A design for business intelligence service in demand driven supply chain management

This paper discusses the problems inherent within traditional supply chain management's forecast and inventory management processes arising when tackling demand driven supply chain. A demand driven supply chain management architecture developed by Orchestr8 Ltd., U.K. is described to demonstrate its advantages over traditional supply chain management. Within this architecture, a metrics reporting system is designed by adopting business intelligence technology that supports users for decision making and planning supply activities over supply chain health.

A review of growth for construction service companies in global markets

Throughout the developed world, professional services play an increasingly important part in an economy, with many countries showing a substantial positive trade balance for services. Yet, there has been relatively little research on construction services (CS) and, in particular, how well professional service companies (PSFs) perform in the international arena. The method for collecting services export information differs to the way in which goods and products exports data are gathered because of the intangible nature of services. Organisational growth of companies aims to share risks across different regions and sectors, however, the rapidly changing business environment challenges companies with the increasing foreign ownership and changes in procurement. The complexity of today’s international construction services organisations raises two questions: how the organisations can successfully manage growth and what are their motives for international trade. The research focuses on top UK consulting engineering companies to understand their organisational strategy, their export strategy, and drivers for overseas activities. The data will feed a model of professional services exports, which can help to inform the way services export data could be collected to better reflect the industry’s performance.

The business case development process in the delivery of NHS infrastructure

There is a lack of knowledge base in relation to experiences gained and lessons learnt from previously executed National Health Service (NHS) infrastructure projects in the UK. This is in part a feature of one-off construction projects, which typify healthcare infrastructure, and in part due to the absence of a suitable method for conveying such information. The complexity of infrastructure delivery process in the NHS makes the construction of healthcare buildings a formidable task. This is particularly the case for the NHS trusts who have little or no experience of construction projects. To facilitate understanding a most important aspect of the delivery process, which is the preparation of a capital investment proposal; steps taken in developing the business case for an NHS healthcare facility are examined. The context for such examination is provided by the planning process of a healthcare project, studied retrospectively. The process is analysed using a social science based method called ‘building stories’, developed at the University of California-Berkeley. By applying this method, stories or narratives are constructed around the data captured on the case study. The findings indicate that the business case process may be used to justify, rather than identify, trusts’ requirements. The study is useful for UK public sector clients as well as consultants and professionals who aim to participate in the delivery of healthcare infrastructure projects in the UK.

Modelling requirements of supplier selection for benchmarking service provision

Supplier selection has a great impact on supply chain management. The quality of supplier selection also affects profitability of organisations which work in the supply chain. As suppliers can provide variety of services and customers demand higher quality of service provision, the organisation is facing challenges for making the right choice of supplier for the right needs. The existing methods for supplier selection, such as data envelopment analysis (DEA) and analytical hierarchy process (AHP) can automatically perform selection of competitive suppliers and further decide winning supplier(s). However, these methods are not capable of determining the right selection criteria which should be derived from the business strategy. An ontology model described in this paper integrates the strengths of DEA and AHP with new mechanisms which ensure the right supplier to be selected by the right criteria for the right customer's needs.

A design of e-procurement infrastructure model for public service sector

Procurement is one of major business operations in public service sector. The advance of information and communication technology (ICT) pushes this business operation to increase its efficiency and foster collaborations between the organization and its suppliers. This leads to a shift from the traditional procurement transactions to an e-procurement paradigm. Such change impacts on business process, information management and decision making. E-procurement involves various stakeholders who engage in activities based on different social and cultural practices. Therefore, a design of e-procurement system may involve complex situations analysis. This paper describes an approach of using the problem articulation method to support such analysis. This approach is applied to a case study from UAE.

SORMA - business cases for an open grid market: concept and implementation

Economic mechanisms enhance technological solutions by setting the right incentives to reveal information about demand and supply accurately. Market or pricing mechanisms are ones that foster information exchange and can therefore attain efficient allocation. By assigning a value (also called utility) to their service requests, users can reveal their relative urgency or costs to the service. The implementation of theoretical sound models induce further complex challenges. The EU-funded project SORMA analyzes these challenges and provides a prototype as a proof-of-concept. In this paper the approach within the SORMA-project is described on both conceptual and technical level.

Exporting construction professional services in a global service economy

Globalisation has prompted increasing numbers of construction profes-sional services (CPS) firms to internationalise and export their services. The driver has been twofold; firstly to increase turnover/profits and sec-ondly, to minimise the risk of a reliance on working in a single domestic market which has a fluctuating demand. Secondly, where firms have out-grown their domestic market, and in order to expand, they must export overseas. There has been little research into the way CPS firms operate overseas, yet construction represents approximately 10% of global GDP; this means that understanding CPS firms is important. This paper investigates how CPS firms internationalise and the drivers that impact their decisions and operations overseas. A survey was undertaken and interviews conducted that showed CPS firms are project driven, in-vesting heavily in the process of seeking work/bidding for projects, and are very focused on delivering projects with minimum risk. Increasing foreign ownership, changing procurement approaches and more consolidation of CPS firms in the global marketplace present a changing business land-scape. The research develops a framework of tangible and intangible factors, such as competencies, business organisation culture, leadership and reputation in order to better understand how CPS firms export their ser-vices. Whilst all CPS firms share the same framework of factors, the re-sulting synergies are different not only for each firm but also for each pro-ject. The knowledge-intensive and project-based nature of CPS firms presents a challenge in understanding the way they operate in the global service economy.

Stakeholder-defined corporate responsibility for a pre-credit-crunch financial service company: lessons for how good reputations are won and lost

This paper presents a study that identifies a stakeholder-defined concept of Corporate Responsibility (CR) in the context of a UK financial service organisation in the immediate pre-credit crunch era. From qualitative analysis of interviews and focus groups with employees and customers, we identify, in a wide-ranging stakeholder-defined concept of CR, six themes that together imply two necessary conditions for a firm to be regarded as responsible— both corporate actions and character must be consonant with CR. This provides both empirical support for a notable, recent theoretical contribution by Godfrey (in Acad Manag Rev 30:777–798, 2005) and novel lessons for reputation management practice.