How screening criteria change during brand development

Purpose - Despite the increasing sophistication of new product development (NPD) research, the reliance on traditional approaches to studying NPD has left several areas in need of further research. The authors propose addressing some of these gaps, especially the limited focus on consumer brands, evaluation criteria used across different project-review points in the NPD process, and the distinction between "kills", "successes", and "failures". Moreover, they propose investigating how screening criteria change across project-review points, using real-time NPD projects. Design/methodology/approach - A postal survey generated 172 usable questionnaires from a sample of European, North American, Far Eastern and Australian consumer packaged-goods firms, providing data on 314 new product projects covering different development and post-commercialization review points. Findings - The results confirm that acceptance-rejection criteria vary through the NPD process. However, financial criteria dominate across all the project-review points. Initial screening is coarse, focusing predominantly on financial criteria. Fit with organizational, product, brand, promotional, and market requirements dominate in the detailed screen and pre-development evaluation points. At pre-launch, decision-makers focus on product, brand, and promotional criteria. Commercial fit, production synergies, and reliability of the firm's market intelligence are significant discriminators in the post-launch review. Moreover, the importance of marketing and channel issues makes the criteria for screening brands different from those of industrial markets. Originality/value - The study, although largely descriptive and involves a relatively small sample of consumer goods firms, offers new insights into NPD project evaluation behavior. Future, larger-scale investigations covering a broader spectrum of consumer product sectors are needed to validate our results and to explain the reasons behind managers' decisions. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

Evaluation of options for energy recovery from municipal solid waste in India using the hierarchical analytical network process

In this paper a Hierarchical Analytical Network Process (HANP) model is demonstrated for evaluating alternative technologies for generating electricity from MSW in India. The technological alternatives and evaluation criteria for the HANP study are characterised by reviewing the literature and consulting experts in the field of waste management. Technologies reviewed in the context of India include landfill, anaerobic digestion, incineration, pelletisation and gasification. To investigate the sensitivity of the result, we examine variations in expert opinions and carry out an Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) analysis for comparison. We find that anaerobic digestion is the preferred technology for generating electricity from MSW in India. Gasification is indicated as the preferred technology in an AHP model due to the exclusion of criteria dependencies and in an HANP analysis when placing a high priority on net output and retention time. We conclude that HANP successfully provides a structured framework for recommending which technologies to pursue in India, and the adoption of such tools is critical at a time when key investments in infrastructure are being made. Therefore the presented methodology is thought to have a wider potential for investors, policy makers, researchers and plant developers in India and elsewhere. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Uses of frontier efficiency methodologies and multi-criteria decision making for performance measurement in the energy sector

Guest editorial Ali Emrouznejad is a Senior Lecturer at the Aston Business School in Birmingham, UK. His areas of research interest include performance measurement and management, efficiency and productivity analysis as well as data mining. He has published widely in various international journals. He is an Associate Editor of IMA Journal of Management Mathematics and Guest Editor to several special issues of journals including Journal of Operational Research Society, Annals of Operations Research, Journal of Medical Systems, and International Journal of Energy Management Sector. He is in the editorial board of several international journals and co-founder of Performance Improvement Management Software. William Ho is a Senior Lecturer at the Aston University Business School. Before joining Aston in 2005, he had worked as a Research Associate in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His research interests include supply chain management, production and operations management, and operations research. He has published extensively in various international journals like Computers & Operations Research, Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, European Journal of Operational Research, Expert Systems with Applications, International Journal of Production Economics, International Journal of Production Research, Supply Chain Management: An International Journal, and so on. His first authored book was published in 2006. He is an Editorial Board member of the International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology and an Associate Editor of the OR Insight Journal. Currently, he is a Scholar of the Advanced Institute of Management Research. Uses of frontier efficiency methodologies and multi-criteria decision making for performance measurement in the energy sector This special issue aims to focus on holistic, applied research on performance measurement in energy sector management and for publication of relevant applied research to bridge the gap between industry and academia. After a rigorous refereeing process, seven papers were included in this special issue. The volume opens with five data envelopment analysis (DEA)-based papers. Wu et al. apply the DEA-based Malmquist index to evaluate the changes in relative efficiency and the total factor productivity of coal-fired electricity generation of 30 Chinese administrative regions from 1999 to 2007. Factors considered in the model include fuel consumption, labor, capital, sulphur dioxide emissions, and electricity generated. The authors reveal that the east provinces were relatively and technically more efficient, whereas the west provinces had the highest growth rate in the period studied. Ioannis E. Tsolas applies the DEA approach to assess the performance of Greek fossil fuel-fired power stations taking undesirable outputs into consideration, such as carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide emissions. In addition, the bootstrapping approach is deployed to address the uncertainty surrounding DEA point estimates, and provide bias-corrected estimations and confidence intervals for the point estimates. The author revealed from the sample that the non-lignite-fired stations are on an average more efficient than the lignite-fired stations. Maethee Mekaroonreung and Andrew L. Johnson compare the relative performance of three DEA-based measures, which estimate production frontiers and evaluate the relative efficiency of 113 US petroleum refineries while considering undesirable outputs. Three inputs (capital, energy consumption, and crude oil consumption), two desirable outputs (gasoline and distillate generation), and an undesirable output (toxic release) are considered in the DEA models. The authors discover that refineries in the Rocky Mountain region performed the best, and about 60 percent of oil refineries in the sample could improve their efficiencies further. H. Omrani, A. Azadeh, S. F. Ghaderi, and S. Abdollahzadeh presented an integrated approach, combining DEA, corrected ordinary least squares (COLS), and principal component analysis (PCA) methods, to calculate the relative efficiency scores of 26 Iranian electricity distribution units from 2003 to 2006. Specifically, both DEA and COLS are used to check three internal consistency conditions, whereas PCA is used to verify and validate the final ranking results of either DEA (consistency) or DEA-COLS (non-consistency). Three inputs (network length, transformer capacity, and number of employees) and two outputs (number of customers and total electricity sales) are considered in the model. Virendra Ajodhia applied three DEA-based models to evaluate the relative performance of 20 electricity distribution firms from the UK and the Netherlands. The first model is a traditional DEA model for analyzing cost-only efficiency. The second model includes (inverse) quality by modelling total customer minutes lost as an input data. The third model is based on the idea of using total social costs, including the firm’s private costs and the interruption costs incurred by consumers, as an input. Both energy-delivered and number of consumers are treated as the outputs in the models. After five DEA papers, Stelios Grafakos, Alexandros Flamos, Vlasis Oikonomou, and D. Zevgolis presented a multiple criteria analysis weighting approach to evaluate the energy and climate policy. The proposed approach is akin to the analytic hierarchy process, which consists of pairwise comparisons, consistency verification, and criteria prioritization. In the approach, stakeholders and experts in the energy policy field are incorporated in the evaluation process by providing an interactive mean with verbal, numerical, and visual representation of their preferences. A total of 14 evaluation criteria were considered and classified into four objectives, such as climate change mitigation, energy effectiveness, socioeconomic, and competitiveness and technology. Finally, Borge Hess applied the stochastic frontier analysis approach to analyze the impact of various business strategies, including acquisition, holding structures, and joint ventures, on a firm’s efficiency within a sample of 47 natural gas transmission pipelines in the USA from 1996 to 2005. The author finds that there were no significant changes in the firm’s efficiency by an acquisition, and there is a weak evidence for efficiency improvements caused by the new shareholder. Besides, the author discovers that parent companies appear not to influence a subsidiary’s efficiency positively. In addition, the analysis shows a negative impact of a joint venture on technical efficiency of the pipeline company. To conclude, we are grateful to all the authors for their contribution, and all the reviewers for their constructive comments, which made this special issue possible. We hope that this issue would contribute significantly to performance improvement of the energy sector.

Design concept evaluation based on rough number and information entropy theory

Concept evaluation at the early phase of product development plays a crucial role in new product development. It determines the direction of the subsequent design activities. However, the evaluation information at this stage mainly comes from experts' judgments, which is subjective and imprecise. How to manage the subjectivity to reduce the evaluation bias is a big challenge in design concept evaluation. This paper proposes a comprehensive evaluation method which combines information entropy theory and rough number. Rough number is first presented to aggregate individual judgments and priorities and to manipulate the vagueness under a group decision-making environment. A rough number based information entropy method is proposed to determine the relative weights of evaluation criteria. The composite performance values based on rough number are then calculated to rank the candidate design concepts. The results from a practical case study on the concept evaluation of an industrial robot design show that the integrated evaluation model can effectively strengthen the objectivity across the decision-making processes.

Selection of power market structure using the analytic hierarchy process

Selection of a power market structure from the available alternatives is an important activity within an overall power sector reform programme. The evaluation criteria for selection are both subjective as well as objective in nature and the selection of alternatives is characterised by their conflicting nature. This study demonstrates a methodology for power market structure selection using the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), a multiple attribute decision-making technique, to model the selection methodology with the active participation of relevant stakeholders in a workshop environment. The methodology is applied to a hypothetical case of a State Electricity Board reform in India.

Constructing institutional change: emergence, contestation and convergence of business models in the field of Java application servers

How are innovative new business models established if organizations constantly compare themselves against existing criteria and expectations? The objective is to address this question from the perspective of innovators and their ability to redefine established expectations and evaluation criteria. The research questions ask whether there are discernible patterns of discursive action through which innovators theorize institutional change and what role such theorizations play for mobilizing support and realizing change projects. These questions are investigated through a case study on a critical area of enterprise computing software, Java application servers. In the present case, business practices and models were already well established among incumbents with critical market areas allocated to few dominant firms. Fringe players started experimenting with a new business approach of selling services around freely available opensource application servers. While most new players struggled, one new entrant succeeded in leading incumbents to adopt and compete on the new model. The case demonstrates that innovative and substantially new models and practices are established in organizational fields when innovators are able to refine expectations and evaluation criteria within an organisational field. The study addresses the theoretical paradox of embedded agency. Actors who are embedded in prevailing institutional logics and structures find it hard to perceive potentially disruptive opportunities that fall outside existing ways of doing things. Changing prevailing institutional logics and structures requires strategic and institutional work aimed at overcoming barriers to innovation. The study addresses this problem through the lens of (new) institutional theory. This discourse methodology traces the process through which innovators were able to establish a new social and business model in the field.

Strategic sourcing supplier selection misalignment with critical success factors:findings from multiple case studies in Germany and the United Kingdom

Strategic sourcing plays an important role in organisations' performance. Strategic sourcing has been researched extensively using empirical studies as well as review work, such as strategic sourcing importance, issues and challenges, processes, source selection criteria and framework. However, there is no research on critical success factors for strategic sourcing specific to industry and country. This research aims to qualitatively evaluate and understand the current role of strategic sourcing, the critical success factors for business performance and its relationship with strategic sourcing, and strategic supplier evaluation criteria from multiple stakeholders' perspectives specific to industry and country. This research studies twenty organisations from Germany and the United Kingdom (UK) covering two industry sectors - electronics manufacturing and construction. We consider five organisations from each industry sector and each country. The findings from twenty case studies reveal comparative analysis of strategic sourcing practices of two countries and two industries.

Serious games for energy social science research

This paper proposes a set of criteria for evaluation of serious games (SGs) which are intended as effective methods of engaging energy users and lowering consumption. We discuss opportunities for using SGs in energy research which go beyond existing feedback mechanisms, including use of immersive virtual worlds for learning and testing behaviours, and sparking conversations within households. From a review of existing SG evaluation criteria, we define a tailored set of criteria for energy SG development and evaluation. The criteria emphasise the need for the game to increase energy literacy through applicability to real-life energy use/management; clear, actionable goals and feedback; ways of comparing usage socially and personal relevance. Three existing energy games are evaluated according to this framework. The paper concludes by outlining directions for future development of SGs as an effective tool in social science research, including games which inspire reflection on trade-offs and usage at different scales.

Multi-criteria decision making approaches for supplier evaluation and selection:a literature review

Supplier evaluation and selection problem has been studied extensively. Various decision making approaches have been proposed to tackle the problem. In contemporary supply chain management, the performance of potential suppliers is evaluated against multiple criteria rather than considering a single factor-cost. This paper reviews the literature of the multi-criteria decision making approaches for supplier evaluation and selection. Related articles appearing in the international journals from 2000 to 2008 are gathered and analyzed so that the following three questions can be answered: (i) Which approaches were prevalently applied? (ii) Which evaluating criteria were paid more attention to? (iii) Is there any inadequacy of the approaches? Based on the inadequacy, if any, some improvements and possible future work are recommended. This research not only provides evidence that the multi-criteria decision making approaches are better than the traditional cost-based approach, but also aids the researchers and decision makers in applying the approaches effectively.

Evaluation of PCR in the molecular diagnosis of endocarditis

Objective. Infective endocarditis (IE) is diagnosed by the Duke criteria, which can be inconclusive particularly when blood cultures are negative. This study investigated the application of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to identify bacterial DNA in excised valvular tissue, and its role in establishing the diagnosis of IE. Methods. Ninety-eight patients undergoing valve replacement surgery were studied. Twenty-eight patients were confirmed as definite for endocarditis by the Duke criteria; nine were considered as possible and 61 had no known or previous microbial infection of the endocardium. A broad-range PCR technique was used to amplify prokaryotic 16S rRNA genes present within homogenised heart valve tissue. Subsequent DNA sequencing of the PCR amplicon allowed identification of the infecting microorganism. Results. PCR results demonstrated the presence of bacterial DNA in the heart valves obtained from 14 out of 20 (70%) definite IE patients with positive blood cultures preoperatively. The causative microorganism for one patient with definite culture negative endocarditis was identified by PCR. Two out of nine (22%) of the valves from possible endocarditis patients also had bacterial DNA present converting them into the definite criteria whereas in the valves of seven out of nine (78%) of these patients no bacterial DNA was detected. Conclusion. The application of PCR to the explanted valves in patients with possible or confirmed diagnosis can augment the Duke criteria thereby improving post-surgical antimicrobial therapeutic options. © 2003 The British Infection Society. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Consumer brand equity : a model for the measurement, analysis and evaluation of consumer perceived value

The topic of my research is consumer brand equity (CBE). My thesis is that the success or otherwise of a brand is better viewed from the consumers’ perspective. I specifically focus on consumers as a unique group of stakeholders whose involvement with brands is crucial to the overall success of branding strategy. To this end, this research examines the constellation of ideas on brand equity that have hitherto been offered by various scholars. Through a systematic integration of the concepts and practices identified but these scholars (concepts and practices such as: competitiveness, consumer searching, consumer behaviour, brand image, brand relevance, consumer perceived value, etc.), this research identifies CBE as a construct that is shaped, directed and made valuable by the beliefs, attitudes and the subjective preferences of consumers. This is done by examining the criteria on the basis of which the consumers evaluate brands and make brand purchase decisions. Understanding the criteria by which consumers evaluate brands is crucial for several reasons. First, as the basis upon which consumers select brands changes with consumption norms and technology, understanding the consumer choice process will help in formulating branding strategy. Secondly, an understanding of these criteria will help in formulating a creative and innovative agenda for ‘new brand’ propositions. Thirdly, it will also influence firms’ ability to simulate and mould the plasticity of demand for existing brands. In examining these three issues, this thesis presents a comprehensive account of CBE. This is because the first issue raised in the preceding paragraph deals with the content of CBE. The second issue addresses the problem of how to develop a reliable and valid measuring instrument for CBE. The third issue examines the structural and statistical relationships between the factors of CBE and the consequences of CBE on consumer perceived value (CPV). Using LISREL-SIMPLIS 8.30, the study finds direct and significant influential links between consumer brand equity and consumer value perception.

An evaluation of task analysis techniques for industrial process control

The concept of a task is fundamental to the discipline of ergonomics. Approaches to the analysis of tasks began in the early 1900's. These approaches have evolved and developed to the present day, when there is a vast array of methods available. Some of these methods are specific to particular contexts or applications, others more general. However, whilst many of these analyses allow tasks to be examined in detail, they do not act as tools to aid the design process or the designer. The present thesis examines the use of task analysis in a process control context, and in particular the use of task analysis to specify operator information and display requirements in such systems. The first part of the thesis examines the theoretical aspect of task analysis and presents a review of the methods, issues and concepts relating to task analysis. A review of over 80 methods of task analysis was carried out to form a basis for the development of a task analysis method to specify operator information requirements in industrial process control contexts. Of the methods reviewed Hierarchical Task Analysis was selected to provide such a basis and developed to meet the criteria outlined for such a method of task analysis. The second section outlines the practical application and evolution of the developed task analysis method. Four case studies were used to examine the method in an empirical context. The case studies represent a range of plant contexts and types, both complex and more simple, batch and continuous and high risk and low risk processes. The theoretical and empirical issues are drawn together and a method developed to provide a task analysis technique to specify operator information requirements and to provide the first stages of a tool to aid the design of VDU displays for process control.

An evaluation of Home Office extended interviews for police personnel

In this thesis the validity of an Assessment Centre (called 'Extended Interview') operated on behalf of the British police is investigated. This Assessment Centre (AC) is used to select from amongst internal candidates (serving policemen and policewomen) and external candidates (graduates) for places on an accelerated promotion scheme. The literature is reviewed with respect to history, content, structure, reliability, validity, efficiency and usefulness of ACs, and to contextual issues surrounding AC use. The history of, background to and content of police Extended Interviews (Els) is described, and research issues are identified. Internal validation involved regression of overall EI grades on measures from component tests, exercises, interviews and peer nominations. Four samples numbering 126, 73, 86 and 109 were used in this part of the research. External validation involved regression of three types of criteria - training grades, rank attained, and supervisory ratings - on all EI measures. Follow-up periods for job criteria ranged from 7 to 19 years. Three samples, numbering 223, 157 and 86, were used in this part of the research. In subsidiary investigations, supervisory ratings were factor analysed and criteria intercorrelated. For two of the samples involved in the external validition, clinical/judgemental prediction was compared with mechanical (unit-weighted composite) prediction. Main conclusions are that: (1) EI selection decisions were valid, but only for a job performance criterion; relatively low validity overall was interpreted principally in terms of the questionable job relatedness of the EI procedure; (2) Els as a whole had more validity than was reflected in final EI decisions; (3) assessors' use of information was not optimum, tending to over-emphasize subjectively derived information particularly from interviews; and (4) mechanical prediction was superior to clinical/judgemental prediction for five major criteria.

Which is the best solar thermal collection technology for electricity generation in north-west India? Evaluation of options using the analytical hierarchy process

This study of concentrating solar thermal power generation sets out to evaluate the main existing collection technologies using the framework of the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP). It encompasses parabolic troughs, heliostat fields, linear Fresnel reflectors, parabolic dishes, compound parabolic concentrators and linear Fresnel lenses. These technologies are compared based on technical, economic and environmental criteria. Within these three categories, numerous sub-criteria are identified; similarly sub-alternatives are considered for each technology. A literature review, thermodynamic calculations and an expert workshop have been used to arrive at quantitative and qualitative assessments. The methodology is applied principally to a case study in Gujarat in north-west India, though case studies based on the Sahara Desert, Southern Spain and California are included for comparison. A sensitivity analysis is carried out for Gujarat. The study concludes that the linear Fresnel lens with a secondary compound parabolic collector, or the parabolic dish reflector, is the preferred technology for north-west India.