Thesis (M.S.)--Oregon State University, 2009. / Printout. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 93-103). Also available on the World Wide Web.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology is a ethod of identifying unique items using radio waves that communicate between RFID tags and readers without line-of-sight readability. RFID technology provides great potential in many industries and a wide spectrum of possible uses. Areas of application include person identification, logistics, pharmaceutical, access control, security guard monitoring and asset management. One of the areas where RFID is being used and where it promises excellent results is the retail industry. While RFID systems have the potential to revolutionise the way products and goods are tracked and traced in the retail supply chain, barriers to its widespread adoption exist: for example; technical constraints, return on investment constraints, a lack of awareness and education and as well as privacy and security issues. The research aims to identify the barriers to the adoption of RFID and to investigate the perceptions of RFID held by members of the retail sector in South Africa (SA). Current research and available literature are used to identify RFID adoption barriers and a conceptual framework on this subject is proposed, which is then verified by SA retailers’ perceptions, established by means of a survey. Initial barriers to widespread adoption include a shortage in skills, a lack of standards, high costs associated with RFID devices, the difficulty of integrating with current legacy systems, and a lack of familiarity with the system. Finally, an enhanced framework is proposed, describing RFID adoption barriers within the South African retail sector. In summary, the framework is an outline of the barriers impacting RFID adoption in the SA retail sector that need to be considered and addressed. The framework identifies six categories of RFID adoption barriers, with each category containing two or more barriers relating to that particular category. These categories are Technological, Cost and return on investment, Privacy and security, Implementation, Organisational factors and People.

The purpose of this thesis is to uncover and examine the processes that start-up entrepreneurs go through while designing and then developing their business models. This is done with the intent of deciphering the kind of development that might ultimately lead to a unique or innovative business model. This study uses primary qualitative data generated from interviews with founding entrepreneurs and managers who still participate in running the organization. Each of these organizations participates in the men’s retail market. The research design and methodology of this research uses a grounded-theory coding procedure to analyze the data. Three questions guide this research forward and the findings are threefold. First, for these organizations two business model design paths were followed, herein referred to as the path to ‘Alleviate Pain’ and as the path to ‘Adopt and Modify.’ Second, entrepreneurial leaders tended to act as arbiters when developing their business models, mediating between the set of information accrued during operations and three identified factors. Thirdly, new research into whether or not business model innovations are the result of ex-ante insights or ex-post operational learning is presented. And the findings tend to indicate that both ex-ante insights and ex-post learning are important, but their importance is temporally induced. Lastly, a brief discussion is carried out on how this research informs the entrepreneurial business model creation process (see entrepreneurial practicum) and how it adds to the current literature on business models and business model innovation.

The retail companies have a very conservative approach concerning IT expenses and innovations. Maybe for this reason, it is now the best time for changing an IT infrastructure and a complex retail solution. Most of the companies need to optimize their processes due to the financial crisis to achieve a competitive advantage. There are many differences among the retail companies - these differences may cause that an implementation of a software solution is tricky. It is important to be aware of such aspects when implementing the software solution. The main aim of this work is to design, extend and optimize a methodology of implementation of a complex retail solution. The new methodology is quite general - it might be used for an implementation of any POS solution. The goal of new methodology is to improve top line and margin. Finally, it shall bring a bigger satisfaction to the customer. I divided this work into several main chapters. First chapter is dedicated to the specifics of retail companies - how they work, which processes they use, how much they invest into the IT. The second part contains an analysis of POS solutions available on the Czech market and a brief description of the particular software solutions with their market share. The third part is dedicated to the RIM methodology designed by Microsoft Corporation. The fourth - and the main part of my work - contains an extension of the RIM methodology. In the final part I sum up the main achievements of this work and evaluate the new extended methodology. In the appendix, I compared some examples with the real figures to the new methodology.

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Titel: Kunden har alltid makt – En studie av Customer Empowerments inverkan på företag inom retailbranschen.    Nivå: Examensarbete på Grundnivå (kandidatexamen) i ämnet företagsekonomi    Författare: Jacob Cedergren och Christin Rampeltin Molin    Handledare: Anna Ljung och Akmal Hyder   Datum: 2021– januari      Syfte: Syftet med studien är att undersöka och analysera företagens uppfattning av Customer Empowerment och dess inverkan på företag inom retailbranschen.   Metod: Vi har valt att använda oss av ett induktivt tillvägagångssätt. Det empiriska materialet har inhämtats genom en kvalitativ intervjuundersökning, med semistrukturerade intervjuer. Företagsrepresentanter inom retailbranschen har utgjort studiens urval, då vi anser att deras kundkontakt och möte slutkunden är viktigt för att kunna besvara studiens frågeställningar.   Resultat & slutsats: Studien visar att respondenterna uppfattar att de idag styrs av kunden och kundens behov. Intervjupersonerna beskriver att internet har ökat kundens inflytande och makt, på grund av tillgången till en obegränsad mängd information. Respondenterna beskriver en maktförskjutning från företag till kund. Studien visar att begreppet Customer Empowerment, CE, har förändrats från en företagsinitierad strategi för att skapa kundengagemang och nöjdhet, till en okontrollerbar kundmakt, vilket innebär att kunden har övertagit flera av företagens roller. Ett koncept vi har valt att namnge omvända roller då kunderna, enligt respondenterna, styr och innehar makt över företagen medan företagen försöker anpassa sig efter kundens behov och önskemål.    Examensarbetets bidrag: Studien bidrar då den beskriver begreppet Customer Empowerment, CE, och dess inverkan på retailföretag, utifrån företagens perspektiv. Tidigare forskning av begreppet CE har framhållit dess fördelar. Denna studie beskriver att kunden idag inte bara erbjuds inflytande utan även har övertagit makt och kontroll från företagen. Denna maktförändring leder till negativa effekter, vilket beskrivs i två teoretiska figurer. Det praktiska bidraget är att studien beskriver de negativa effekterna som kundens makt kan inneha på företag, inom retailbranschen.    Förslag till fortsatt forskning: Denna studie bygger på 10 intervjupersoner, från retailbranschen, vilket gör att studiens generaliserbarhet endast speglar en del av retailbranschen samt en liten del av svenska företag. Det vore intressant att undersöka företagens syn på CE inom andra branscher, exempelvis inom B2B- branschen.    Nyckelord: Customer Empowerment, Kundmakt, Kundfokus, Kundorientering, Retail, Retailbransch / Title: The customer always has power - a study of how Customer Empowerment affects companies in the retail industry.   Level: Final assignment for Bachelor Degree in Business Administration    Author: Jacob Cedergren and Christin Rampeltin Molin   Supervisor: Anna Ljung and Akmal Hyder    Date: 2021 - January     Aim: The study aims to investigate and describe companies' perceptions of Customer Empowerment, CE, and its impact on companies in the retail industry.   Method: We have chosen to use an inductive approach. The empirical material has been obtained through a qualitative interview survey with semi-structured interviews. Company representatives in the retail industry have made up our selection, as we believe that their customer contact and meeting the end customer are essential to answer the study's questions.   Result & Conclusions: The study shows that the respondents perceive that they are governed by the customer and the customer's needs. The interviewees describe that the internet has increased the customer's influence and power due to the unlimited amount of information. The respondents describe a shift in power from the company to the customer. The study shows that CE's concept has changed from a company-initiated strategy to create customer engagement and satisfaction, to an uncontrollable customer power, which means that the customer has taken over several of the companies' roles. This concept we have chosen to name reverse roles, as the customers, according to the respondents, control and hold power over the companies while the companies try to adapt to the customer's needs and wishes.   Contribution of the thesis: The study contributes as it describes Customer Empowerment, CE, and its impact on retail companies, from the companies' perspective. Previous research on the concept of CE has highlighted its benefits. This study describes that the customer today is offered influence and has also taken over the companies' power. This change in control leads to adverse effects, which are described in two theoretical figures. The practical contribution is that the study describes the damaging effects of the customer's power on companies in the retail industry.   Suggestions for future research: This study is based on ten interviewees, from the retail industry, which means that the study's generalizability only reflects a part of the Swedish companies. It would be interesting to investigate whether this view of customer power is also valid in other industries or, for example, in the B2B industry.   Key words: Customer Empowerment, Customer Power, Customer Focus, Customer Orientation, Retail, Retail Industry

The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) designed the Internal Ratings Based (IRB) approach, which is based on a single risk factor model. This IRB approach was de-signed to determine banks’ regulatory capital for credit risk. The asymptotic single risk factor (ASRF) model they used makes use of prescribed asset correlations, which banks must use for their credit risk regulatory capital, in order to abide by the BCBS’s rules. Banks need to abide by these rules to reach an international standard of banking that promotes the health of the specific bank. To evaluate whether these correlations are as conservative as the BCBS intended, i.e. not too onerous or too lenient, empirical asset correlations embedded in gross loss data, spanning different economic milieus, were backed out of the regulatory credit risk model. A technique to extract these asset correlations from a Vasicek distribution of empirical loan losses was proposed and tested in international markets. This technique was used to extract the empirical asset correlation, and then compare the prescribed correlations for developed (US) and developing (South Africa) economies over the total time period, as well as a rolling time period. For the first analysis, the BCBS’s asset correlation was conservative when com-pared to South Africa and the US for all loan types. Comparing the empirical asset correlation over a seven-year rolling time period for South Africa and the BCBS, the specified asset cor-relation was found to be as conservative as the BCBS intended. Comparing the US empirical asset correlation for the same rolling period to that of the BCBS, it was found that for all loans, the BCBS was conservative, up until 2012. In 2012 the empirical asset correlation sur-passed that of the BCBS, and thus the BCBS was not as conservative as they had originally intended. / MCom (Risk Management), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2015

The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) designed the Internal Ratings Based (IRB) approach, which is based on a single risk factor model. This IRB approach was de-signed to determine banks’ regulatory capital for credit risk. The asymptotic single risk factor (ASRF) model they used makes use of prescribed asset correlations, which banks must use for their credit risk regulatory capital, in order to abide by the BCBS’s rules. Banks need to abide by these rules to reach an international standard of banking that promotes the health of the specific bank. To evaluate whether these correlations are as conservative as the BCBS intended, i.e. not too onerous or too lenient, empirical asset correlations embedded in gross loss data, spanning different economic milieus, were backed out of the regulatory credit risk model. A technique to extract these asset correlations from a Vasicek distribution of empirical loan losses was proposed and tested in international markets. This technique was used to extract the empirical asset correlation, and then compare the prescribed correlations for developed (US) and developing (South Africa) economies over the total time period, as well as a rolling time period. For the first analysis, the BCBS’s asset correlation was conservative when com-pared to South Africa and the US for all loan types. Comparing the empirical asset correlation over a seven-year rolling time period for South Africa and the BCBS, the specified asset cor-relation was found to be as conservative as the BCBS intended. Comparing the US empirical asset correlation for the same rolling period to that of the BCBS, it was found that for all loans, the BCBS was conservative, up until 2012. In 2012 the empirical asset correlation sur-passed that of the BCBS, and thus the BCBS was not as conservative as they had originally intended. / MCom (Risk Management), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2015

Temporary price reductions (sales) as a means of promotion have become an increasingly important tool in the marketing mix of food retailers around the world. This paper investigates the retailers' pricing strategy by explicitly accounting for the multi-product nature of retailing. We find that retailers systematically adjust the breadth and depth of sales over time and they respond aggressively to their rivals' promotional activities. Finally, the breadth and depth of sales are found to be substitutes in the set of the available strategies to increase the store traffic. (authors' abstract)