Intuitive global sourcing – a study of supplier selection decisions by apparel SMEs

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to create knowledge on the intuitive global sourcing process applied by small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) managers.Design/methodology/approachThis study reports on qualitative inquiries with experienced sourcing managers from 10 SMEs in the textile industry. The study follows a three-step semi-structured interviewing process, allowing us to gradually unveil the detailed nature of the intuitive supplier selection process.FindingsNine of the 10 SMEs rely on a highly intuitive supplier selections process, where one supplier at a time is gradually taken into the exchange while testing the supplier’s behavior. The process consists of an early heuristics sub-process, which gradually switches over to a more advanced intuiting behavioral pattern-matching process.Practical implicationsMost OM/SCM research has treated global sourcing and supplier selection as a highly rational, analytical and deliberate optimization problem. This study uncovers a completely different, and frequently successful, intuitive process, which could inspire managers in companies of all sizes, faced with high uncertainty about global supplier selection decisions.Originality/valueIntuition has recently been adopted in the global sourcing literature. However, this study is the first to offer detailed insights into a predominantly intuitive global sourcing process, specifically as it is managed by SMEs.

End-to-end sustainability: trade-offs, consumers’ perceptions and decisions beyond B2C interfaces

Purpose This study aims to examine the extended effects of corporate (ir)responsibilities in supply chains. More specifically, the authors compare the impact of social and environmental initiatives and failures in the reputational capital of supply chain partners. The authors investigate how (and if) companies’ decisions to prioritize different sustainability dimensions in their supplier selection processes (i.e. sustainability trade-offs) affect consumers’ perception of corporate image, corporate credibility-expertise, attitude towards the firm and word-of-mouth. Design/methodology/approach The authors conducted three behavioural vignette-based experiments with 562 participants from the USA, relying on analysis of variance and t-tests analyses. Findings Results show that consumers perceive social irresponsibility cases as more severe than environmental ones in suppliers’ operations, penalizing buyers’ corporate image, corporate credibility-expertise and word-of-mouth. Corporate image, attitude towards the firm and word-of-mouth also have significant differences between social and environmental trade-offs. Statistically significant differences were also found between scenarios that portrayed the discovery of an irresponsible action and ones that reinforced the previous irresponsible practice in companies’ suppliers. Practical implications When types of irresponsibility practices are presented, the discovery of child labour and modern slavery conditions in suppliers damage how consumers perceive the company on corporate image and their attitude towards the organization and how they will spread word-of-mouth, reinforcing the importance of considering sustainability issues when making supplier selection decisions. Originality/value The study contributes to the understanding of how companies are perceived by their consumers regarding irresponsible practices and their impact on firms’ supplier selection decisions. Furthermore, data suggests that consumers might hierarchize sustainability dimensions, perceiving social irresponsibility cases as more severe than environmental irresponsibility ones.

Selecting the field hospital location for earthquakes: an application for Ankara Province in Turkey

PurposeThe authors present a location selection model for the field hospital to build after a possible earthquake in Ankara, Turkey using the VIKOR method.Design/methodology/approachCompanies or governments that make location selection decisions to improve their performance in new investment decisions for different service industries. On the other hand, disasters, especially earthquakes, force the governments to evaluate their existing potentialities and develop action plans to improve their middle and long-term preparations. This paper proposes a VIKOR method-based location selection model for the field hospital to build after a possible earthquake. Also, the authors present a methodology using the VIKOR method that how government agencies take action for the field hospital's location selection process via VIKOR methodology.FindingsThe modeling and application results show that the field hospital's location selection decision-making process improves considerably using the VIKOR model. This paper shows that the proposed VIKOR-based model can rank alternatives suitability at various criteria targeting to minimize the possible earthquake's impact and obtains a single overall ranking score to select the best alternative.Research limitations/implicationsThe study does not consider the uncertain nature of the field hospital selection problem. The application part is restricted to the Ankara case. But the proposed model can easily extend for different locations in the world.Originality/valueThis paper presents the multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) framework study of the establishment of field hospitals and demonstrates its importance when criteria diversity is restricted.

Attitudes and Willingness to Accept Long-Acting Injections for Patients With Schizophrenia in Beijing: A Cross-Sectional Investigation Based on Samples From the Communities

Background: Schizophrenia has brought a serious disease burden to China. Under the background that community rehabilitation has become the mainstream treatment model, the long-acting injection (LAI) can better prevent recurrence. Some districts in Beijing have also issued policies. This article aims to find out patient's current attitudes toward LAI and provide policy suggestions.Methods: Some patients with schizophrenia in the communities are selected, while the survey format is face-to-face conversation. The content of the self-made questionnaire includes patients' willingness and reasons for accepting LAI treatment. Descriptive statistics, t-test and F-test are used to process the data from questionnaire surveys.Results: About 10% of respondents have had experience using LAI and the current utilization rate is 2.4%. Respondents' willingness to accept LAI is generally low (only 18.1% are willing). The main reason for willingness is no need to take medication every day, while the main reasons for unwillingness are high cost, fear of injection and lack of understanding.Conclusion: Beijing community patients are not very optimistic about LAI's cognition and willingness. Medication habits play an important role in their medication selection decisions. Intervention such as educate clinicians and patients about LAI and provide free injections to patients can be imposed. The promotion of LAI still has a long way to go.

Factors influencing book selection decisions by academic librarians in an Arabic Islamic context

<p>There are many factors to be taken into account when making selection decisions in an academic library including curriculum need, suitability of content, user interest, and academic input. Academic librarians in the Muslim Arabic country of the United Arab Emirates face the added challenge of making judgements about the suitability of the content in view of the community in which they work. In the absence of comprehensive collection development policies librarians are at times required to make decisions based on the sometimes conflicting demands of traditional Muslim values and their own beliefs about intellectual freedom. In this study nine academic librarians were asked to consider the suitability of twelve books and to offer criteria for their decision. A range of variables was also explored to identify possible relationships between the variables and selection decisions. The variables appearing to have an effect on decisions include the gender and nationality of the student population, and the nationality and religion of the librarian.</p>

Factors influencing book selection decisions by academic librarians in an Arabic Islamic context

<p>There are many factors to be taken into account when making selection decisions in an academic library including curriculum need, suitability of content, user interest, and academic input. Academic librarians in the Muslim Arabic country of the United Arab Emirates face the added challenge of making judgements about the suitability of the content in view of the community in which they work. In the absence of comprehensive collection development policies librarians are at times required to make decisions based on the sometimes conflicting demands of traditional Muslim values and their own beliefs about intellectual freedom. In this study nine academic librarians were asked to consider the suitability of twelve books and to offer criteria for their decision. A range of variables was also explored to identify possible relationships between the variables and selection decisions. The variables appearing to have an effect on decisions include the gender and nationality of the student population, and the nationality and religion of the librarian.</p>

Storm Clouds on the Horizon: On the Emerging Need to Tighten Selection Policies

Athlete selection is fundamental in elite sport, occurring regularly throughout an athlete's development. Research in this area reveals the accuracy of these decisions is questionable in even the most elite sport environments and athletes are increasingly disputing these decisions as unfair and punitive. As a countermeasure to these dispute and arbitration practices, many elite sport systems have created policies where coaches must outline and stand behind the criteria used for their selection decisions. Selection criteria policies have the potential to help encourage fair selection practices by holding selectors accountable to their selection criteria, but their implementation also has the potential to wrongfully nudge selectors toward developing more defendable, but less-accurate selection practices. The paper concludes with 10 suggestions to help support practitioners when implementing selection criteria.

The Association between Audit Office Team Diversity and Audit Quality

Surveys and field studies find that high-performing teams are diverse teams. Diverse teams value different perspectives and encourage the participation of team members through psychological safety, leading to higher team performance. This paper argues that team diversity is an office-level characteristic that is distinguishable from other characteristics studied in the prior auditing literature and that has an incremental effect on audit quality. I find a positive association between team diversity and audit quality that is robust to controlling for other audit office and client characteristics. Further, this positive association is stronger for more complex and non-routine audit engagements. These findings should be of interest to regulators who regulate how the auditing industry attracts and retains talent worldwide. In addition, these findings should be informative to audit committees who make auditor selection decisions and to investors and accounting researchers interested in the relation between audit team personnel and audit quality.

Multi-Layer Fuzzy Sustainable Decision Approach for Outsourcing Manufacturer Selection in Apparel and Textile Supply Chain

The apparel and textile industry are known as a key sector in the structure of many economies around the world. In particular, the influence of foreign outsourcing manufacturers on textile supply chains has been recognized for decades. The outsourcing manufacturers are multi-criteria selected and changed by supply chain managers from time to time in search of the most efficient state for the entire supply chain. This is a known concern with the community and there is large interest in studying the apparel and textile outsourcing manufacturer problems. Aiming at reinforcing the selection methods, this study develops a three-layer fuzzy multiple criteria decision-making approach that leverages the strengths from the original methods. In turn through the layers, the hierarchy and weights of criteria and sub-criteria, which includes sustainability factors, are determined by the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) method. Next, the results from the fuzzy technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (FTOPSIS) process determine the outsourcing manufacturer’s performance via expert linguistics judgments. Then, data envelopment analysis (DEA) models are applied for the purpose of evaluating the outsourcing manufacturer’s overall performance along with other quantitative effectiveness. This approach is applied to the problem of selecting the apparel and textile outsourcing manufacturers in Vietnam, one of the places that makes the necessity of this problem grow. The third position in the world apparel and textile export ranking, as well as the trend of shifting labor-intensive production systems to Southeast Asia make the necessity of Vietnam outsourcing manufacturer selection problem grow. The results of this study also classified manufacturers into groups as a support for selection decisions. Analysis of quantitative uncertainties using simulation tools and forecasting techniques can strengthen the solutions in future related studies.

REGIONAL AIRCRAFT SELECTION WITH FUZZY PIPRECIA AND FUZZY MARCOS: A CASE STUDY OF THE TURKISH AIRLINE INDUSTRY

Aircraft selection is an important issue in achieving long-term goals in the airline industry. For this issue in which multiple conflicting criteria are involved, the extant literature points to the use of multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods. In this respect, this study aims to propose a systematic and comprehensive framework with a focus on the regional aircraft selection perspective. To achieve this, an integrated fuzzy Pivot Pairwise Relative Criteria Importance Assessment (F-PIPRECIA) and fuzzy Measurement Alternatives and Ranking according to the Compromise Solution (F-MARCOS) approach was employed. In this study, in which six regional aircraft alternatives were evaluated according to 14 criteria, data were collected from five decision experts. As a result, it was found that the most pivotal criterion is C33 (Operational Cost), and the least important criterion is C12 (NOx). In addition, CRJ1000 was identified as the most promising regional aircraft alternative. The results of the application were further validated by applying a three-stage sensitivity analysis. The proposed structure is anticipated to assist airline managers in aircraft selection decisions under uncertainty by offering a robust and systematic tool.