Purpose
– The concept of supply chain agility (SCA) has been identified as one of the most important issues in supply chain management literature. However, despite the popularity of the concept, many ...attributes of SCA are largely unexplored. One area that is deficient in research is the antecedents of SCA. This paper aims to seek further theory development by addressing these gaps in the SCA literature.
Design/methodology/approach
– Data for this study were obtained from a field survey. A mail questionnaire was constructed that contained items measuring the constructs of interest. The theoretical model was evaluated using structural equation modeling.
Findings
– The findings indicate that logistics capabilities positively impact SCA. The results provide empirical evidence for logistics’ unique and critical role in helping firms respond in a timely and effective manner to market volatility and other uncertainties.
Research limitations/implications
– As is the case with most supply chain survey research, the constructs of interest were evaluated based on the perception of a single party involved in a specific relationship. Future research using multiple dyads or triads within various supply chains could address this limitation.
Practical implications
– If limited resources are available for investment (as is often the case), a more balanced distribution of resources toward the development of multiple logistics capabilities (e.g. demand-management interface, information-management interface) is preferred to pooling all the resources toward the development of a single capability (e.g. information-management interface).
Originality/value
– Considering logistics’ boundary-spanning nature, prior research suggest that logistics capabilities perform a key role in achieving SCA. However, the relationship between firm-specific logistics capabilities and SCA has not been empirically tested. This paper address that gap in the research.
Customer engagement has emerged as a noteworthy marketing concept, as several studies have linked it to desirable performance outcomes. However, extant customer engagement research offers few ...insights into gender's direct impact across different customer engagement activities. To offer a detailed perspective of these effects, we examine these gender-related differences across four aspects of customer engagement: customer purchases, customer referrals, customer influence, and customer knowledge. To increase the explanatory power of our model and better parse out effect differences across women and men, we also explore the mediating role of perceived brand fairness and the moderating role of brand identification. The findings of our survey research (n = 250) show that females, relative to males, display higher levels of customer purchases, customer influence, and customer knowledge, but not customer referrals. Also, the results reveal that perceived brand fairness mediates the impact of gender on customer engagement. Further, brand identification negatively moderates the link between gender and perceived brand fairness. The results of this study carry noteworthy theoretical implications for customer engagement literature, social identity theory, and social role theory, as well as relevant managerial implications.
Random key graphs form a class of random intersection graphs that are naturally induced by the random key predistribution scheme of Eschenauer and Gligor for securing wireless sensor network (WSN) ...communications. Random key graphs have received much attention recently, owing in part to their wide applicability in various domains, including recommender systems, social networks, secure sensor networks, clustering and classification analysis, and cryptanalysis to name a few. In this paper, we study connectivity properties of random key graphs in the presence of unreliable links. Unreliability of graph links is captured by independent Bernoulli random variables, rendering them to be on or off independently from each other. The resulting model is an intersection of a random key graph and an Erdos-Renyi graph, and is expected to be useful in capturing various real-world networks; e.g., with secure WSN applications in mind, link unreliability can be attributed to harsh environmental conditions severely impairing transmissions. We present conditions on how to scale this model's parameters so that: 1) the minimum node degree in the graph is at least k and 2) the graph is k-connected, both with high probability as the number of nodes becomes large. The results are given in the form of zero-one laws with critical thresholds identified and shown to coincide for both graph properties. These findings improve the previous results by Rybarczyk on k-connectivity of random key graphs (with reliable links), as well as the zero-one laws by Yagan on one-connectivity of random key graphs with unreliable links.
Biomedicine represents one of the main study areas for dendrimers, which have proven to be valuable both in diagnostics and therapy, due to their capacity for improving solubility, absorption, ...bioavailability and targeted distribution. Molecular cytotoxicity constitutes a limiting characteristic, especially for cationic and higher-generation dendrimers. Antineoplastic research of dendrimers has been widely developed, and several types of poly(amidoamine) and poly(propylene imine) dendrimer complexes with doxorubicin, paclitaxel, imatinib, sunitinib, cisplatin, melphalan and methotrexate have shown an improvement in comparison with the drug molecule alone. The anti-inflammatory therapy focused on dendrimer complexes of ibuprofen, indomethacin, piroxicam, ketoprofen and diflunisal. In the context of the development of antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains, dendrimer complexes of fluoroquinolones, macrolides, beta-lactamines and aminoglycosides have shown promising effects. Regarding antiviral therapy, studies have been performed to develop dendrimer conjugates with tenofovir, maraviroc, zidovudine, oseltamivir and acyclovir, among others. Furthermore, cardiovascular therapy has strongly addressed dendrimers. Employed in imaging diagnostics, dendrimers reduce the dosage required to obtain images, thus improving the efficiency of radioisotopes. Dendrimers are macromolecular structures with multiple advantages that can suffer modifications depending on the chemical nature of the drug that has to be transported. The results obtained so far encourage the pursuit of new studies.
Over the past two decades, considerable research has focused on enhancing supply chains' capacity to cope with disruptions. Consequently, the concept of supply chain resilience (SCRE) has emerged, ...with the prevailing view that building resilience into the supply chain effectively manages disruptive events. However, given the concept's nascent state, little is understood about the processes through which a supply chain becomes resilient. This study employs fuzzy qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to explore the configurations of managerial and organizational capabilities that contribute to improving the resilience of supply chains against both high- and low-impact disruptions. It identifies four key “recipes” that combine different resilience antecedents to enhance supply chain resilience. The findings illustrate how various combinations of organizational and managerial antecedents of SCRE, as suggested by the dynamic capabilities theory and its extension, the dynamic managerial capabilities theory, operate to build supply chain resilience. Additionally, the study demonstrates that principles of complexity theory—namely, asymmetric relationships, equifinality, and causal complexity—are integral to developing SCRE.
The effective use of non-reimbursable European funds is an objective not only at European level, but also at national one, although it requires a significant allocation of financial and human ...resources in order to be met. European procedures and regulations involve the respect for several rules and steps, but the question that arises in this respect is whether the current procedures and regulations could not be simplified and whether the administrative costs generated by the management of European structural and investment funds could not be reduced.
The low-loss interconnection of multicore fiber with other fibers or photonic integrated circuits poses significant challenges in photonic packaging. Femtosecond laser processing has been harnessed ...here to combine three-dimensional writing of low-loss optical waveguides with laser-guided etching of self-aligning fiber sockets. The silica platform facilitated efficient packaging of multicore and single-core fibers into the underlying photonic circuitry, providing submicron registration of the waveguide cores. The direct writing approach offers facile connectivity of specialty fiber types with high-bandwidth optical links, high channel-density integrated chips, and micro-scale sensors.
Agility has been identified as one of the most salient issues of contemporary supply chain management (Lee, 2004). Despite its importance, there has been limited theory development in supply chain ...agility at the firm level. The antecedents of firm supply chain agility are understood even less as they have been primarily addressed at an operational level. Gligor and Holcomb (2012b) emphasized that more research is needed to identify the firm supply chain agility strategic level antecedents. Gligor et al. (2015) specifically called for future research to investigate the role of market orientation and supply chain orientation in achieving supply chain agility. We address this call and expand on the work of Braunscheidel and Suresh (2009) who explored the role of different managerial orientations in achieving supply chain agility. The current research hypothesizes that market orientation has a direct impact on firm supply chain agility. Further, it is not enough to be market oriented to achieve a high level of supply chain agility; rather, a supply chain orientation also needs to be developed. In order to increase the explanatory power of our model we account for the impact of environmental uncertainty (Dess and Beard, 1984). Important theoretical and managerial implications are put forth as well.
The aim of this study was to determine the variability of several chemical compounds and the antioxidant and antimicrobial activities of eight types of berries harvested from two different ...geographical regions in the same year. The analyses were performed on bilberry, black currant, gooseberry, red currant, raspberry, sea buckthorn, strawberry and sour cherry, which were handpicked during the summer of 2019, in the same periods when they are typically harvested for consumer purposes. Total anthocyanins content (TAC), total flavonoids content (TFC), total polyphenolic compounds (TPC), determination of the Ferric-Reducing Antioxidant Power (FRAP), determination of the DPPH free radical scavenging assay (RSA), determination of nine phenolic compounds by HPLC-UV assay and antimicrobial activity were determined for undiluted hydroalcoholic extracts of all the studied berries. The results showed that the berries from Romania were richer in antioxidant compounds than the berries from Russia. The TPC content varied between 4.13–22.2 mg GAE/g d.w., TFC between 3.33–8.87 mg QE/g d.w. and TAC between 0.13–3.94 mg/g d.w. The highest variability was determined for TPC. Regarding the antioxidant activity assessed by FRAP assay, values were between 6.02–57.23 µmols TE/g d.w. and values for the RSA method between 18.44–83.81%. From the eight types of berries analyzed, bilberries and raspberries had the highest antioxidant activity considering both regions and both determination methods. Not only the type, but also the environmental and cultivation conditions in which the berries grow, can lead to variations in their chemical composition. The extracted polyphenolic compounds from the studied berries showed antibacterial properties on pathogens, such as Escherichia coli, Bacillus subtilis and Staphyloccocus aureus. The inhibitory action on Salmonella typhi and fungi Candida albicans and Aspegillus niger was absent to very low. The antimicrobial activity of the hydroalcoholic extracts was dependent on the provenance of the berries, too.
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