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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

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     

Take command of your growth

Ask senior managers to pare costs by 10%, and they know just what to do. Ask them to boost growth by 10%, and they're stymied, assuming that growth is not really something they can influence. But managers can control their company's growth if they have better information about where their revenues are coming from. Rather than sort sales by geographic market, business unit, or product line, they should break them out in a way that reveals which part of their strategy is responsible for what part of their revenue. This article presents a tool--the sources of revenue statement (SRS)--that does just that. Through straightforward calculations using data taken from a company's balance sheet, along with estimations of customer-churn and industry growth rates, the SRS enables managers to classify their revenue according to five sources of growth: continuing sales to established customers (base retention); sales won from the competition (share gain); sales that fell into their laps because the market was expanding (market position); sales from moves into adjacent markets; and sales from entirely new lines of business. Once sorted in this way, revenue can be viewed as the outgrowth of manageable circumstances. At one company, seemingly healthy 10% total revenue growth masked substantial customer defections counter-balanced only by sales in a fast-expanding market--a market that actually grew faster than the company did. Rather than doing well, the company was ceding customers and market share to competitors. Comparing the sources of revenue across divisions can uncover similarly profound insights, which can suggest smart ways to change strategy or set stretch goals. Hundreds of companies are perched atop enormous potential that they can't see and so don't exploit. The SRS can endow them with sight and, more important, with understanding.     

商业信用与合作型客户关系的构建——基于提供给大客户应收账款的经验证据

利用我国上市公司前5名应收账款欠款人信息以及前5名大客户信息的披露数据,本文较为直接地考察了企业是否以及如何利用应收账款的产品质量担保功能与大客户构建合作型客户关系。研究结果表明,客户集中度越高,企业提供给大客户的信用政策越宽松,即应收账款金额越多,信用期限越长;进一步研究发现,在与主要客户地理位置相似度较低的企业、处于竞争性行业的企业以及营商环境较好的地区,上述两者之间的正相关关系有所增强。最后,本文发现,在与大客户构建合作型客户关系时,企业向这些大客户提供的应收账款越多,企业的业绩越好。     

Where value lives in a networked world

While many management thinkers proclaim an era of radical uncertainty, authors Sawhney and Parikh assert that the seemingly endless upheavals of the digital age are more predictable than that: today's changes have a common root, and that root lies in the nature of intelligence in networks. Understanding the patterns of intelligence migration can help companies decipher and plan for the inevitable disruptions in today's business environment. Two patterns in network intelligence are reshaping industries and organizations. First, intelligence is decoupling--that is, modern high-speed networks are pushing back-end intelligence and front-end intelligence toward opposite ends of the network, making the ends the two major sources of potential profits. Second, intelligence is becoming more fluid and modular. Small units of intelligence now float freely like molecules in the ether, coalescing into temporary bundles whenever and wherever necessary to solve problems. The authors present four strategies that companies can use to profit from these patterns: arbitrage allows companies to move intelligence to new regions or countries where the cost of maintaining intelligence is lower; aggregation combines formerly isolated pieces of infrastructure intelligence into a large pool of shared infrastructure provided over a network; rewiring allows companies to connect islands of intelligence by creating common information backbones; and reassembly allows businesses to reorganize pieces of intelligence into coherent, personalized packages for customers. By being aware of patterns in network intelligence and by acting rather than reacting, companies can turn chaos into opportunity, say the authors.     

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE (BI) SUCCESS AND THE ROLE OF BI CAPABILITIES

Business intelligence (BI) has become the top priority for many organizations who have implemented BI solutions to improve their decision‐making process. Yet, not all BI initiatives have fulfilled the expectations. We suggest that one of the reasons for failure is the lack of an understanding of the critical factors that define the success of BI applications, and that BI capabilities are among those critical factors. We present findings from a survey of 116 BI professionals that provides a snapshot of user satisfaction with various BI capabilities and the relationship between these capabilities and user satisfaction with BI. Our findings suggest that users are generally satisfied with BI overall and with BI capabilities. However, the BI capabilities with which they are most satisfied are not necessarily the ones that are the most strongly related to BI success. Of the five capabilities that were the most highly correlated with overall satisfaction with BI, only one was specifically related to data. Another interesting finding implies that, although users are not highly satisfied with the level of interaction of BI with other systems, this capability is highly correlated with BI success. Implications of these findings for the successful use and management of BI are discussed. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

THE USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN THE SUPPLY CHAIN: SURVEY AND EXTENSIONS

This paper investigates the capabilities of social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, Digg and others, for their current and potential impact on the supply chain. In particular, this paper examines the use of social media to capture the impact on supply‐chain events and develop a context for those events. This paper also analyses the use of social media in the supply chain to build relationships among supply‐chain participants. Further, this paper investigates the of use of user‐supplied tags as a basis of evaluating and extending an ontology for supply chains. In addition, using knowledge discovery from social media, a number of concepts related to the supply chain are examined, including supply‐chain reputation and influence within the supply chain. Prediction markets are analysed for their potential use in supply chains. Finally, this paper investigates the integration of traditional knowledge management along with knowledge generated from social media. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A darker side to decentralized banks: Market power and credit rationing in SME lending

We use loan-level data to study how the organizational structure of banks impacts small business lending. We find that decentralized banks—where branch managers have greater autonomy over lending decisions—give larger loans to small firms and those with “soft information.” However, decentralized banks are also more responsive to their own competitive environment. They are more likely to expand credit when faced with competition but also cherry pick customers and restrict credit when they have market power. This “darker side” to decentralized banks in concentrated markets highlights that the level of local banking competition is key to determining which organizational structure provides better lending terms for small businesses.     

Internal liquidity risk,financial bullwhip effects,and corporate bond yield spreads: Supply chain perspectives

This study explores internal liquidity risk (ILR) and financial bullwhip effects on corporate bond yield spreads along supply chain counterparties by employing American market data from year 1997 to 2008. This study finds that the ILRs of suppliers and customers positively affect a firm’s bond yield spreads and the effects of customers’ ILRs are greater. This research also finds a financial bullwhip effect that the ILR effect becomes greater upwardly along the supply chain counterparties. The results are robust when controlling for well-known spread determinant variables.     

Microdata Evidence on the Empirical Importance of Selection Effects in Menu‐Cost Models

We use microdata on product prices linked to information on the producing firms that set them to study to what extent the timing of price changes reacts to changes in marginal cost. This self‐selection of price changes is a key feature in the canonical Menu‐Cost model a la Golosov and Lucas Jr. (2007), which may generate near monetary neutrality (Golosov and Lucas Jr. 2007, Karadi and Reiff 2016), but is absent in the Calvo (1983) model. We find that the microdata strongly favors the Calvo (1983) model. Thus, upstream in the supply chain, price setting is best characterized by a very low degree of self‐selection into price changes.     

国有商业银行贷款业务流程的理论分析与现实构想

业务流程再造是对现有流程和体系结构的变革，目的在于提高经济运行效率。本文通过对我国国有商业银行贷款业务流程现状的分析，借鉴国外商业银行贷款业务流程的设计，提出我国商业银行贷款业务流程再造的原则，即必须坚持“扬弃”的原则、坚持精减流程的原则、坚持整体设计、分步推进的原则及坚持激励约束配套的原则。在具体运作过程中，应按照不同客户类别分别授权，通过数据清理，分步建立风险评价模型，由不同级别的风险经理与客户经理负责不同种类的客户，最终实现贷款业务的高质、高效审批管理，重构国有商业银行的贷款业务流程。