Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyze the business strategy of an energy company, identify the shortcomings in its existing strategy and provide recommendations to streamline a strategic direction. Design/methodology/approach The paper applies strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and...

Purpose The purpose of this study is that service sectors sectors create queues intentionally as a promotional strategy. Potential buyers might become actual customers after witnessing and joining queues. However, the effectiveness of company promotional activities involving queues remains...

With almost a decade of experience, HelpMate is a material transport service robot that works in hospitals, side‐by‐side with human co‐workers, delivering equipment and supplies to and from nursing units. Much has been written about the technology that allows HelpMate to navigate...

Rapid technological change and an emerging global marketplace underscore the need for firms to innovate in order to succeed. The 1997 Survey of Innovation was the first to look at innovation in selected knowledge-based and information-intensive services industries. This article presents...

Leasing, rather than buying, is ingreasingly becoming an attractive option for both consumers and businesses. This article looks at the industries that rent or lease: automobiles and trucks; and machinery and equipment. In some instances, the focus turns to the sub-industries comprising these...

Purpose – The paper aims to present an approach to improve the organisation's productivity which is applicable in every industrial sector. The nucleus of the approach is to develop an optimal productivity strategy in an organization by the application of a uniform static model of productivity...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the use of Design of Experiments (DoE) in a higher education setting and to remove the misconception that it is only applied to a manufacturing environment. The authors demonstrate a simple case study here to illustrate its application in a...

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to investigate to what extent buying companies use quality management (QM) practices for their externally sourced business services (BS) and if differences between manufacturing and service as well as between large and small companies exist regarding their...

The debate about whether any difference exists between manufacturing and service operations is discussed. There is no difference per se between the two types of operation and that debate about differences between them is spurious. There are significant differences between operating systems which...