To improve the quality of services delivered to customers, hotels can benefit from the experiences of manufacturing firms and employ quality and process improvement philosophies/tools with proven track records in the manufacturing industries. This article presents a framework which integrates the tools of Root Cause Analysis (RCA), Benchmarking (BM), Reengineering (RE) and Continuous Improvement (CI) within the context of a Rapid Assessment Methodology (RAM). Application of the framework is illustrated and the potential benefits a hotel can derive from the implementation of the framework are discussed.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the role of loyalty in consumers’ selection of brand extensions in the presence of familiar competitors. The findings show that fit may not have a linear relationship with the choice of an extension when loyalty and brand familiarity are considered. Loyal consumers’ likelihood to choose high-fit and moderate-fit extensions is not much lower than their likelihood to choose products from familiar competitors. We also find an inverted-U-shaped relationship between choice behavior and degree of perceived fit for loyal and moderately loyal consumers. Moreover, brand concepts can make a brand more elastic and extendable, increasing loyal and moderately loyal consumers’ likelihood to choose moderate- and even low-fit extensions. However, disloyal consumers are highly unlikely to choose extensions over products from familiar competitors regardless of fit and types of similarity. Finally, the effect of similarity on consumers’ choice of extensions is fully mediated by loyalty and perceived risks.

Purpose: With the growing importance of performance measurement and management, this exploratory study intends to examine the practices of maintenance managers with regards to maintenance measures, as used in their organizations. In this process, the study attempts to uncover the relevant maintenance performance dimensions from the perspectives of the surveyed managers. In addition, the mediating effect of information availability on the main performance measures utilization is studied. Design/methodology/approach: The research at hand is survey-based. It utilizes the responses of a sample of ninety-five (95) experienced maintenance managers to identify the most relevant maintenance performance measures. Factor analysis is then utilized to uncover the important dimensions of performance, as seen by the respondents. Additionally, using the Partial Least Squares method, several models were studied. Findings: The findings of this exploratory research appear to suggest that maintenance managers are beginning to broaden their perspective with regard to performance management. While machine and plant-related performance measures are still emphasized, maintenance managers are slowly moving toward a wider organizational orientation. While the manufacturing organizations are becoming more and more customer-oriented open systems, the maintenance function of these organizations is still, for the most part, operating under the semi-open system orientation. Overall, it appears that an emerging maintenance strategy is slowly taking shape. Research limitations/implications: For the most part, performance measures and measurement related to maintenance have not received enough attention from researchers. Therefore, the literature dealing with the different facets of performance in maintenance has not been forthcoming. The study attempts to fill this apparent gap in the literature. This is important, as maintenance managers are being asked to contribute to the achievement of the competitive strategies of their organizations. Therefore, they must quickly learn how to view maintenance from a coherent strategic organizational perspective. Such a perspective should help in integrating the maintenance, resources, capabilities, and technical know-how in order to serve the strategic goal of their organization. The research at hand is limited to a sample from Portugal. Therefore, the results and conclusions must be interpreted accordingly. Practical implications: As maintenance managers struggle to move from a machine-orientation to a more organizational-wide strategic orientation, they are often left with many questions and few answers. This study attempts to bring this problem to the spotlight so that it can receive more systematic empirical and practical research. In this context, the role of maintenance managers in the process of organizational strategy formulation should be examined. Originality/value: The study presented in this article has practical, as well as theoretical contributions. It deals with an area of performance measurement, which so far has been relatively ignored. It uses a system orientation (closed vs open), in addition to the strategic orientation (single vs multi-faceted strategy) in order to shed some light on the need to have consistency between the nature of the system and its strategic objective.

The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of the current relationship building Supply Chain Management (SCM) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) practices which could build business partners’ loyalty in the SCM context. A proposed model was developed with variables including mutual benefits/fairness, trust, retention, loyalty, and switching cost. Previous research examined the partial relationships in the proposed model, and no research has included the switching cost with all the variables in the proposed model. The quantitative methodology involving a survey method was employed for this exploratory study. The hypothesised relationships were partially supported depending on the type of SCM. The most significant variable having an effect on the switching cost was also different depending on the type of SCM. The SCM practice applied from Human CRM (i.e. emotional connections) in a business-to-business environment was the least effective SCM for loyalty but had a significant impact on switching cost.

The recent machine learning and analytics advances in customer relationship management (CRM) technologies place new demands on marketing education and practitioners to develop the skills needed to use the technology. Compounding the issue, research on the use of technology in sales curriculum is underdeveloped. In a comprehensive review of the sales education literature, one study identified that only six articles on sales technology were published in major marketing education journals from 1979 to 2013. In an effort to bridge the gap between critical industry competencies and marketing curriculum, understanding the impact of technology use and training is important for educational planning and student development. Using a survey of 82 salespeople in the United States, the current study empirically evaluates how use of technologically advanced CRM features influences self-perception of CRM knowledge, the perception that additional technology training would be beneficial, and adaptive selling performance of sales practitioners. A majority of survey respondents in the current study cited a need for college students to receive increased exposure to advanced CRM technology training and skill development. We propose an experiential learning approach to teach marketing college students advanced CRM features to help them bolster their effectiveness and value in the workplace.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to assess the management of public-sector projects in Portugal paying particular attention to the extent to which total quality management (TQM) principles are being utilized in such projects. Design/methodology/approach: Based on an extensive review of the literature, nine propositions are advanced about the interrelationships among seven factors that were identified, in a previous study, as having some influence on the management process in the planning and implementation of public-sector projects in Portugal. Structural equation modeling was used to investigate these propositions using data obtained from 211 respondents to a survey of project managers from municipalities across Portugal. Findings: The results of the structural equation model indicate that the TQM components working in tandem with project-management-specific variables provide a systematic means of managing the planning and implementation stages of projects, with technical items being critical in the planning stage and softer management items becoming important in the implementation stage. Research limitations/implications: Readers should be careful not to generalize the findings in a global context or for private sector projects. However, researchers are encouraged to extend this study by including other planning and implementation variables with a view to discerning what particular characteristics of a project make it more amenable to TQM solutions. Practical implications: The findings are presented to show how the key components of TQM, customer focus, employee involvement and continuous involvement, can be applied during the planning and implementation stages of projects. Originality/value: The sample size of 211 is representative of the underlying population of project managers in municipalities across Portugal and is comparatively large in relation to other empirical project management studies from Portugal, lending credence to the generalizability of these finding to public-sector projects in Portugal.

© 2018 Elsevier Inc. It is important to understand the relative importance of business ethics and social responsibility in determining brand attitudes. However, there has been a failure in prior research to differentiate between attitudes toward business ethics and CSR. This research reviews customer-brand research related to business ethics and social responsibility and conducts a study to evaluate customer attitudes. Four scenarios offer variations in company behaviors related to positive and negative conduct of customer social responsibility and business ethics. Study findings from a panel of 351 respondents provide new insights related to a customer's expectations and perceptions of company CSR and business ethics behavior. We conclude that although CSR attitudes remain important, customers value business ethics as a critical behavior in their perceptions of brand attitudes.

Despite the abundance of research dealing with the impact of supply chain management on today's organisations, such research tended to emphasise discreet relationships. A cross-sectional sample of Portuguese organisations is used to test several hypotheses pertaining to organisational resources, competencies, different levels of supply chain integration and organisational performance. Based on the findings, the impact of information technology infrastructure flexibility exhibited mixed results on the constructs studied. Executive information technology competencies tended to positively influence the different types of supply chain integration. Internal integration was found to have a direct influence on organisational performance. Such internal integration is being encouraged by external entities including customers and suppliers. In this context, more integration might lead to more effective organisational performance. Therefore, it is concluded that organisations should integrate their resources, processes and in the process encourage effective utilisation of information.

Wind power becomes one of the most promising energy sources in the electricity generation sector in Texas over the past decade by declining levelized cost of wind energy. However, recent studies show that the wind farms in Texas are relatively less productive. Hence, this study aims to find out reasons of inefficiencies by constructing a two-stage performance assessment of wind farms in Texas. In the first stage of analysis, comprehensive input- and output-oriented Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) models are applied to evaluate productive efficiencies of the 95 large utility-scale wind farms by using pre-determined three input and two output variables. The sensitivity analysis is provided for the robustness of the DEA models with different combinations of input and output variables of the original model. The slack analysis and projection data are obtained for inefficient wind farms to find out optimal input-output variables. Tobit regression models are conducted for the second stage of the analysis to investigate the reasons of inefficiencies. DEA results indicate that half of the wind farms were operated efficiently in Texas during 2016. 13 wind farms were performed at the most productive scale size, ten wind farms should reduce their operational size to improve production efficiency, and 72 wind farms have the notable potential to increase their production efficiency by expanding operational sizes with modern wind turbine technologies. The sensitivity analysis shows the importance of each input-output variables. Tobit regression models indicate that elevation of the site, rotor diameter, hub height, and brand of the turbine have significant contributions to the relative efficiency scores of the wind farms, and the age of turbine has a negative impact on the productive efficiency of the wind farms.

The classical economic lot-scheduling problem (ELSP) involves the batch sizing and scheduling of multiple products in a single facility under deterministic conditions over an infinite planning horizon. It is assumed that the products are delivered to customers at continuous rates. In today's supply chains, however, often employing complex delivery networks, the finished goods are usually transported in discrete lots to succeeding stages along the distribution process, in order to take advantage of economies of scale in transportation. In this paper, we formulate mathematical models that attempt to integrate the production lot scheduling problem with outbound shipment decisions. The optimization objective is to minimize the total relevant costs of a manufacturer, which distributes a set of products to multiple retailers. In making the production/distribution decisions, the common cycle approach is employed to solve the ELSP, for simplicity. Two different shipping scenarios, i.e. periodic full truckload (TL) peddling shipments and less than truckload (LTL) direct shipping, are integrated with and linked to the multiproduct batching decisions. We consider these two shipment policies for both coordinated and uncoordinated scenarios. The resulting mixed-integer, non-linear programming models (MINLPs) are solved by the BONMIN solver. Finally, a set of numerical examples illustrate and evaluate the relative efficacies of these policies.