstrate the value of big data to enterprises by interweaving the perceptions, challenges, and opportunities of big data for businesses. While enterprises are aware of the value of big data to their businesses, there are challenges of exploiting big data in terms of data quality and usage. Executives might lack knowledge on how applications are related to one another in the big data ecosystem and the business benefits to reap. We summarize the results of a research study that explores emerging business perceptions of big data. We examine the current practice in 20 large enterprises, each having an annual revenue of more than USD 0.5 billion and present our findings related to executive perceptions. We provide insights on how firms can develop their big data expertise along various dimensions and identify critical ideas to be further investigated to better understand the issues that practitioners and researchers might be equally grappling with. © 1973-2011 IEEE.

Increasing demand of automotive products and over-consumption of natural resources compel the manufacturers to implement the Extension of Useful Life (EUL) methodology of automotive products through remanufacturing. Remanufacturing is a process in which the original functionality of End-of-Use (EoU) or End-of-Life (EoL) product is restored and the remanufactured product is treated as good as a new product. In spite of these advantages, remanufacturing is still not so popular and organized in developing countries like India. The developing countries encounter several problems in strategic, tactical and operational level of management while implementing the remanufacturing business option. In this paper attempts have been made to identify both the enablers and the barriers in managing business of EUL products through remanufacturing in India. Subsequently the structural relationships among the enablers and barriers have been modelled in this paper. Initially an extensive literature review is carried out to identify the factors depicting the enablers and barriers. Then, Fuzzy Interpretive Structural Modeling (FISM) is applied to develop and evaluate the structural relationships among the identified factors. The application of FISM helps in understanding the effect of major enablers and barriers in extending useful life of automotive products through remanufacturing. The outcome of FISM based analysis shows that low cost, price sensitive market, cheap labour cost, and fast turnaround are the major enablers for OEM in initiating EUL business practice through remanufacturing, whereas the major barriers are lack of proper design of product, stringent foreign trade policy, cannibalization of new product, lack of proper remarketing strategies, lack of reverse network design, lack of proper maintaining the database of the customers, seller reputation and identity. The analysis is further enriched by MICMAC technique, which leads to getting an insight on the significance of the dependence and driving power of both the enablers and barriers. © 2019 Elsevier Ltd

The occurrence of natural disasters has become a major global problem. It poses serious threats to the concept of sustainable development. Over the last two decades, more than 1.3 million people and nearly two trillion dollars have been lost due to natural disasters. The paper discusses the status of disaster mitigation information systems during the Uttarakhand disaster of June 2013. The researchers have discussed the status of such actions taken by both Government and Non-Government Organizations (NGOs) from a qualitative perspective. The Software Package for Social Science (SPSS) software was used for the analysis and the results are presented in descriptive statistical format. As many as (n = 1500) respondents were interviewed, out of which 80% respondents were ill-informed. Over 80% respondents were found to be untrained to respond in a disastrous situation. Hence, the researchers have proposed the use of better information and communication mediums with the assistance of public and private partnership (PPP model) to deal with disastrous situations in the future along with some indigenous methods. © 2019 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

Cloud computing has transformed the decision-making processes involved in the procurement of information-technology services. Not only has it brought about tremendous speed-ups to computing jobs, but also, the flexibility it provides in terms of availability and pricing options now enables a consumer to make trade-offs between price and time, based on the situation on-hand and the turnaround-time requirements. These price-time trade-offs have been studied in the behavioral-economic literature, but have not been considered formally in the procurement and the cloud-system bodies of literature. We fill this gap, by taking up the question of how the impatience characteristics of the procurer (and in turn his/her procurement decisions) get affected by two behavioral factors, namely, delay horizon and situational involvement. We test the model using a factorial experiment with 180 participants and find that impatience degree and type are affected by delay horizon and situational involvement. We discuss practical implications for a cloud-service provider, as well as implications for the intertemporal and IS literature. © 2019, Springer Nature B.V.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between ethical leadership and employee learning orientation in organizations. Design/methodology/approach: This paper uses a quantitative methodology to analyze data collected from 160 faculty members from universities, using a survey questionnaire. Findings: The finding of this study reveals that ethical leadership has a positive effect on learning orientation of faculty members in universities. Originality/value: This study adds to the field of ethical leadership by investigating the influence of ethical leadership on learning orientation of faculty members in universities. © 2018, Emerald Publishing Limited.

The study reexamines the issue of informational efficiency of Bitcoin using data at different frequencies (15, 30, 60 and 120 min and daily data). In particular, we test the martingale hypothesis in Bitcoin returns using different variance ratio tests. We also examine the evolution of informational efficiency of Bitcoin using non-overlapping and overlapping moving window analysis. The study provides evidence of the presence of informational inefficiency in the Bitcoin market at higher frequency levels. The daily Bitcoin returns which appear to be following a memory-less stochastic process are in fact otherwise when we move to the higher frequencies of Bitcoin prices. © 2018 Elsevier B.V.

Purpose: Despite the established significance of absorptive capacity, there is a worrying lack of research that empirically examines its antecedents. With a call for investigation guided by the knowledge-based theory, the purpose of this paper is to bridge any probable gap by exploring the effect that an organization’s knowledge stock and its knowledge integrating mechanisms have on the development of its absorptive capacity. Design/methodology/approach: On the basis of a survey administered to a sample comprising owners of small Indian automotive firms, this paper empirically examines the direct effect of an organization’s knowledge stock (including knowledge breadth and depth) and the moderating role of its structure-related mechanisms (e.g., formalization) on its potential and realized absorptive capacities. The study uses survey data from 226 small business owners and multiple linear regression analysis to examine the significance of its hypotheses. Findings: The results show that knowledge stock has a statistically notable influence on a small firm’s absorptive capacity. The enabling role of formalization in the relationship between knowledge stock and absorptive capacity is also evident. Practical implications: Given the handicap of small firms vis-à-vis large firms to deploy internal R&D capabilities, business owners must ensure not to confuse absorptive capacity with the pre-existence of R&D capabilities. Originality/value: The unbundling of knowledge stock into breadth and depth of knowledge enables business owners and researchers to understand how any particular knowledge stock can relate to an organization’s absorptive capacity. © 2019, Emerald Publishing Limited.

Using the high-frequency data of Bitcoin, this paper investigates the long memory characteristics of the unconditional and conditional volatilities of Bitcoin at different time scales using the local Whittle (LW) estimator, the exact local Whittle (ELW) estimator and the ARMA–FIAPARCHmodel. The results show that the long memory parameter is significant and quite stable for both unconditional and conditional volatility measures across different time scales. This paper also examines the long memory characteristics of the unconditional and conditional “realized” volatilities of Bitcoin at different time scales using the local Whittle (LW) estimator, exact local Whittle (ELW) estimator and the ARFIMA model. Long memory is found to be significant and stable also in case of unconditional and conditional “realized” volatilities. The study also undertakes quarterly non-overlapping rolling window analysis to develop deeper insights into the evolution of long memory parameter, d, over the period. The results indicate high persistence in the Bitcoin market. This study has useful implications for different investors and market participants having varying exposures in the Bitcoin market depending on their trading horizons. The findings can help them in forecasting the expected volatility in the Bitcoin market and thereby in developing and implementing trading strategies. © 2018 Elsevier B.V.

The study investigates the volatility transmission from developed markets (the United States [US], the United Kingdom [UK] and Japan) to the major Asian emerging markets (India, China, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia) during a period from 1996 to 2015. We make use of the opening, high, low and closing prices to estimate unbiased extreme value volatility estimator and implement heterogeneous autoregressive distributed lag (HAR-DL) framework to study the spillover effects. Based on time-varying spillover analysis, we observe sudden changes in the spillover effect during the periods of major crises. Initially, we find evidence of contagion during the period of global financial crisis of 2007–2009. However, after accounting for conditional heteroscedasticity, we observe a decline in the strength of volatility transmission from developed markets to the Asian emerging markets. Moreover, the initial evidence of contagion is not detectable anymore. We also test the economic significance of the findings by implementing three trading strategies based on risk averse and risk-taking investors that make use of the forecasted variance based on HAR-DL specification. Our findings indicate that substantial average annualised gains in returns can be earned based on the lagged volatility components of the USA and the UK. JEL Classification: C32, C58, G01, G15. © 2019 Institute of Financial Management and Research.

Managing supply chain risk is a big challenge for any organization. The purpose of the paper is to provide a methodology for assessing supply chain risk using the Fuzzy based Analytic Hierarchy Process (Fuzzy AHP). This study presents a comprehensive study to identify the Risk Factors (RFs) in supply chain and evaluate them. In this paper, sixteen risk factors were identified based on extensive literature survey. To limit the scope of the work, focus was on transaction and infrastructural risk and avoiding the demand risk. The RFs are formulated as hierarchy structure and Fuzzy AHP as a Multi Attribute Decision Making (MADM) tool applied to judge the viable candidates. A revised risk matrix with a continuous scale was proposed to assess the RFs classes. The result classifies the RFs in different categories (Extreme, High, Medium and Low). Based on this result, some management implications and suggestions are proposed. The revised risk matrix with continuous scale for risk assessment in supply chain is a novel approach. © 2018 China Anti-Cancer Association. All rights reserved.

We investigate the Feldstein-Horioka (1980) puzzle using a novel time-frequency approach. The wavelet-based retention and correlation coefficients are estimated for a cross-section of 15 Asian countries over the period 1972–2016. The countries are grouped as OCED countries (Japan and South Korea), least developed countries (like Bangladesh and Nepal), the large countries (like India and China), and the small countries (like Sri Lanka and Pakistan). Our approach reveals some interesting insights on the relationship between investment and saving rates and investment and current account deficits. © 2018, © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

[No abstract available]

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to bring to the fore the identity and image of knowledge sharing (KS) research in terms of the patterns and trends of its growth and its intellectual structure by systematically and objectively extracting various information from extant literature published in KS research area. Design/methodology/approach: This study is based on the counting technique and bibliometric approach (citations and co-citations analysis) applied in extant literature published in the KS research area. Findings: The study finds that KS research area is evolving and has immense potential to grow in the future. It elaborates upon the publications and collaborative research patterns and identifies the works, authors and journals that have significant theoretical influence in KS research area. The analysis reveals four major themes in KS research, namely, behaviour-oriented perspective of KS, understanding, frameworks and models of KS, technology-oriented perspective of KS and KS barriers. Research limitations/implications: This study is based on research papers, published in KS research area, that have been extracted from selected journals by mining their titles with “knowledge sharing” as a keyword. Future studies may enhance the search space by including the abstracts in addition to the title while extracting papers in the search. Practical implications: This study renders all stakeholders an extensive understanding about the direction of KS research. It will help future researchers to identify their areas of interest before venturing into a deeper search. Thus, it will be a significant resource and a quick reference for researchers in KS research area. The study can also help practitioners to focus on key aspects of KS and, further, apply appropriate organizational interventions to enhance KS in promoting innovation and gaining competitive advantage for their organizations. Originality/value: This is one of the very few and early studies conducted to extract patterns and trends of growth and provide the intellectual structure with KS as a domain of research. © 2018, Emerald Publishing Limited.

Purpose: Despite the recognized importance of knowledge management for small family firms, relatively little empirical research has been done so far to understand the mechanisms through which absorptive capacity (AC) assists their performance. The purpose of this study is to understand the relationship between absorptive capacity and performance in small family firms. Design/methodology/approach: In this study, the authors theoretically argue and empirically validate that AC enables the creation of entrepreneurial, market and technology orientations in small family firms, which, in turn, lead to superior firm performance. They also tested the study’s hypotheses using mediation and multiple linear regression analyses on data collected from 272 small Indian family firms. Findings: The study’s findings suggest indirect relationship between AC and performance. The strategic orientations provide a mechanism through which investments in small family firms’ AC results in firm performance. Practical implications: This study offers crucial insights to practitioners and small firm managers regarding the use of knowledge-based capabilities in creating appropriate strategic postures, which, in turn, assist firm performance. Originality/value: This study is among few research attempts in understanding the knowledge aspects of small family firms. The present research contributes to the existing literature by unravelling the relationship between knowledge management and small family firm performance. Also, by bringing in data from an under-studied context of an emerging economy, this study strengthens the theoretical applicability of knowledge management in different contexts. © 2018, Emerald Publishing Limited.

Organizations make considerable efforts when implementing Supply Chain Information systems (SCIS) to increase their competitiveness. This chapter attempts to identify the Risk Factors (RFs) in SCIS implementation and evaluate them. Sixteen risk factors were identified based on an extensive literature survey. A comprehensive framework is presented with three major phases to select an adequate SCIS. The risk assessment for SCIS implementation is then empirically investigated. The RFs are formulated as hierarchy structures and Fuzzy AHPs as a Multi Attribute Decision Making (MADM) tool applied to judge the viable candidates. Based on a fuzzy AHP approach, a revised risk matrix with a continuous scale is proposed to assess the RFs’ classes. The result classifies the risk factors in different categories (Extreme, High, Medium and Low). The revised risk matrix with continuous scale for risk assessment in SCIS implementation is a novel approach. Copyright © 2018, IGI Global.

Any selection decision of supply chain coordination schemes (SCCS) is essentially affected by the environment where the schemes are to be implemented, the necessary conditions required for their implementation, the risk associated with the implementation, and the impact on the performance of the supply chain. Because of the multi-dimensional characteristics; the selection of appropriate SCCS in a given situation remains a challenging task for supply chain managers. This study explores relevant factors that influence this selection process. A structural model is proposed to capture relationships among these factors for development of Impact Relationship Maps (IRM) by applying Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) and Maximum Mean De-Entropy (MMDE) algorithm. A study has been conducted and the outcome leads to add significant value to the decision making process with knowledge on the roles of the factors and inter-factor relations which helps in taking meaningful decision on SCCS selection and implementation. © 2018, IGI Global. All rights reserved.

Purpose: As the retail banking institutions are becoming more customer centric, their focus on service quality is increasing. Established service quality frameworks such as SERVQUAL and SERVPERF have been applied in the banking sector. While these models are widely accepted, they are expensive because of the need for replication across bank branches. The purpose of this paper is to propose a novel, user friendly and cost effective approach by amalgamating the traditional concept of service quality in banks (marketing base) and sentiment analysis literature (information systems base). Design/methodology/approach: In this study, the main objective is to analyze user reviews to better understand the correlation between RATER dimension sentiment scores as independent variables and user overall rating (customer satisfaction) grouping in “good” and “bad” as dependent variable through development of authors’ own logistic regression model using lexicon-based sentiment analysis. The model has been developed for three largest private banks in India pertaining to three banking product categories of loans, savings and current accounts and credit cards. Findings: The results show that the responsiveness and tangibles dimensions significantly impact the user evaluation rating. Even though the three largest private banks in India are concentrating on the tangibles dimension, not all of them are sufficiently focused on the responsiveness dimension. Additionally, customers looking for loan products are more susceptible to negative perceptions on service quality. Originality/value: This study has highlighted two types of scores whereby user provided overall evaluation scores help provide validation to the sentiment scores. The developed model can be used to assess performance of a bank in comparison to its peers and to generate in depth insights on point of parity (POP) and point of difference (POD) fronts. © 2018, Emerald Publishing Limited.