Despite a pervasive belief that the world's largest firms compete globally, the vast majority have most of their sales in their home regions. Of the top 500 firms for which regional sales data are available, 118 are from Europe, and they compete predominantly within the European region. On...

In a service environment, a stockist usually has many slow moving items whose infrequency of demand can give rise to forecasting problems. Moreover, when a demand occurs, the request is sometimes for more than a single unit, which results in so-called lumpy demand. In this paper, the standard...

In this paper, we introduce a mixed integer stochastic programming approach to mean-variance post-tax portfolio management. This approach takes into account of risk in a multistage setting and allows general withdrawals from original capital. The uncertainty on asset returns is specified as a...

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to develop an analytical model for assessing the performance of supplier relationships (SRs). The majority of performance measurement models incorporate hard quantitative measures that are not appropriate for the soft features of business relationships. As...

This paper is a product of the SPES programme on multi-country models and describes a set of diagnostic simulations on five European-based multi-country models. These are the EEC's model QUEST as operated by the Deutsches Institut fur Wirtschaftsforschung (DIW); the GEM model jointly operated by...

In the knowledge driven economy, universities have a vital role to play in our ability to compete successfully as a nation. In addition to supplying graduates with up-to-date skills, as well as the right kind of skills, they must participate in activities that transfer their knowledge to...

The UK manufacturing sector is facing massive challenges to survive in today's global and volatile marketplace. In an attempt to overcome these challenges, companies are adopting newer management systems to clarify their vision and strategy and translate them into action. The balanced scorecard...

This paper challenges the critical articles that have classified thematic initiatives as 'fads' or 'fashions' of their period with little real value. Using business process reengineering (BPR) as an example, the paper suggests that it is important to 'unpack' thematic initiatives into their key...

This paper examines relationships developed in the UK's defence branch of the aerospace supply chain. Comparisons are made between economic and formal contractual relationships. Major customers, in this paper we refer to the Ministry of Defence (MoD), have tended to developed complex and...

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to investigate the key determinants of knowledge sharing and collaboration using Web 2.0 technologies by exploring the reasons for and barriers to employees' active participation in its various platforms within a large multinational firm....