Francisco Javier Miranda

Characteristics of the research on reverse logistics (1995–2005)

This paper aims to describe and analyse the main characteristics of articles on reverse logistics published in the production and operations management field, in order to determine the evolution of this current research over recent years and improve our understanding of this issue. We built up a database with the articles on reverse logistics published in the most relevant journals within the period 1995–2005, and we have explored the topic, the methodology and the techniques of analysis, as well as other relevant aspects of the research. We have evaluated the first decade of research on reverse logistics, observing what has been done and how, where and by whom it has been carried out. The result is an extensive review of the research works that have created and developed the reverse logistics concept, outlining some directions of research for the near future and offering practical help to those who begin to research on this topic.

Quantitative assessment of European municipal web sites: Development and use of an evaluation tool

Purpose – The internet is becoming increasingly important in the communication between local governments and citizens, which makes the usability of municipal web sites a critical factor in government‐citizen communication. The purpose of this paper is to propose and test a model for evaluating the potential of municipal web sites.Design/methodology/approach – In this work an objective investigation of the issue has been conducted by manually accessing and evaluating 84 European municipal web sites. Quality of web home pages was determined using an original Web Assessment Index, which focuses on four categories: accessibility, speed, navigability and content.Findings – A detailed report of the results arising from this investigation is presented and systematically analyzed.Originality/value – The most valuable output from this paper is not the ability to identify the best sites, but to see how each municipal site is compared to related sites and to spot ideas and practices that can improve city sites. Thes...

Professional Sports Teams on Social Networks: A Comparative Study Employing the Facebook Assessment Index

Professional sports teams are increasingly using social networks to better connect their sports and businesses to fans and the general public with the aim of providing team-related information, fostering fandom, and building team reputation. However, few, if any, studies have been done that analyze and evaluate the efficacy of this important portion of the professional sports business model from an informationmanagement perspective. This study employs the Facebook Assessment Index (FAI) to effectively compare, assess, and rank the Facebook sites of top European and North American professional teams. The study also shows how information artifacts in sports can be systematically analyzed, evaluated, and compared. In more general terms, the findings and analysis demonstrate how the information perspective can serve as a novel theoretical lens and important dimension in sport management. The results of the study show large differences between teams in the 3 FAI dimensions and a great improvement opportunity i...

Implementing a reverse logistics system: a case study

This paper is based on the results of a research project developed in an important Spanish industrial group to analyse if a reverse logistics system can be implemented in some of its companies. The business activity of this group is focused on the steel industry and the aim of the project was to design and evaluate a recovery system for packaging materials used for galvanised steel coils. Up to now, this type of packaging is disposed of because the current structure of the packaging system is not appropriate from a reverse logistics point of view. For this reason, we propose a new packaging system that can be recovered through a reverse logistics system generating economic and environmental advantages.

The Web as a marketing tool in the Spanish foodservice industry: evaluating the websites of Spain's top restaurants.

The quality and recognition of Spanish cuisine are fostering the development of culinary tourism, both domestic in origin and from abroad. Another detected trend is that an ever-greater proportion of tourists are using the Internet to obtain information and make decisions about activities to include in their trips. Given this context, the present work describes a comparative analysis of the websites of Spanish restaurants which have at least one Michelin star in order to assess the quality of those webpages and provide some guidance to their designers to facilitate their use as a marketing tool. The instrument used is the Web Assessment Index. This has been validated in other studies, and measures the quality of a website based on four dimensions: visibility, speed, navigability, and content. The results showed the quality of the website to be positively correlated with the category of the corresponding restaurant.

Determinants of the intention to create a spin-off in Spanish universities

With the growth in the popularity of the concept of an entrepreneurial university, over recent decades the commitment from European universities to commercialising research findings through the creation of spin-offs has also grown. In this way, academics become potential entrepreneurs or, as they are called in the business literature, intrapreneurs. Taking into account that the theories regarding planned behaviour consider intention as the main antecedent of behaviour, the aim of this paper is to test the influence that certain variables - demographic, psychological and those relating to the environment - have on the intention of academics in Spanish universities to create a spin-off. After conducting a survey of 1,178 academics from all fields of knowledge, the results show that the variables influencing this intention to be an entrepreneur are entrepreneurial personality, gender, academic experience and the entrepreneurial abilities of the individual, as well as the perceived utility of being an entrepreneur, the assessment of the economic environment and the productivity of their research group in terms of patents and articles published. Identifying the profile of the academics with the greatest entrepreneurial intention can help to guide university policy in matters of transferring knowledge and promoting spin-offs as an alternative way of commercialising research findings.

Customer delight: perception of hotel spa consumers

Abstract Delighted customers are those whose expectations have been exceeded by the service provider. Competitors in the hotel business need to go beyond what is expected in order to satisfy the guest with an unpredictable positive experience. This study was aimed to clarify the significance of customer delight as an antecedent to customer loyalty, in five-star hotel spas in Portugal. To better understand spa consumers’ perception of delight, the development and testing of an integrated model was undertaken by examining the relationship between perceived service quality, customer satisfaction, loyalty and customer delight. The model was tested using surveyed data from 427 spa consumers and validated using partial least squares (PLS) technique. The results indicated that satisfaction had a direct positive effect on customer delight and, consequently, influences the effect of customer delight on customer loyalty.

Evaluation of Social Network Sites: An Empirical Study of 150 Top-Ranked Firms in the World

Social networks are one of the more notable sociological phenomena of the last years. Moreover, its apparition and acceptance by majority of the citizens also suppose an important challenge for the firms. Social networks are a new and relevant channel of communication and interaction with their consumers. For this, firms have to create his own place in the social network and manage of active form the content that shares and the dialogue that is supported by their followers. In the first part of this paper we explain the creation of an index to evaluate the presence of the companies in the social network more used to international level, Facebook. The Facebook Assessment Index FAI is formed by several indicators grouped in three dimensions: popularity, interactivity and content. The weights for each category were obtained as recommended by a Delphi study conducted with 10 independent experts community managers and internet marketing experts. In the second part, we applied this index to the 150 largest firms according to Fortune 2011 ranking. At present, only 44% of these firms tested had an international official Facebook page. The results showed that the larger firms are those that in general terms best manage their presence on Facebook, have the greatest number of followers and a higher degree of interactivity with them. However, the most interesting contribution of this work lies not in identifying firms that achieve higher scores on the FAI, but in comparing the pages with each other and making suggestions of ideas and practices that may improve a firms Facebook presence as a marketing tool.