Backup strategy for robots’ failures in an automotive assembly system

Automotive assembly lines are often characterized by robots’ failures that may result in stoppages of the lines and manual backup of tasks. The phenomena tend to impair throughput rate and products’ quality. This paper presents a backup strategy in which working robots perform tasks of failed robots. The proposed Mixed-Integer Linear-Programming based approach minimizes the throughput loss by utilizing the robots’ redundancy in the system. Two algorithms are developed to comply with stochastic conditions of a real-world environment. The performance of these algorithms is compared with several heuristics, and the downstream-backup based algorithm is found superior to all other methods.     

Conceptualization and Integration of Marketing Intelligence: The Case of an Industrial Manufacturer

Purpose: The primary goal of this article was to conceptualize a systematic marketing intelligence process for industrial manufacturers because, up until now, such concepts have only been focused on consumer goods settings. Hence, this article investigates how marketing intelligence activities are developed and managed effectively in industrial markets.

Methodology/approach: The authors conducted a case study of Maschinenfabrik Reinhausen, a German based manufacturer of regulation technology for power transformers.

Findings: We found that a systematic marketing intelligence process should be based on the resource- and market-based view of strategy as well as on the market orientation construct. When implementing marketing intelligence, the integration of the sales force within the whole process is the crucial lever for an industrial company. The formalization of the process is necessary to ensure its continuity and acceptance; however, the varying intensity allows the necessary flexibility of the process.

Research implications: The constraints of the decisive process steps of marketing intelligence have to be further enhanced for industrial markets. It is important to find out how the integration of the sales force can best be designed to incorporate reward systems and motivation structures, and how to establish a corporate marketing-minded culture throughout the organization.

Practical implications: The important steps for a well implemented marketing intelligence process are a preparation phase, followed by the gathering, analysis, and dissemination of information. This article highlights the success factors for each process step. Above all, managerial and organizational commitment is necessary for the implementation of the whole process.

Originality/value/contribution: By focusing on the industrial manufacturing business, this study provides deep insights into a neglected area of research. Light needs to be shed on marketing intelligence in industrial markets, where the lack of traditional market research has to be compensated.     

Deutsche Konjunktur erholt sich — Ergebnisse der Gemeinschaftsdiagnose vom Frühjahr 2013

According to the recent Joint Forecast, the German economy is back on an upward trend in spring 2013. The situation in the financial markets has eased and the headwind from the world economy has tailed off somewhat. The institutes expect gross domestic product in Germany to increase by 0.8% this year and by 1.9% next year. The expansion will mainly be driven by domestic demand. The labour market situation is expected to improve further. With capacity utilisation rising, inflation is forecasted to edge up to 2.0% next year. The public budget will be almost balanced in 2013 and should show a surplus of 0.5% in relation to gross domestic product in 2014. However, risks will continue to remain until the euro crisis is resolved.     

TECHNOLOGY SHOCKS AND ROBUST SIGN RESTRICTIONS IN A EURO AREA SVAR*

We use a model‐based identification strategy to estimate the impact of technology shocks on hours worked and employment in the euro area. The sign restrictions applied in the vector autoregression (VAR) analysis are consistent with a large class of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models and are robust to parameter uncertainty. The results are in line with the conventional Real Business Cycle (RBC) interpretation that hours worked rise as a result of a positive technology shock. By comparing the sign restrictions method to the long‐run restriction approach of Galí (Quaterly Journal of Economics (1992) 709–38) , we show that the results do not depend on the stochastic specification of the hours worked series or the data sample but only on the identification scheme.     

Should we delight the customer?

Critics have suggested that delighting the customer “raises the bar” of customer expectations, making it more difficult to satisfy the customer in the next purchase cycle and hurting the firm in the long run. The authors explore this issue by using a mathematical model of delight, based on assumptions gathered from the customer satisfaction literature. Although delighting the customer heightens repurchase expectations and makes satisfying the customer more difficult in the future, and the delighting firm is injured by raised customer expectations, the (nondelighting) competition is hurt worse through customer attrition to the delighting firm. If customers forget delighting incidents to some degree from occasion to occasion, the delighting firm suffers if it is in a position to take customers from the competition. If taking customers from the competition is difficult, the delighting firm actually benefits from customer forgetting, because the same delighting experience can be repeated again, with the same effect. Roland T. Rust (Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) is the Madison S. Wigginton Professor of Management and Director of the Center for Service Marketing at the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University. His publication record includes more than 60 journal articles and five books. His 1997Marketing Science article, “Customer Satisfaction, Productivity, and Profitability: Differences Between Goods and Services,” won the Best Services Article Award from the American marketing Association, for the best services article in any journal, and his 1995 article, “Return on Quality (ROQ): Making Service Quality Financially Accountable,” won theJournal of Marketing's Alpha Kappa Psi Award for the article with the greatest impact on marketing practice. He has also won best article awards from theJournal of Advertising and theJournal of Retailing. His honors include career achievement awards from the American Statistical Association and the American Academy of Advertising, as well as the Henry Latané Distinguished Doctoral Alumnus Award from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His work has been covered widely in the media and has resulted in aBusiness Week cover story and an appearance onABC World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. He is the founder and chair of the American Marketing Association (AMA) Frontiers in Services Conference and serves as founding editor of theJournal of Service Research. He also serves on the editorial review boards of theJournal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing, andMarketing Science. Richard L. Oliver (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin, Madison) is the Valere Blair Potter Professor of Management at the Owen Graduate School of Management, Vanderbilt, University. His research interests include consumer psychology with a special focus on customer satisfaction and postpurchase processes. He holds the position of Fellow of the American Psychological Association for his extensive writings on the psychology of the satisfaction response. He is the author ofSatisfaction: A Behavioral Perspective on the Consumer (Irwin/McGraw-Hill) and coeditor ofService Quality: New Directions in Theory and Practice (Sage). He previously served on the boards of theJournal of Consumer Research, theJournal of Marketing, theJournal of Personal Selling & Sales Management, and theJournal of Retailing and has published articles in theJournal of Consumer Research, theJournal of Marketing Research, theJournal of Marketing, theJournal of Applied Psychology, Psychology & Marketing, Behavioral Science, theJournal of Economic Psychology, Applied Psychological Measurement, Psychometrika, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Advances in Consumer Research, theJournal of Retailing, theJournal of Personal Selling & Sales Management, theJournal of Consumer Satisfaction/Dissatisfaction & Complaining Behavior, theJournal of Advertising, theJournal of Consumer Affairs, and others. He previously taught at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and at Washington University in St. Louis.     

Konjunktur der Bundesländer: große Unterschiede,aber wenig aussagefähige Daten

Wirtschaftsdienst - Im März 2021 legte der Arbeitskreis der Volkswirtschaftlichen Gesamtrechnungen der Länder die ersten Berechnungen zur Wirtschaftsleistung der Länder für 2020...     

Principles for sustainability rating of investment funds

During the last decade, the idea of sustainable investments hit the market. Investors both private and institutional started to supplement financial considerations with social and ecological ones. Meanwhile the supply of mutual funds in the ‘green’ investment sector increased enormously. Currently in Europe about 300 mutual funds are available that are managed according to sustainability and social responsibility. Potential investors face the difficulty of keeping track of the various funds and choosing among them based on a reliable comparative assessment. This paper outlines the basic principles and methods on which such a comparative sustainability rating is based. The method was designed to be analogous to rating of the funds financially. The sustainability rating is based on assessment of the research processes in the fund management as well as investigation of the fund portfolio in terms of composition and sustainability performance. It should support investors in their investment choices by offering them a third party view. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

An extension of Mohring's model for land rent distribution

In an early paper Herbert Mohring (J. Pol. Econ., 49 (1961)) presented a model for land rent distribution yielding the well-known result that the price of land must fall with the distance from the city center to offset transportation costs. Our paper is an extension of Mohring's model in which we relax some of his drastic simplifying assumptions. This extended model has been incorporated in a method for economic evaluation of city master plans which has been applied to a Swedish city. In this method the interdependence among housing, heating, and transportation, the durability of urban structures, and the uncertainty of future demand are explicitly considered within a cost-benefit approach. Some empirical results from this pilot study concerning land rent distributions are also presented here.