Purchasing green transport and logistics services:implications from the environmental sustainability attitude of 3PLs

Environmental sustainability is an area of increasing importance for third party logistics (3PL) companies. As the design and implementation of services requires interaction between buyer and 3PL, the 3PLs are in a critical position to support the efforts towards greening operations of different supply chain participants. However the literature in this field reflects a gap between the perspectives of buyers and 3PLs. This chapter attempts to fill this void through an explorative case study analysis on the environmental attitude of 3PLs in order to derive implications for buyers’ behavior. The results indicate that the buyer’s role is critical in different ways in the development of green initiatives among 3PLs. An increased orientation towards longer-term contracts and joint development would likely enhance the level of green initiatives. Indirectly, the buyer has the opportunity to influence its 3PLs through interaction with employees on different levels in the company, including top management.

Purchasing green transport and logistics services:implications from the environmental sustainability attitude of 3PLs

Environmental sustainability is an area of increasing importance for third party logistics (3PL) companies. As the design and implementation of services requires interaction between buyer and 3PL, the 3PLs are in a critical position to support the efforts towards greening operations of different supply chain participants. However the literature in this field reflects a gap between the perspectives of buyers and 3PLs. This chapter attempts to fill this void through an explorative case study analysis on the environmental attitude of 3PLs in order to derive implications for buyers’ behavior. The results indicate that the buyer’s role is critical in different ways in the development of green initiatives among 3PLs. An increased orientation towards longer-term contracts and joint development would likely enhance the level of green initiatives. Indirectly, the buyer has the opportunity to influence its 3PLs through interaction with employees on different levels in the company, including top management.

Handling and communicating uncertainty in chained geospatial web services

Recent developments in service-oriented and distributed computing have created exciting opportunities for the integration of models in service chains to create the Model Web. This offers the potential for orchestrating web data and processing services, in complex chains; a flexible approach which exploits the increased access to products and tools, and the scalability offered by the Web. However, the uncertainty inherent in data and models must be quantified and communicated in an interoperable way, in order for its effects to be effectively assessed as errors propagate through complex automated model chains. We describe a proposed set of tools for handling, characterizing and communicating uncertainty in this context, and show how they can be used to 'uncertainty- enable' Web Services in a model chain. An example implementation is presented, which combines environmental and publicly-contributed data to produce estimates of sea-level air pressure, with estimates of uncertainty which incorporate the effects of model approximation as well as the uncertainty inherent in the observational and derived data.

A comparative study of market orientation in China's two services sectors

Developing a Market Orientation (MO) is one of the key managerial issues. In this study, using a sample of firms from two services sectors in China with distinctly different business environments, we explored the effects of business environment on the development of a MO. A key finding of our study is that the effectiveness of top management emphasis on the MO development varies under different environmental conditions.

Web based expert elicitation of uncertainties in environmental model inputs

When constructing and using environmental models, it is typical that many of the inputs to the models will not be known perfectly. In some cases, it will be possible to make observations, or occasionally physics-based uncertainty propagation, to ascertain the uncertainty on these inputs. However, such observations are often either not available or even possible, and another approach to characterising the uncertainty on the inputs must be sought. Even when observations are available, if the analysis is being carried out within a Bayesian framework then prior distributions will have to be specified. One option for gathering or at least estimating this information is to employ expert elicitation. Expert elicitation is well studied within statistics and psychology and involves the assessment of the beliefs of a group of experts about an uncertain quantity, (for example an input / parameter within a model), typically in terms of obtaining a probability distribution. One of the challenges in expert elicitation is to minimise the biases that might enter into the judgements made by the individual experts, and then to come to a consensus decision within the group of experts. Effort is made in the elicitation exercise to prevent biases clouding the judgements through well-devised questioning schemes. It is also important that, when reaching a consensus, the experts are exposed to the knowledge of the others in the group. Within the FP7 UncertWeb project (http://www.uncertweb.org/), there is a requirement to build a Webbased tool for expert elicitation. In this paper, we discuss some of the issues of building a Web-based elicitation system - both the technological aspects and the statistical and scientific issues. In particular, we demonstrate two tools: a Web-based system for the elicitation of continuous random variables and a system designed to elicit uncertainty about categorical random variables in the setting of landcover classification uncertainty. The first of these examples is a generic tool developed to elicit uncertainty about univariate continuous random variables. It is designed to be used within an application context and extends the existing SHELF method, adding a web interface and access to metadata. The tool is developed so that it can be readily integrated with environmental models exposed as web services. The second example was developed for the TREES-3 initiative which monitors tropical landcover change through ground-truthing at confluence points. It allows experts to validate the accuracy of automated landcover classifications using site-specific imagery and local knowledge. Experts may provide uncertainty information at various levels: from a general rating of their confidence in a site validation to a numerical ranking of the possible landcover types within a segment. A key challenge in the web based setting is the design of the user interface and the method of interacting between the problem owner and the problem experts. We show the workflow of the elicitation tool, and show how we can represent the final elicited distributions and confusion matrices using UncertML, ready for integration into uncertainty enabled workflows.We also show how the metadata associated with the elicitation exercise is captured and can be referenced from the elicited result, providing crucial lineage information and thus traceability in the decision making process.

The Once and future pioneers? : the role of voluntary organizations in innovation in the personal social services

This thesis explores the innovative capacity of voluntary organizations in the field of the personal social services. It commences with a full literature review, which concludes that the wealth of research upon innovation in the organization studies field has not addressed this topic, whilst the specialist literatures upon voluntary organizations and upon the personal social services have neglected the study of innovation. The research contained in this thesis is intended to right this neglect and to integrate lessons from both fields. It combines a survey of the innovative activity of voluntary organizations in three localities with cross-sectional case studies of innovative, developmental and traditional organizations. The research concludes that innovation is an important, but not integral, characteristic of voluntary organizations. It develops a contingent model of this innovative capacity of voluntary organizations, which stresses the role of external environmental and institutional forces in shaping and releasing this capacity. It concludes by considering the contribution of this model both to organization studies and to the study of voluntary organizations.

An economic, environmental and functional study of buildings erected for educational purposes

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An evaluation of aerial photography as a source of environmental information

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Open-source mapping and services for Web-based land-cover validation

Monitoring land-cover changes on sites of conservation importance allows environmental problems to be detected, solutions to be developed and the effectiveness of actions to be assessed. However, the remoteness of many sites or a lack of resources means these data are frequently not available. Remote sensing may provide a solution, but large-scale mapping and change detection may not be appropriate, necessitating site-level assessments. These need to be easy to undertake, rapid and cheap. We present an example of a Web-based solution based on free and open-source software and standards (including PostGIS, OpenLayers, Web Map Services, Web Feature Services and GeoServer) to support assessments of land-cover change (and validation of global land-cover maps). Authorised users are provided with means to assess land-cover visually and may optionally provide uncertainty information at various levels: from a general rating of their confidence in an assessment to a quantification of the proportions of land-cover types within a reference area. Versions of this tool have been developed for the TREES-3 initiative (Simonetti, Beuchle and Eva, 2011). This monitors tropical land-cover change through ground-truthing at latitude / longitude degree confluence points, and for monitoring of change within and around Important Bird Areas (IBAs) by Birdlife International and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB). In this paper we present results from the second of these applications. We also present further details on the potential use of the land-cover change assessment tool on sites of recognised conservation importance, in combination with NDVI and other time series data from the eStation (a system for receiving, processing and disseminating environmental data). We show how the tool can be used to increase the usability of earth observation data by local stakeholders and experts, and assist in evaluating the impact of protection regimes on land-cover change.

Proactive environmental systems:the next generation of environmental monitoring

In this article we envision factors and trends that shape the next generation of environmental monitoring systems. One key factor in this respect is the combined effect of end-user needs and the general development of IT services and their availability. Currently, an environmental (monitoring) system is assumed to be reactive. It delivers measurement data and computational results only if the user explicitly asks for it either by query or subscription. There is a temptation to automate this by simply pushing data to end-users. This, however, leads easily to an "advertisement strategy", where data is pushed to end-users regardless of users' needs. Under this strategy, the mere amount of received data obfuscates the individual messages; any "automatic" service, regardless of its fitness, overruns a system that requires the user's initiative. The foreseeable problem is that, unless there is no overall management, each new environmental service is going to compete for end-users' attention and, thus, inadvertently hinder the use of existing services. As the main contribution we investigate the nature of proactive environmental systems, and how they should be designed to avoid the aforementioned problem. We also discuss how semantics, participatory sensing, uncertainty management, and situational awareness link to proactive environmental systems. We illustrate our proposals with some real-life examples.

Towards environmental responsibility in business

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A comparison of the environmental management practices in three British universities

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Control of environmental lead pollution with particular attention to lead in food

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Implementing biodiversity action plans within environmental management systems

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Purchasing green transport and logistics services:implications for small business

Considering its strong environmental impact, logistics plays a critical role in green supply chain management. It provides strategic links in the supply chain and is an essential function in the delivery of green products to the consumer. There is a general consensus on the fact that more environmentally sustainable companies may be achieved only if transport and logistics activities also become greener. To achieve this objective, buyer companies need to incorporate green considerations in the purchasing of transport and logistics services. This appears particularly challenging for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) because of their traditional lack of managerial, organisational and financial resources that often result in failure to adopt an environmental perspective. In the extant literature, green purchasing has received increased attention over the past decade and the strategic importance of introducing green aspects into purchasing practices has been recognised. However, little has been written in relation to purchasing green transport and logistics services. The aim of this paper is to explore practices in the buying of green transport and logistics services and to derive implications for small buyer companies. The paper analyses how general environmental company ambitions and environmental purchasing practices are reflected when green transport and logistics services are purchased in three different European countries (Italy, Ireland and Sweden) using a multiple case study research approach. The results of the paper indicate that while the case companies show a relatively high concern for green issues at corporate level, a lower importance is attributed to green issues at the purchasing function level. When green concerns in the purchasing of transport and logistics services are analysed the level of importance decreases further. Thus, a conflicting attitude is evident between the overall corporate level and the purchasing of transport and logistics services specifically. This suggests that there is potential for improvement especially in the area of green collaboration in buyer and supplier relationships.