Agility in international fast fashion retailing

The birth of Internet technologies, the developments of fast fashion and multiple retailing channels have created a need for a new, more integrated way for doing retailing. Agility in fast fashion retailing could be seen as a significant way of responding to these changes and furthermore, as a way to respond to consumers’ altering demands. The purpose of this study was to explore the ways in which agile supply chains and integrated multichannel retailing influence the international fast fashion retailing. A framework for agility in retail was developed based on available theoretical considerations in distribution and communication channels. Qualitative research methods and qualitative content analysis were used. Four expert interviews were carried out to gain new perspectives to the objectives. The rest of the data was collected from an industry specific document, expert video and two expert lectures. Following the data collection, the research material was analyzed with qualitative content analysis. The empirical findings on agility in retail were presented based on a coding frame. It was found that agility in retail has multiple parts, which are overlapping and affecting one another. Furthermore, instead of viewing the agile supply chain and integrated multichannel retailing separately of each other as usual, it was found that they should be integrated, and the term “agility” was proposed to denote this approach. Also, it was found that the most common drivers and constrains of integrated multichannel retailing were the new Internet technologies and customer demand. Brick-and-mortar store, online store, mobile devices and social media were found to be the most common retailing channels. Furthermore, in-store technology, click-and-collect approach, NFC-buying, RFID-technology as well as 3D- digital simulations on fabrics and patterns will enhance agility even more in the future. In addition, environmental issues, customer experiences and communication will be important factors. This study has provided new practical insights for the future retailing. Furthermore, it has contributed to the academic research by discussing the traditional approaches of agility in fast fashion retail and bringing in new insights.

Save Consumers Time and Money: Thou Shall Not Forget Digital Native Big Data Consumers

Poster at Open Repositories 2014, Helsinki, Finland, June 9-13, 2014

Open Access Button Workshop

Workshop at Open Repositories 2014, Helsinki, Finland, June 9-13, 2014

Pelillistetyn viestintäjärjestelmän profiilin yhdistäminen sosiaaliseen mediaan

Pelillistetyissä järjestelmissä saavutetut pisteet ja muut saavutukset näkyvät yleensä vain kyseisessä palvelussa. Edward Decin ja Richard Ryanin teorian mukaan on tärkeää, että käyttäjä pystyy jakamaan saavutetun maineensa ystävilleen. Viestintäjärjestelmän suosiota, vertaisviestintää ja pelillistämistä pyrittiin parantamaan mahdollistamalla sen profiilin jakaminen sosiaalisessa mediassa käyttäjän ystäville, jotka eivät ole rekisteröityneet kyseiseen viestintäjärjestelmään. Tätä varten toteutettiin liitännäinen, joka mahdollistaa profiilin jakamisen Facebookissa yhdellä klikkauksella. Toteutetun liitännäisen avulla käyttäjä voi jakaa profiilinsa Facebookissa, jonka lisäksi se on helppokäyttöinen ja muokattavissa pääkäyttäjän toimesta. Suurimmaksi ongelmaksi liitännäisen kehityksessä osoittautui Facebookin vielä kehityksessä olevat kirjastot, jota käytetään yhteyden muodostamiseen. Liitännäisen julkaisu vaatisi laajempaa testausta sen yleisen toiminnallisuuden ja käytettävyyden suhteen.

Adopting the Vaadin Java framework to rebuild VTT’s Web Interfaces and Database Applications

With the growth in new technologies, using online tools have become an everyday lifestyle. It has a greater impact on researchers as the data obtained from various experiments needs to be analyzed and knowledge of programming has become mandatory even for pure biologists. Hence, VTT came up with a new tool, R Executables (REX) which is a web application designed to provide a graphical interface for biological data functions like Image analysis, Gene expression data analysis, plotting, disease and control studies etc., which employs R functions to provide results. REX provides a user interactive application for the biologists to directly enter the values and run the required analysis with a single click. The program processes the given data in the background and prints results rapidly. Due to growth of data and load on server, the interface has gained problems concerning time consumption, poor GUI, data storage issues, security, minimal user interactive experience and crashes with large amount of data. This thesis handles the methods by which these problems were resolved and made REX a better application for the future. The old REX was developed using Python Django and now, a new programming language, Vaadin has been implemented. Vaadin is a Java framework for developing web applications and the programming language is extremely similar to Java with new rich components. Vaadin provides better security, better speed, good and interactive interface. In this thesis, subset functionalities of REX was selected which includes IST bulk plotting and image segmentation and implemented those using Vaadin. A code of 662 lines was programmed by me which included Vaadin as the front-end handler while R language was used for back-end data retrieval, computing and plotting. The application is optimized to allow further functionalities to be migrated with ease from old REX. Future development is focused on including Hight throughput screening functions along with gene expression database handling

Path Analysis of Online Users Using Clickstream Da-ta: Case Online Magazine Website

This paper explores behavioral patterns of web users on an online magazine web-site. The goal of the study is to first find and visualize user paths within the data generated during collection, and to identify some generic behavioral typologies of user behavior. To form a theoretical foundation for processing data and identifying behavioral ar-chetypes, the study relies on established consumer behavior literature to propose typologies of behavior. For data processing, the study utilizes methodologies of ap-plied cluster analysis and sequential path analysis. Utilizing a dataset of click stream data generated from the real-life clicks of 250 ran-domly selected website visitors over a period of six weeks. Based on the data collect-ed, an exploratory method is followed in order to find and visualize generally occur-ring paths of users on the website. Six distinct behavioral typologies were recog-nized, with the dominant user consuming mainly blog content, as opposed to editori-al content. Most importantly, it was observed that approximately 80% of clicks were of the blog content category, meaning that the majority of web traffic occurring in the site takes place in content other than the desired editorial content pages. The out-come of the study is a set of managerial recommendations for each identified behavioral archetype.