Purpose – The purpose of this article is to evaluate the diffusion of and user response to an information technology support system (ITSS) which was designed to facilitate inter-organisational coordination and collaboration in the professional development of officers employed by local...

Action learning is intended to enable a group of professionals (a SET) to tackle work problems, develop solutions and reflect upon the success and failure of their actions. As part of the UK construction industry's drive to improve learning and performance, four SETs of small and medium-sized...

Innovation-led performance improvement in the construction industry is significantly influenced by the innovation performance of small firms. There is a dearth of research investigating innovation from the perspective of the small construction firm. This paper contributes to this underdeveloped...

Small construction knowledge-intensive professional service firms (SCKIPSFs) are becoming increasingly important agents of innovation within the construction industry. The nature and process of innovation in SCKIPSFs, however, is generally considered through the constraining prism of research...

Purpose – Many supply contracts are employed in practice to improve the performance of supply chains. But there is a lack of research that can offer guidance to practitioners in choosing the best supply contract among a group of popular contracts. This paper aims to fill this gap by developing...

A new forecast-based dynamic inventory control approach is discussed in this paper. In this approach, forecasts and forecast uncertainties are assumed to be exogenous data known in advance at each period over a fixed horizon. The control parameters are derived by using a sequential procedure....

Spare parts have become ubiquitous in modern societies, and managing their requirements is an important and challenging task with tremendous cost implications for the organisations that are holding relevant inventories. Demand for spare parts arises whenever a component fails or requires...

The ARIMA(0,1,1) demand model has been analysed extensively by researchers and used widely by forecasting practitioners due to its attractive theoretical properties and empirical evidence in its support. However, no empirical investigations have been conducted in the academic literature to...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to report how a small, family-owned children's play centre can achieve competitive advantage by developing a differentiated service. The aim is to show how this differentiation strategy is operationalized in a small family business using safety critical...

This paper considers the application of capital replacement models at Mass Transit Railway Corporation Limited (MTRCL), Hong Kong. A particular characteristic of the replacement problems considered is that costs relating to existing equipment are generally constant or increasing only slowly....