智联产品服务供应链研发运维多阶段联合优化与协调

在智联化和服务化背景下,智能产品服务系统成为制造企业转型升级的重要方向。产品的“智能”和“互联”特性给供应链中的产品和服务都带来了新的变化。考虑产品的“智能”和“互联”对产品、服务的需求和成本的影响,构建了供应链两阶段动态博弈模型。刻画了分散决策和集中决策下供应链的最优运作行为,基于产品收益和服务收益提出了“双元收益共享”的供应链协调机制。通过算例分析,探讨了“服务化”、“智能互联”与“双元收益共享”契约对供应链利润的影响。研究表明,智联产品供应链中融入智能服务,不总是能增加供应链利润,存在“服务化悖论”;当产品智联化后,智能互联特性加强了产品与服务的融合,使供应链各方的利润都有较大提高;“双元收益共享”契约不仅能实现供应链Pareto改进,还能提高消费者剩余。     

Foundations and Implications of a Proposed Unified Services Theory

Diverse businesses, such as garbage collection, retail banking, and management consulting are often tied together under the heading of “services”, based on little more than a perception that they are intangible and do not manufacture anything. Such definitions inadequately identify managerial and operational implications common among, and unique to, services. We present a “Unified Services Theory” (UST) to clearly delineate service processes from non‐service processes and to identify key commonalities across seemingly disparate service businesses. The UST defines a service production process as one that relies on customer inputs; customers act as suppliers for all service processes. Non‐services (such as make‐to‐stock manufacturing) rely on customer selection of outputs, payment for outputs, and occasional feedback, but production is not dependent upon inputs from individual customers. The UST reveals principles that are common to the wide range of services and provides a unifying foundation for various theories and models of service operations, such as the traditional “characteristics of services” and Customer Contact Theory. The UST has significant operational corollaries pertaining to capacity and demand management, service quality, services strategy, and so forth. The UST provides a common reference point to which services management researchers can anchor future theory‐building and theory‐testing research.     

Coalitions of Actors and Managerial Innovations in the Healthcare and Social Healthcare Sector

This paper studies the behavior of a variety of stakeholders around the adoption of managerial innovations desired by operational managers of health services institutions. We show that if the operational manager may cause the managerial innovation, the tool prospective is subject to power games around coalitions of actors. The study of several management situations in health services institutions enables us, using the game theory, to highlight the “winning”, “losing” and “uncertain” coalitions that can achieve operational management within the establishment to settle a managerial innovation.     

FIELD EXPERIMENTS WHICH COMPARED THE EFFECTIVENESS OF DESIGN METHODS*

The influence of “method” on the design of services was investigated in three organizational settings. Models of “Systems,”“Behavioral,” and “Heuristic” design approaches were used to plan several service programs. These plans were compared using measures of their “quality,”“acceptance,” and “innovation.” Service plans designed by the Systems approach were found to have high quality (p < .05), and service plans designed by the Behavioral approach were found to be innovative (p < .05). These findings are employed to provide guides to select a Design Method and to suggest some research issues.     

Models for investment in electronic commerce—financial perspectives with empirical evidence

Electronic Commerce (“eCommerce”) is a concept for trade based upon products and services that are being marketed, contracted, and paid for over the Internet. Consequently, electronic commerce demands for the investment in computer systems, marketing, logistics and payments.This paper will develop conditions for profitable investments in eCommerce with a special focus on outlays for information technology systems and sales management. If the services are made more standardized, if they do not change that often, or if they are well known to the customers so that there is little need for supplementary information, then the less costly will the information technology system become. The investment in marketing depends on how well known the brand name is to the customer. eCommerce firms “Born on the Net” have to spend substantially more resources on marketing than firms that “Move to the Net”.These investments may be seen as parts of a process, which aims to generate larger revenues to the firm, better services to the customers, a more efficient logistic system, and lower payment costs. A financial perspective is taken, where investment outlays for web services and marketing are balanced to cost savings when serving existing customers and net revenues from the generation of new customers. This financial approach is applied to five case studies from the sectors of capital goods, financial services, food, ornamental horticulture, and books and stationeries, where the given background from practice and conditions for success are developed in terms of a customer-base, margins, and sales growth. It is demonstrated that an existing customer base offline reduces the need for a marketing that is costly. It is also shown that a combination of services online and offline improves customer services and increases the extension of repeat purchases.     

Reframing Resilience: Equitable Access to Essential Services

We urgently need to put the concept of resilience into practice if we are to prepare our communities for climate change and exacerbated natural hazards. Yet, despite the extensive discussion surrounding community resilience, operationalizing the concept remains challenging. The dominant approaches for assessing resilience focus on either evaluating community characteristics or infrastructure functionality. While both remain useful, they have several limitations to their ability to provide actionable insight. More importantly, the current conceptualizations do not consider essential services or how access is impaired by hazards. We argue that people need access to services such as food, education, health care, and cultural amenities, in addition to water, power, sanitation, and communications, to get back some semblance of normal life. Providing equitable access to these types of services and quickly restoring that access following a disruption are paramount to community resilience. We propose a new conceptualization of community resilience that is based on access to essential services. This reframing of resilience facilitates a new measure of resilience that is spatially explicit and operational. Using two illustrative examples from the impacts of Hurricanes Florence and Michael, we demonstrate how decisionmakers and planners can use this framework to visualize the effect of a hazard and quantify resilience-enhancing interventions. This “equitable access to essentials” approach to community resilience integrates with spatial planning, and will enable communities not only to “bounce back” from a disruption, but to “bound forward” and improve the resilience and quality of life for all residents.     

Fractional Price Matching Policies Arising from the Ocean Freight Service Industry

We consider a situation in which shippers (customers) can purchase ocean freight services either directly from a carrier (service provider)in advance or from the spot market just before the departure of an ocean liner. The price is known in the former case, while the spot price is uncertain ex‐ante in the latter case. Consequently, some shippers are reluctant to book directly from the carrier in advance unless the carrier is willing to “partially match” the realized spot price when it is lower than the regular price. This study is an initial attempt to examine if the carrier should bear some of the “price risk” by offering a “fractional” price matching contract that can be described as follows. The shipper pays the regular freight price in advance; however, the shipper will get a refund if the realized spot price is below the regular price, where the refund is a “fraction” of the difference between the regular price and the realized spot price. By modeling the dynamics between the carrier and the shippers as a sequential game, we show that the carrier can use the fractional price matching contract to generate a higher demand from the shippers compared to no price matching contract by increasing the “fraction” in equilibrium. However, as the carrier increases the “fraction,” the carrier should increase the regular price to compensate for bearing additional risk. By selecting the fractional price matching contract optimally, we show that the carrier can afford to offer this price matching mechanism without incurring revenue loss: the optimal fractional price matching contract is “revenue neutral.”     

Strategies for Environmentally Sustainable Products and Services

Industry leaders are setting the goal of sustainable products and services. The question is how this necessary but ambitious goal can be met. The author focuses on the environmental aspect of the expression “sustainable”. Strategies like eco-innovation, re-designs, and product improvements are discussed using examples such as the development of fuel cell vehicles, and the use of renewable and recycled materials. Major single actions (e.g. the development of new propulsion systems) as well as small improvements create a significant environmental benefit in total if “environmental economies of scale” are reached through mass production. Life cycle strategies, service instead of product strategies, as well as the link between “old” and “new” economy are described. The opportunities and challenges of these strategies for sustainable products are discussed. The author believes that it is necessary to look at a combination of all these strategies in order to reach the goal of sustainable products and services. In future, increasing numbers of life cycle stakeholders may have to be involved in these efforts, as their involvement is key to providing very efficient and effective additional positive effects.     

Auf dem Weg an die Spitze Anforderungen an Bewerber für Top-Positionen

En route to the top. Requirements on candidates for top positionsThe assessment of candidates for positions as managing director or as an executive committee member by means of management diagnostics has been frowned upon by German companies for a long time. There has, however, been a clear change of opinion regarding this matter in the meantime. The authors have developed a model of requirements to assess the competencies and potential critical for success. Six areas of responsibility are differentiated between thereby: “Ability to cope with complexity” and “development of decidedness”, “Will to create” and “establishment of structures”, “Establishment of bonds” and “ability of self-management”, and are divided into three levels: the personal level, the co-operative level and the level of corporate culture respectively.     

„Er ist als Wissenschaftler eine Niete und hat sich deshalb der Universitätspolitik verschrieben“

In the university three cultures are converging, as illustrated in the film “The Campus”: the “old” culture of the savant who is interested in truth, painted in a idealized manner; the “new” culture of the politicized group university, painted in a satirical manner, and the culture of neutral rules of law, represented in the administration. Science, politics and law could inspire each other, but for it a power would be needed which could connect them with their properties. Because of the absence of this power, a continuous politicization of the university develops which loses their identity as organization of science and his cultural core.     

Servitization of business: Adding value by adding services

More and more corporations throughout the world are adding value to their core corporate offerings through services. The trend is pervading almost all industries, is customer demand-driven, and perceived by corporations as sharpening their competitive edges.Modern corporations are increasingly offering fuller market packages or “bundles” of customer-focussed combinations of goods, services, support, self-service, and knowledge. But services are beginning to dominate.This movement is termed the “servitization of business” by authors Sandra Vandermerwe and Juan Rada, and is clearly a powerful new feature of total market strategy being adopted by the best companies. It is leading to new relationships between them and their customers.Giving many real-life examples, the authors assess the main motives driving corporations to servitization, and point out that its cumulative effects are changing the competitive dynamics in which managers will have to operate. The special challenge for top managers is how to blend services into the overall strategies of the company.     

The financial benefits to building outsourcing partnerships

The value of whether to outsource EH&S services is a question that compares the importance of maintaining in-house core competencies and accountability versus that of the cost and efficiency for this expertise. At Baxter International's Cardio-Vascular Group in Irvine, California, Environmental Manager Curtis Stephan has lead the development of “outsourcing partners.” Stephan believes that by developing a concept that goes beyond the traditional “contractor-employer” relationship, Baxter is best able to concentrate on what they do best—manufacturing— and save money in the process.     

Die Kultur der Macht. Die Macht der Kultur

Acting in organizations is characterized by strategies of “Bemächtigung” (repression) just as “Ermächtigung” (empowerment): Everyone tries to push through its individual interests, legitimate or not. Thereby in every organization specific rules of game and stiles of play are developed. Altogether these rules constitute the specific organizational culture. In unfair games, strategies of repression are dominant. In fair games, all players try to realize over and over again a just balance of legitimate interests of all stakeholders. Supervision aims to strengthen “Spielmächtigkeit” (ability of play and game) so that its addressees are able to change unfair games into fair games. The know-how for this is here called “technology of empowerment”.     

Self‐Service Operations at Retail Stores: The Role of Inter‐Customer Interactions

Inter‐customer interactions are important to the operation of self‐services in retail settings. More specifically, when self‐service terminals are used as part of customers’ checkout processes in retail operations without the explicit involvement of retailers as the direct service providers, inter‐customer interactions become a significant managerial issue. In this article, we examine the impact of inter‐customer interactions at retail self‐service terminals on customers’ service quality perceptions and repeat purchase intentions at retail stores. We conduct a scenario‐based experimental design (N = 674) using a 2 × 2 factorial design in which inter‐customer interactions are divided into “positive” vs. “negative” and occur during the “waiting” or during the actual “transaction” stages of self‐services at a retail store. We use attribution theory to develop the hypotheses. The results demonstrate that, through their interactions, fellow customers can exert influences on a focal customer's quality perceptions and repeat purchasing intentions toward a retail store. Furthermore, these influences were impacted by how customers attribute blame or assign responsibility toward the retail store. Service operations managers should leverage these interactions by designing into self‐service settings the capacities and interfaces that are best suited for customers’ co‐production of their self‐service experiences.     

Top Management's Transformational Leader Behaviors and Innovation Orientation: A Cross-Cultural Perspective in Eight Countries

This study builds upon the established relationship between top management's transformational leadership and firm-level innovation. It extends current research by determining how specific transformational-leader behaviors influence the firm's innovation orientation and how national culture moderates this relationship. The study examines these behaviors empirically in 954 firms from eight countries. Findings reveal that six transformational-leader behaviors positively influence innovation orientation but with differing levels of intensity. Only two of these relationships, “providing an appropriate model” and “accepting group goals,” are culturally independent, while the other behaviors' effects tend to be culturally dependent. For example, “providing intellectual stimulation” has a stronger effect in collectivist cultures, cultures with high power distance, and low uncertainty-avoidance cultures than in other cultures. Similar culture-dependent findings emerge for other leader behaviors.     

Akzeptanz anbieterseitiger Integration in die Alltagsprozesse der Konsumenten: Erste empirische Ergebnisse

The processing of product usage data represents an exceptional variety of Web 2.0. It enables the users to get real-time services via web applications in order to optimize their consumption and usage processes. The collection of usage data in real time is currently provided mainly by so-called Ambient intelligence (AmI) applications, which at the same time offer completely new options for providers with regard to the marketing of their services. In particular, the “classic” customer integration is to be expanded towards a “provider integration” (PI), in which the providers are integrated into the everyday life processes of the customers. The paper identifies the key characteristics of the PI and investigates the acceptance of PI by the development and empirical testing of an adapted acceptance model. The results of this study show that a quite extensive use of PI can be expected in the future. This will be a motivation for further research activities in this area, as outlined in the end of this paper.     

Revenue Management in Business Services

A significant portion of the services industry is focused on providing services (medical, legal, financial, personal, and travel) to individuals. However, studies have shown that a less visible but rapidly growing segment of the service sector comprises firms that provide business functions to other businesses. The sector covers tasks such as payroll processing, procurement, and information systems management, as well as business consulting, technical support, call center operations, and software development. Firms may choose to purchase, rather than perform, these business functions to reduce costs, to mitigate risk, or simply to focus on their processes that provide marketplace differentiation. Transferring a business function from within a firm to an outside supplier is often called “outsourcing”; when the supplier provides the service from a lower‐cost country, it is called “offshoring.” The risks and benefits of outsourcing to the firm purchasing a business service have been studied in some detail by both academics and consultants. In this paper, we outline revenue management issues faced by business service providers and describe some new opportunities for the use of analytic methods in the service science sector.     

多人从经验中学习模型研究：基于信息和分析方法不对称视角

当前,日益复杂且动态变化的形势和环境对多人从过往事件中不断学习、积累应对经验、快速迭代应对措施等提出了更高的要求。然而,在多人从经验中学习时,常出现由于不同个体间不了解彼此掌握的信息和会使用的分析方法而导致的莫衷一是、讨论进程拖沓、无法及时达成结论等现象。本文将个体间不了解彼此掌握的信息和/或会使用的分析方法的现象概括为“不对称”,并采用理论构建的方法,聚焦于多人从经验中学习的过程,以“信息”和“分析方法”为维度,构建基于信息不对称性和分析方法不对称性的二维矩阵,提出多人从经验中学习时会存在信息不对称且分析方法不对称、信息不对称且分析方法对称、信息对称且分析方法不对称,以及信息对称且分析方法对称四种情况,并指出信息和/或分析方法的不对称性会降低多人从经验中学习的效率,构建了基于不对称性视角的多人从经验中学习过程机制模型。随后,从“意愿”和“能力”两个方面,提出了降低信息和分析方法不对称性的实践方法,建立了降低不对称性的多人从经验中学习的实践方法库。本文针对多人从经验中学习时,由于信息和/或分析方法的不对称性而导致的问题进行探索,并为提升学习效率提供了理论基础和实践指导。     

An organizational approach to undoing gender: The unlikely case of offshore oil platforms

This case study of two offshore oil platforms illustrates how an organizational initiative designed to enhance safety and effectiveness created a culture that unintentionally released men from societal imperatives for “manly” behavior, prompting them to let go of masculine-image concerns and to behave instead in counter-stereotypical ways. Rather than proving how tough, proficient, and cool-headed they were, as was typical of men in other dangerous workplaces, platform workers readily acknowledged their physical limitations, publicly admitted their mistakes, and openly attended to their own and others’ feelings. Importantly, platform workers did not replace a conventional image of masculinity with an unconventional one and then set out to prove the new image—revealing mistakes strategically, for example, or competing in displays of sensitivity. Instead, the goal of proving one's masculine credentials, conventional or otherwise, appeared to no longer hold sway in men's workplace interactions. Building on West and Zimmerman's (1987: 129) now classic articulation of gender as “the product of social doings,” we describe this organizationally induced behavior as “undoing” gender. We use this case, together with secondary case data drawn from 10 published field studies of men doing dangerous work, to induce a model of how organizational cultures equip men to “do” and “undo” gender at work.