This book offers an elaborate and empirical look at service quality of hospitals in the emerging market of India. The poor quality of service is a major issue in a large number of hospitals (particularly in government hospitals), which forces patients to opt for private hospitals that are generally much more expensive than government hospitals. This book provides a comprehensive understanding of service quality antecedents in Indian hospitals. It focuses on patient satisfaction and includes valuable insights and implications for hospital management and government. The book is theoretically grounded in SERVQUAL literature and uses appropriate and sophisticated techniques and tools to analyse data. It highlights causal model development with Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) and introduces a classification model, developed using Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), in order to benchmark specialty cardiac care. The book also deals with Support Vector Machines (SVMs) and compares the error rates between SVM and ANN to find the best classification technique among the two. Overall, this book is a timely and relevant work that contributes to the theory, practice and policy of service quality in hospitals.

This book provides a practical approach to designing and implementing a Knowledge Management (KM) Strategy. The book explains how to design KM strategy so as to align business goals with KM objectives. The book also presents an approach for implementing KM strategy so as to make it sustainable. It covers all basic KM concepts, components of KM and the steps that are required for designing a KM strategy. As a result, the book can be used by beginners as well as practitioners. Knowledge management is a discipline that promotes an integrated approach to identifying, capturing, evaluating, retrieving, and sharing all of an enterprise's information assets. These assets may include databases, documents, policies, procedures, and previously un-captured expertise and experience in individual workers. Knowledge is considered to be the learning that results from experience and is embedded within individuals. Sometimes the knowledge is gained through critical thinking, watching others, and observing results of others. These observations then form a pattern which is converted in a 'generic form' to knowledge. This implies that knowledge can be formed only after data (which is generated through experience or observation) is grouped into information and then this information pattern is made generic wisdom. However, dissemination and acceptance of this knowledge becomes a key factor in knowledge management. The knowledge pyramid represents the usual concept of knowledge transformations, where data is transformed into information, and information is transformed into knowledge. Many organizations have struggled to manage knowledge and translate it into business benefits. This book is an attempt to show them how it can be done.

This book examines the modules/elements required before implementing knowledge management solutions in typical manufacturing and service industry. The objective is to develop a framework, design and model suitable for all requirements and a strategy to properly implement. Related case studies from organizations are included, with the results provided to use as a solution to problems experienced when implementing knowledge management in the industry. Implementing a knowledge management system can be complex and dynamic, no matter how well planned and developed. Inevitably a degree of organizational inertia is focused on the current state rather than the new. Within an enterprise, personal and group involvement and interests process status and technology landscape can deflect the commitment needed to successfully implement such a system. Cumulative evidence from past research in knowledge management suggests that effective implementation of KM solution in any organization requires a robust designs and models for various critical elements of process, people and technology. Using the techniques provided in this book, readers should be able to design knowledge management strategies, to align objectives of the KM initiatives with their business goals.

This book develops an IT strategy for cloud computing that helps businesses evaluate their readiness for cloud services and calculate the ROI. The framework provided helps reduce risks involved in transitioning from traditional "on site" IT strategy to virtual "cloud computing." Since the advent of cloud computing, many organizations have made substantial gains implementing this innovation. Cloud computing allows companies to focus more on their core competencies, as IT enablement is taken care of through cloud services. Cloud Computing and ROI includes case studies covering retail, automobile and food processing industries. Each of these case studies have successfully implemented the cloud computing framework and their strategies are explained. As cloud computing may not be ideal for all businesses, criteria are also offered to help determine if this strategy should be adopted.

Business process reengineering (BPR) focuses on redesigning the strategic and value-added processes which transcend the organizational boundaries. It is a cross-functional approach that requires support from almost all the departments of the organization. Business Process Reengineering: Automation Decision Points in Process Reengineering offers a new framework based process reengineering and links it to organization life cycle, process life cycle, and process management. This volume describes the fundamental concepts behind business process reengineering and examines them through case studies, and should appeal to researchers and academics interested in business process reengineering, operations strategy, and organizational restructuring and design.

This book illustrates approaches for implementing ICT in primary education. Through different initiatives and case studies, the book shows different approaches for successful implementation of ICT. While it gives details of theoretical concepts related to ICT, it also provides live examples from different initiatives as to how literacy can be achieved through customized implementation strategy. The book illustrates different ICT policies that have been implemented with varying degree of success. It also demonstrates different approaches that would be of interest to practitioners.

The importance of benchmarking in the service sector is well recognized as it helps in continuous improvement in products and work processes. Through benchmarking, companies have strived to implement best practices in order to remain competitive in the product- market in which they operate. However studies on benchmarking, particularly in the software development sector, have neglected using multiple variables and therefore have not been as comprehensive. Information Theory and Best Practices in the IT Industry fills this void by examining benchmarking in the business of software development and studying how it is affected by development process, application type, hardware platforms used, and many other variables. Information Theory and Best Practices in the IT Industry begins by examining practices of benchmarking productivity and critically appraises them. Next the book identifies different variables which affect productivity and variables that affect quality, developing useful equations that explaining their relationships. Finally these equations and findings are applied to case studies. Utilizing this book, practitioners can decide about what emphasis they should attach to different variables in their own companies, while seeking to optimize productivity and defect density.

E-Commerce Strategy: Text and Cases provides the fundamental literature required for graduate students and practitioners to understand electronic commerce. Each chapter provides clearly designed learning objectives and review questions to highlight the major topics and goals. This book covers many of the new innovations and technologies that have been established for e-commerce site development. Unlike similar books, topics such as e-channel adoption, factors affecting e-commerce adoption, and strategy design are reviewed in greater depth. Additionally, the book examines areas not normally covered like open source, online research, and peer-to-peer systems. E-Commerce Strategy: Text and Cases is divided into two parts. Part 1 examines the evolution of e-commerce, analyzes different sectors such as B2B and m-Commerce, and explores the challenges they face. Case studies of well known companies reinforce the concepts learned to demonstrate both successes and failures in the field. Part 2 deals with developing strategies in e-Commerce and looks at future trends including Web 2.0. Overall, the useful guidelines provided should prove valuable to students and researchers in the field.

This book deals with complex variants of Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) and Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) within the manufacturing and service industries. The objective is to develop heuristics for these supply chain problems in order to offer practical solutions to improve operational efficiency. These heuristics are evaluated using benchmark and derived data-sets. Case studies pertaining to logistics in different industries including textile machinery manufacturing and banking are also included to demonstrate the created heuristics. High competition in today's global market has forced the organizations to invest in and focus on their logistics system. The critical function of logistics is the transportation within and across various supply chain entities. Both supply and distribution procedure require effective transportation management. A small improvement in routing problems can lead to huge logistics savings in absolute terms. This book should appeal to executives, researchers and consultants seeking supply chain management solutions.

This book introduces the fundamental principles of understanding business requirements to apply enterprise resource planning (ERP) in order to meet business needs. The book also helps readers understand the usage of ERP for monitoring and controlling business processes, while providing practical oriented solutions to the design and implementation of ERP. Using the provided framework, a business can decide to provide more value at lower cost which increases its competitive advantage. This should be an ideal reference for executives, researchers and consultants in project management of ERP. ERP can be considered to be an integrated package of business process. The scope of ERP determines the extent of automation of business process. For example if ERP covers Human Resource (HR) and finance business processes only, then business process related HR and finance are automated. Typically business process that are automated in HR and finance employee entry and exist process, allocation of employee ID, payroll, processing , income tax planning and actual deduction etc. There is seamless flow of employee data and information is available at an effectively faster rate to take appropriate decision. As custom demand increases, there is a need to meet the changing scenario with speed and efficiency. While there is a need to increase productivity, there is also a need to reduce cost of operation. The repetitive business processes can be handled effectively by automating them and freeing human resources for meeting other uncertainties. These automations not only should be done for each department, but also should cut across different departments. Thus there is a need for automating business processes at enterprise level. This enterprise level automation started with MRP, then MRP II, ERP and then finally open source ERP have taken centre stage. Out of the standard products available in the market, an organization can chose an ERP product for implementation, depending on the features available and the total cost of ownership (TCO). This comparison helps an organization to choose the product that best suits the needs for the organization. Enterprise Resource Planning: Fundamentals of Design and Implementation highlights these concepts while discusses different good practices to design and implement ERP.

This book offers a conceptual, theoretical, and empirical overview of the role of total quality management (TQM) in Indian higher education from the perspectives of the engineering faculty, students, and alumni. It identifies the critical dimensions to measure the performance of TQM. This volume conceptualizes the service quality of higher education, especially in engineering education, through empirical assessment of the services being provided to major stakeholders like the faculty, the students, and the alumni. It highlights the significance of TQM in creating success stories while discussing the importance of improved productivity and quality in higher education with respect to the quality of engineering educational institutions. Further, the book provides a complete framework for the implementation of TQM in engineering educational institutions. This book will be of interest to students, teachers, and researchers of education and management studies. It will also be useful for educationalists, education administrators, education policymakers and bureaucrats, management professionals, business leaders, and the governing bodies of higher education institutions.

This book offers a conceptual, theoretical, and empirical overview of the role of total quality management (TQM) in Indian higher education from the perspectives of the engineering faculty, students, and alumni. It identifies the critical dimensions to measure the performance of TQM. This volume conceptualizes the service quality of higher education, especially in engineering education, through empirical assessment of the services being provided to major stakeholders like the faculty, the students, and the alumni. It highlights the significance of TQM in creating success stories while discussing the importance of improved productivity and quality in higher education with respect to the quality of engineering educational institutions. Further, the book provides a complete framework for the implementation of TQM in engineering educational institutions. This book will be of interest to students, teachers, and researchers of education and management studies. It will also be useful for educationalists, education administrators, education policymakers and bureaucrats, management professionals, business leaders, and the governing bodies of higher education institutions.

Resource Allocation (RA) involves the distribution and utilization of available resources in the system. Because resource availability is usually scarce and expensive, it becomes important to find optimal solutions to such problems. Thus RA problems represent an important class of problems faced by mathematical programmers. This book focuses on development of models and heuristics for six new and complex sub-classes of RA problems in Supply Chain (SC) networks, focusing on bi-objectives, dynamic input data, and multiple performance measures based allocation and integrated allocation, and routing with complex constraints. It considers six set of variants of the RA problems normally encountered in practice but have not yet been studied. These variants of the classical RA are complex and pertaining to both manufacturing and service industry.

Since research is best learned by doing, this book emphasizes a hands-on, do-it yourself approach. The readers have many opportunities to see how business researches affect and support management decision. The book used a case study approach for all the chapters with interactive videos. The book gave emphasis to quantitative data analysis using a software program, IBM SPSS 20.0. The data analysis chapters illustrate in detail each step in running the software programs. The software programs files are provided for all data sets: outputs, demonstration movies, and screen captures are on the Website. This book provides students most extensive help available to learn quantitative data analysis using SPSS. Thus, the authors prepared this textbook and all the additional materials to help the students to understand the functional principles of business research and how to apply them in real-life situations.

The importance of automation in the various industries has increased dramatically in recent years; business process automation serves to enhance product quality, improve process safety and plant availability, and efficiently utilize resources and lower emissions. With almost every industry facing sweeping and unprecedented change, Process Automation Strategy in Services, Manufacturing and Construction responds to a rapid pace of transformation that is both a major challenge and a fantastic opportunity. Customers' expectations grow higher, economic pressures require them to do more with less, and each day new competitors appear. Examining case studies and examples of robotic process automation (RPA) across a range of industries and sectors, the authors explore the links between customer satisfaction and organizational performance, and how automation improves service for the end user. Appealing to business researchers, academics and practitioners, Process Automation Strategy in Services, Manufacturing and Construction brings to life the current trends in process automation and considers what the future holds.

Managing big data and data analytics poses unique challenges to many organisations. The effective use of such data is essential to planning business strategies and ensuring future corporate success. Organizations need to know how best to capitalise on the information that they have access to. Enabling Strategic Decision-Making in Organizations through Dataplex breaks down the role of data in strategic decision making, examining the organizational benefits but also utilising real-world examples of limitations and challenges and how these can be overcome. Dataplex allows for the central management of all data resources in the cloud, removing data silos while also maintaining ethical considerations and policies - the intellectual fabric of data provides a path to centrally monitor, manage and rule the data. The use of case studies, frameworks and applied models makes this text applicable to data practitioners, managers and strategic planners, as well as researchers focusing on problem solving at the organizational level.

As manufacturing companies become global, excellence will be key to the survival of Indian manufacturing businesses. Despite India's good performance on the export front in recent years, India is being outperformed by its competitors. Indian manufacturing companies must compete with global companies and become world class organizations to be competitive. Organizational Culture and its Impact on Continuous Improvement in Manufacturing presents detailed insights into recent studies, providing solutions that can be scaled up at a global level. The lack of competitiveness of Indian companies is attributed to culture in the organization as well as an inability to introduce world class manufacturing tools which would allow them to become globally competitive. All the qualities needed to become world class are not currently available, and it is imperative to understand this gap through the detailed research this book presents to ensure India's manufacturing companies can compete.

Change management is a better or smarter approach to initiate a change via behavioral aspects. As it is the power to innovate which is a unique strength for companies, the need for strategies to tackle change management within the firm is evident. This work demonstrates how a firm can learn change management from political upheavals, thus providing benefits to the entire value chain. Through examples and case studies from such unrest throughout India's diverse history, Mohapatra and Sadangi combine their academic and industry experience to show the need for business alignment with change management strategy.

This book gives a scientific and systematic approach to trading in emerging stock markets. As professional traders do not trade purely on the basis of the economic fundamentals, but also take into account market movements generated by other factors (noise trading), knowledge of technical analysis is important to anyone who would like to participate successfully in the stock market. Second, the existence of a skew towards reliance on fundamental analysis at longer horizons suggests that models based on economic considerations will be more important on the long run. Third, the existence of a skew towards reliance on technical analysis at shorter horizons suggests that models based on short term considerations (noise) will be more important in the short term. The present book gives a base for practitioners as well as students to learn the tricks of the trade through examples and case studies.

For a company to grow it needs to generate more margin of profit. It can generate more profit if it provides more value to customers. For this, it needs to put more value in each of the value activities. Agrawal, Satpathy, and Mohapatra demonstrate how a firm can use innovation at all levels (strategic, functional and operational) to provide benefits to the entire value chain. Particularly in developing economies, there is a need for business alignment with innovation strategy and execution of strategies, and this book explains these to the readers through real-word examples and case studies, taking the environment into consideration and concentrating on not just growth but sustainable growth.

Information Strategy Design and Practices develops a framework for designing information technology strategy for an organization. Beyond this, it establishes an approach to not only implement it, but sustain it. The framework explains how IT strategy should have an alignment to business to reap the benefits of business. The book contains five case studies in different domains: retail, real estate development, IT product development, development sector, and education sector. These case studies have been applied to different countries, providing a global prospective to this emerging trend.

Software organizations in South Asia have particular organizational cultures and hierarchies, where teamwork and creativity are essential. Investigating research methodologies and collected data from team leaders across these industries, Team Work Quality subjects them to statistical analysis in order to infer how team work quality contributes towards the enhancement of creativity with respect to software organizations. Team Work Quality, a very recent term being widely applied in software organizations across the world now, has been measured in this book using Weimar's model of Team Work Quality. The relationship of five team characteristics namely, team size, team age, team ethnicity, team role and tenure of the team leader, on the relationship between 'Team Work Quality' and 'Creativity is also explored in this book. Strategies are also offered to software organizations for improving their levels of organizational creativity, through enhancement of Team Work Quality thereby helping its readers in creating a better work environment.

This book illustrates approaches for implementing ICT in primary education. Through different initiatives and case studies, the book shows different approaches for successful implementation of ICT. While it gives details of theoretical concepts related to ICT, it also provides live examples from different initiatives as to how literacy can be achieved through customized implementation strategy. The book illustrates different ICT policies that have been implemented with varying degree of success. It also demonstrates different approaches that would be of interest to practitioners.

This book provides a practical approach to designing and implementing a Knowledge Management (KM) Strategy. The book explains how to design KM strategy so as to align business goals with KM objectives. The book also presents an approach for implementing KM strategy so as to make it sustainable. It covers all basic KM concepts, components of KM and the steps that are required for designing a KM strategy. As a result, the book can be used by beginners as well as practitioners. Knowledge management is a discipline that promotes an integrated approach to identifying, capturing, evaluating, retrieving, and sharing all of an enterprise's information assets. These assets may include databases, documents, policies, procedures, and previously un-captured expertise and experience in individual workers. Knowledge is considered to be the learning that results from experience and is embedded within individuals. Sometimes the knowledge is gained through critical thinking, watching others, and observing results of others. These observations then form a pattern which is converted in a 'generic form' to knowledge. This implies that knowledge can be formed only after data (which is generated through experience or observation) is grouped into information and then this information pattern is made generic wisdom. However, dissemination and acceptance of this knowledge becomes a key factor in knowledge management. The knowledge pyramid represents the usual concept of knowledge transformations, where data is transformed into information, and information is transformed into knowledge. Many organizations have struggled to manage knowledge and translate it into business benefits. This book is an attempt to show them how it can be done.

This book introduces the fundamental principles of understanding business requirements to apply enterprise resource planning (ERP) in order to meet business needs. The book also helps readers understand the usage of ERP for monitoring and controlling business processes, while providing practical oriented solutions to the design and implementation of ERP. Using the provided framework, a business can decide to provide more value at lower cost which increases its competitive advantage. This should be an ideal reference for executives, researchers and consultants in project management of ERP. ERP can be considered to be an integrated package of business process. The scope of ERP determines the extent of automation of business process. For example if ERP covers Human Resource (HR) and finance business processes only, then business process related HR and finance are automated. Typically business process that are automated in HR and finance employee entry and exist process, allocation of employee ID, payroll, processing , income tax planning and actual deduction etc. There is seamless flow of employee data and information is available at an effectively faster rate to take appropriate decision. As custom demand increases, there is a need to meet the changing scenario with speed and efficiency. While there is a need to increase productivity, there is also a need to reduce cost of operation. The repetitive business processes can be handled effectively by automating them and freeing human resources for meeting other uncertainties. These automations not only should be done for each department, but also should cut across different departments. Thus there is a need for automating business processes at enterprise level. This enterprise level automation started with MRP, then MRP II, ERP and then finally open source ERP have taken centre stage. Out of the standard products available in the market, an organization can chose an ERP product for implementation, depending on the features available and the total cost of ownership (TCO). This comparison helps an organization to choose the product that best suits the needs for the organization. Enterprise Resource Planning: Fundamentals of Design and Implementation highlights these concepts while discusses different good practices to design and implement ERP.