Executives’ professional ties along the supply chain: The impact on partnership sustainability and firm risk

This paper investigates the effect of management-level professional ties between suppliers and customers on the sustainability of business partnerships. We find that the presence of cross-firm professional ties between directors and senior executives along the supply chain significantly reduces the probability of relationship termination around customers’ industry negative shocks and during financial crises. The results are robust using professional-tie strength as an alternative measure. Exploring contingency effects, we find that, for suppliers who lack R&D, face high competition, are smaller in size, or are less important to customers in terms of sales, such professional ties are more helpful in sustaining such relationships. Furthermore, we find that professional ties also significantly reduce firm risk during periods of market turbulence. Taken together, our results suggest that professional ties along the supply chain can facilitate information flow and build mutual trust, which can lead to healthy long-term relationships and can help firms survive economic and industry downturns.     

金融科技助推供应链金融风险控制研究

传统信贷业务中,商业银行通常将风险评估重点放在企业的评级和财务状况上。在供应链金融业务中,授信因交易而存在,资金流、信息流、物流是评判业务可行性的基础。供应链金融最大的风险点在于不完整信息下的信用风险和不对称信息下的道德风险。防范化解供应链金融风险,除了运用常规风险管理手段,更要积极引用大数据、物联网、区块链、人工智能等金融科技手段来提升供应链金融的风险管理能力。本文通过分析供应链金融面临的风险,以基于B2B平台的供应链金融模式为例,运用Logistic回归方法构建中小企业信用评估模型,对供应链金融风控体系建设进行实证研究,并围绕金融科技提升商业银行供应链金融风控能力提出建议。     

Enterprise knowledge graphs with applications to continuous monitoring systems

Continuous monitoring systems generate continuous business intelligence by gathering text from a range of sources and typically storing that text information using snippets of text. Further, continuous monitoring systems derive information from those snippets, such as sentiment and new concepts emerging in the text, beyond the existing ontology and dictionaries. However, it is difficult for users to gather much additional information from large quantities of text snippets. As a result, this paper investigates introducing the notion of “knowledge graphs” into such systems and analyzes some of the potential applications and capabilities in business intelligence settings. As part of that analysis, this paper extends current-generation continuous monitoring systems to include knowledge graphs.     

Match your sales force structure to your business life cycle

Although companies devote considerable time and money to managing their sales forces, few focus much thought on how the structure of the sales force needs to change over the life cycle of a product or a business. However, the organization and goals of a sales operation have to evolve as businesses start up, grow, mature, and decline if a company wants to keep winning the race for customers. Specifically, firms must consider and alter four factors over time: the differing roles that internal salespeople and external selling partners should play, the size of the sales force, its degree of specialization, and how salespeople apportion their efforts among different customers, products, and activities. These variables are critical because they determine how quickly sales forces respond to market opportunities, they influence sales reps' performance, and they affect companies' revenues, costs, and profitability. In this article, the authors use timeseries data and cases to explain how, at each stage, firms can best tackle the relevant issues and get the most out of their sales forces. During start-up, smart companies focus on how big their sales staff should be and on whether they can depend upon selling partners. In the growth phase, they concentrate on getting the sales force's degree of specialization and size right. When businesses hit maturity, companies should better allocate existing resources and hire more general-purpose salespeople. Finally, as organizations go into decline, wise sales leaders reduce sales force size and use partners to keep the business afloat for as long as possible.     

Intelligence‐led policing at the Amsterdam‐Amstelland Police Department: operationalized business intelligence with an enterprise ambition

This article elaborates on the setup for intelligence‐led policing in support of ensuring public safety as it presented itself in the Spring of 2007 at the Amsterdam‐Amstelland Police Department in the Netherlands. The picture that is painted is the outcome of a qualitative research effort involving semi‐structured interviews triangulated with other internal data sources. The main goal of the article is to establish how an organization can leverage its operationalized business intelligence ambition by connecting it into an ambition for better enterprise management. The case ends in showcasing two popular operational business intelligence tools instrumental to capacity management. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Does emotional intelligence matter to academic work performance? Evidence from business faculties in Australia

Using data collected through survey questionnaire across 15 universities, we examine the effect of emotional intelligence on academic work performance (in research, teaching and service) in Australian business faculties. We find academics’ ability to use emotion enhances performance across research, teaching and service, while ability to regulate emotion enhances performance for teaching and service only. We also find support for a process‐based model of emotional intelligence in which appraisal of emotion is a necessary antecedent to emotion’s use and regulation. The results have implications for management in appointment decisions and professional development programmes in business/accounting faculties.     

Die Nutzung des Internet durch österreichische Versicherungsunternehmen

This paper compares the internet activities of Austrian insurers within a survey of all members of the Austrian Insurance Association. The analysis is structured according to potential interests of new customers, existing customers, the external sales force, financial intermediaries, investors, the general public, job searchers, and suppliers of inputs. Austrian insurers use the internet primarily for a general presentation of their company and products as well as for linking interested customers to their conventional sales force. Few insurers integrate their relation to suppliers, job searchers, investors, or their external sales force into their homepage. A full business transaction including binding quotes and full contracting through the internet is only provided by few insurers for selected products. Consequently, few cross border internet activities can be found.     

Open Information Enterprise Transactions: Business Intelligence and Wash and Spoof Transactions in Blockchain and Social Commerce

This paper investigates what are referred to as ‘open information transactions’. Such transactions are in contrast to traditional transactions, where typically two parties to a transaction are the only ones with information about the transaction. For example, in a sale, the seller and the purchaser typically are the only ones with information about the transaction. However, some emerging technologies, such as blockchain accounting, supply chain social media, and hashtag commerce are making information about the transactions potentially openly available to others. This paper investigates some of the implications and strategies that include the use of that open information. For example, open information in accounting and supply chain transactions provides the potential for both business intelligence analysis of the information and possibly misleading and illusory transactions, analogous to those that have garnered the recent attention of the Justice Department in cryptocurrencies. Finally, this paper suggests that blockchain transaction processing will provide reliable information in those settings where there is a “single truth” feed of information flow for the phenomena of interest, no ability to do off‐blockchain transactions (or a large penalty cost) and limitation to a single identity for each enterprise on the blockchain.     

广州本田:四位一体 服务第一

<正> 广州本田有限公司是一家中日合资企业,1998年7月1日正式挂牌成立。它由广州汽车集团公司和日本本田技研工业株式会社投资经营,注册资本为11.6亿元人民币,双方各占50％股份。 广州本田汽车有限公司生产的产品是本田美国版2升级“雅阁”系列     

Suppliers’/customers’ production efficiency uncertainty and firm credit risk

This study explores the effects of business counterparties’ (i.e. suppliers’/customers’) production efficiency uncertainty (PEU) on corporate credit risk by employing American bond observations of manufacturing firms. Empirical results of this study show that customers’ PEU is positively related to corporate bond yield spreads whereas suppliers’ has an opposite effect. The former result shows the importance of demand uncertainty while the latter one suggests that the benefits of supply chain integration or information sharing exceed the costs of supply chain uncertainty. We also find that the effects of suppliers’/customers’ PEUs on bond yield spreads are significantly affected by the information flow risk within the supply chain. In addition, the customer-side effect becomes weaker during the financial crisis period, whereas the supplier-side one is insignificantly affected. These empirical results are robust when controlling for potential endogeneity problems and employing an alternative sample which consists of the bond observations with both supplier and customer identification information. Finally, it has to be noticed that our conclusions are only applicable to manufacturing industries.