Managing Critical Spare Parts within a Buyer–Supplier Dyad: Buyer Preferences for Ownership and Placement

Despite the criticality and expense of spare parts, many firms lack a coherent strategy for ensuring needed supply of spare parts. Moreover, scientific research regarding a comprehensive spare parts strategy is sparse in comparison with direct material. Our research identifies and tests three literature-based, theoretically anchored attributes that influence a buyer's preference for inventory ownership and inventory placement when managing the stock of a critical spare part. Our findings indicate that item specificity and item supply uncertainty are useful in predicting a buyer's preference for managing the inventory of a critical spare part. Furthermore, we find that buyers have (1) a strong preference for consignment-based inventory management approaches, (2) a bias against inventory speculation despite its use in practice and analytical models, and (3) a strong preference for inventory postponement when the level of supply uncertainty is low.     

German economic trends 1994/95: Rise in interest rates poses a threat to sustained economic recovery

German economic trends 1994/95: Rise in interest rates poses a threat to sustained economic recovery     

Significant Issues for the Future of Product Innovation

What's happening in the world of product innovation? What are the tough issues that managers are facing? And what's going to happen in the remaining years of this decade? In this article, several members of the Editorial Board of The Journal of Product Innovation Management offer their ideas about where the important problems lie. This is the fodder for a good round table discussion and through the medium of this journal we'll engage in such a discussion in this and a subsequent issue.     

Commercial Farm Workers and the Politics of (Dis)placement in Zimbabwe: Colonialism, Liberation and Democracy

The widespread land occupations of 2000 demonstrate the uneasy fit of commercial farm workers within the politics and development of Zimbabwe. Not only have farm workers borne the most violence at the hands of land occupiers, but their current socio-political situation on predominantly white-owned commercial farms has either been reduced by a nationalist liberation war binary of exploitation/abuse by racist white settlers or totally elided through human rights and democracy discourses anchored in the liberal subject. Based on periodic fieldwork research with commercial farm workers from 1992 to 2000, this paper analyses how farm workers have been represented by the various public actors during the current land occupations and the complex ways some farm workers have responded to these events. The emphasis is on how political actors need to rethink the situation of commercial farm workers if they are to take an active role in the improvement of their living and working lives.     

“私人定制”高管薪酬

正最好的公司绝不会让薪酬成为被诟病的话题。要给崭露头角的人传达这样一个信号:"你与众不同,所以我们给你尽可能高的奖励。"在比较好的公司,董事会和CEO都会着力组建现有或潜在的领导班子,他们也总会在推进人才发展计划时配套以相应的薪酬战略。但也有不少公司对薪酬体系存有错误的看法:他们认为,先把智囊团组建起来再想"钱"的事。如果董事会纵容甚至自己也持有这种想法,那么公司组建起来的人才系统必然是二流的。     

Rosie’s East End Restaurant: An experiential introduction to auditing

This short interactive case introduces several auditing concepts in the context of a familiar activity: verifying the accuracy of a restaurant bill. You will work in student teams to first determine whether the bill is accurate, and then to decide whether you are willing to pay it. During the exercise, you will keep track of the various steps and procedures you used in making your decisions. After you complete the exercise, your instructor will relate the activity to various auditing topics in the auditing process such as audit evidence, internal control, materiality, professional responsibilities and the concept of “fairly stated.” Hundreds of students have completed this exercise and report that it has helped them grasp many essential features of the auditing process, while providing a useful frame of reference for more complex aspects of the audit process.