Gregory R. Heim

A Product-Process Matrix for Electronic B2C Operations: Implications for the Delivery of Customer Value

Electronic business-to-customer (B2C) operations are making it possible for companies to deliver service products—conceptualized as bundles of physical goods, offline services, and digital content—to customers almost anywhere and at any time. In this article, the authors develop a product-process matrix for electronic B2C operations. The building blocks of the matrix are an electronic service product structure and an electronic service process structure. The electronic service product structure, characterized by the digital content of service products and the target market segment, defines four service product categories. The electronic service process structure, characterized by the flexibility of process technologies, defines four service process stages. Positions on the matrix capture the product-process interrelationships in electronic B2C operations. The authors present propositions relating customer value to positions on the product and process structures and on the matrix. They also present illustrative applications of the matrix to examine the B2C operations of two electronic food retailers.

Comparing e‐service performance across industry sectors

Purpose – The online retail industry is enormous, covering a great assortment of products and services. Yet, little research has examined whether determinants of success in online retailing are similar or differ by industry sector. The purpose of this study is to examine industry sectors separately to distinguish drivers associated with overall satisfaction for the online consumers in those sectors.Design/methodology/approach – The paper uses ridge regression to examine how e‐service quality dimensions are associated with overall customer satisfaction for several e‐retailing sectors.Findings – While several e‐service quality dimensions exhibit a similar impact across all sectors, several other dimensions exhibited sector‐by‐sector differences. The drivers that frequently differ across sectors include price perceptions, ease of returns and refunds, and privacy experience.Research limitations/implications – As an exploratory study, research opportunities and limitations derive from the public source of data...

Impacts of Information Technology on Mass Customization Capability of Manufacturing Plants

Purpose – The impact of information technology (IT) on mass customization (MC) capability has been implied in the literature but seldom subjected to empirical examination. This study theoretically relates four types of IT applications with MC capability and empirically examines these relationships. Design/methodology/approach – This study identifies four types of IT that potentially support MC capability, including product configurator IT, new product development IT, manufacturing IT, and supplier collaboration IT. Drawing on organizational information processing theory, this study associates the four IT types with a manufacturer’s MC capability. A structural equation model is tested using survey data collected from a sample of manufacturing plants that focus on product customization. Findings – The empirical results indicate that three of the four IT types either strongly or marginally support a manufacturer’s MC capability. Research limitations/implications – Data used in this study are cross-sectional in nature. Also, a set of refined IT measures should be developed in future studies. Practical implications – The paper identifies managerial opportunities for investing in IT to support or enhance MC capability.Originality/value – The study is one of the first efforts to empirically examine the impact of multiple types of IT applications on MC capability. The study also develops a classification framework of IT applications in manufacturing plants.

The Value to the Customer of RFID in Service Applications

This paper examines how customer value may be affected by deploying radio frequency identification (RFID) technologies within service environments. Business articles promote operational cost savings and improved inventory management as key benefits of deploying RFID. In response, service firms are using RFID to reengineer service transactions and customer touchpoints. Customers may view these RFID applications to offer both benefits and drawbacks. This paper demonstrates that individuals will recognize far more of value from RFID service applications than just cost savings and inventory availability. The paper analyzes qualitative survey responses on the value from RFID to identify a broad list of value objectives – benefits and drawbacks – associated with RFID service applications. The paper contributes to academic literature by providing salient value dimensions for return on investment models of service RFID applications, and for future empirical analyses of means-ends and value-profit chain models. Managers can use the list of dimensions to develop rich business cases for evaluating the benefits and costs from enhancing service operations with RFID. The identified drawbacks also provide managers with a resource for understanding potential risks of RFID applications.

Service Product Configurations in Electronic Business-to-Consumer Operations A Taxonomic Analysis of Electronic Food Retailers

The authors develop a taxonomy of electronic service products, defined as bundles of physical goods, offline services, and digital content. The taxonomy is founded on a conceptual classification scheme in the form of a 2 2 matrix—namely, the electronic service product structure—that differentiates electronic service products according to their digital content (either static or dynamic) and target market segment (either unique or broad). The cells of the matrix correspond to four categories of service products: niche market (static content-unique market), market extender (dynamic content-broad market), dynamic mass market (dynamic content-broad market), and customized megamarket (dynamic content-unique market). Two hypotheses are proposed that posit that the ordering of the service product categories in the sequence that was just stated will be positively associated with customer satisfaction and loyalty. The results of the empirical analysis of data from 255 electronic food retailers, the study sample, support the two hypotheses.

Encounter Satisfaction in E-tailing: Are the Relationships of Order Fulfillment Service Quality with its Antecedents and Consequences Moderated by Historical Satisfaction?

This study focuses on whether historical satisfaction with an e-tailer (HSat) moderates baseline relationships in order fulfillment service quality models. HSat is defined as satisfaction with the e-tailer spanning all transactions except the current encounter. Encounter satisfaction (ESat) is defined as the consumers satisfaction with the current transaction. In the baseline model, four order fulfillment service quality (OFSQ) dimensions managerially relevant to consumer e-tailing are examined: timeliness, availability, condition, and billing accuracy. The baseline structural model results support that OFSQ dimensions impact ESat, which in turn predicts two key consequences—repurchase intention and word-of-mouth. Adaptation theory is used to model the role of HSat, while controlling for transaction recency, vendor familiarity, and competitive pricing. HSat is shown to have pervasive main and interaction effects upon all baseline model relationships. These moderation effects have great managerial relevance. For example, the results illustrate a phenomenon similar to the service recovery paradox, wherein when a negative service encounter is followed by a highly positive service recovery event, previously dissatisfied consumers, as compared to previously satisfied consumers, respond with higher levels of current satisfaction. For managers, this finding is encouraging because policies that create highly positive events for consumers can thus supersede past negative experiences. Our results show however that HSat cannot be completely superseded by current OFSQ or current ESat.

Antecedents and Consequences of New Product Development Practices and Software Tools: An Exploratory Study

Many development practices and software tools enable new product development (NPD), yet few empirical studies shed light on the project characteristics and project contexts driving their use. Using a cross-sectional sample of NPD projects, this study examines how project characteristics and availability of information technology (IT) infrastructure relate to the use of NPD practices and software tools. We also examine how the extent of their use is associated with NPD project performance. The results indicate that different project characteristics influence the use of NPD practices and software tools, with project complexity associated with software tool use, but project uncertainty associated with NPD practice use. Also, customer facing IT infrastructure is associated with the use of NPD practices, while manufacturing plant IT infrastructure is associated with the use of design/validation software tools. Moreover, use of NPD practices has a positive association with all project-level performance metrics examined in this study, and as a result, a greater impact on overall market success. In comparison, the performance impacts of software tools appear relatively limited, with only design/validation software tools exhibiting a strong positive association with product performance quality and a weak positive association with time-to-market and responsiveness. Communication/teamwork software tools exhibit no such impact.

Longitudinal Analysis of Inhibitors of Manufacturer Delivery Performance

This article examines demand, manufacturing, and supply factors proposed to inhibit manufacturer delivery execution. Extant research proposes many factors expected to harm delivery performance. Prior cross-sectional empirical research examines such factors at the plant level, generally finding factors arising from dynamic complexity to be significant, but factors arising from detail complexity to be insignificant. Little empirical research examines the factors using product-level operating data, which arguably makes more sense for analyzing how supply chain complexity factors inhibit delivery. For purposes of research triangulation, we use longitudinal product-level data from MRP systems to examine whether the factors inhibit internal manufacturing on time job rates and three customer-oriented measures of delivery performance: product line item fill rates, average delivery lead times, and average tardiness. Our econometric models pool product line item data across division plants and within distinct product families, using a proprietary monthly dataset on over 100 product line items from the environmental controls manufacturing division of a Fortune 100 conglomerate. The data summarize customer ordering events of over 900 customers and supply chain activities of over 80 suppliers. The study contributes academically by finding significant detail complexity inhibitors of delivery that prior studies found insignificant. The findings demonstrate the need for empirical research using data disaggregated below the plant-level unit of analysis, as they illustrate how some factors previously found insignificant indeed are significant when considered at the product-level unit of analysis. Managers can use the findings to understand better which drivers and inhibitors of delivery performance are important.

Impact of value-added service features in e-retailing processes: : An econometric analysis of web site functions

We examine the impact of three classes of website functions (foundational, customer-centered, and value-added) upon e-retailer performance. Using secondary panel data for 2007-2009 on operating characteristics of over 600 e-retailers, our econometric analysis finds that only the value-added service functions are positively associated with changes in e-retail sales revenues across time. We also observe a decreasing marginal impact of deploying additional value-added service features. To account for possible alternate explanations, we control for firm- and time-specific fixed effects, merchant types, merchandise categories, and order fulfillment strategies. By further decomposing e-retail sales revenues into website traffic, conversion rate, and average order value, we find that website functions affect e-retail sales revenues mainly through their impact on website traffic. Our investigation demonstrates the empirical research usefulness of the Voss (2003) conceptual e-service sand cone model. Our results identify for managers where to focus ongoing e-retailing system development efforts, yet suggest that focusing too many retailing capabilities on exploratory and experimental value-added service features may backfire, potentially leading to worsening e-retailer performance.

Managing Enterprise Risks of Technological Systems: An Exploratory Empirical Analysis of Vulnerability Characteristics as Drivers of Exploit Publication

Enterprises experience opportunistic exploits targeted at vulnerable technology. Vulnerabilities in software-based applications, service systems, enterprise platforms, and supply chains are discovered and disclosed on an alarmingly regular basis. A necessary enterprise risk management task concerns identifying and patching vulnerabilities. Yet it is a costly affair to develop and deploy patches to alleviate risk and prevent damage from exploit attacks. Given the limited resources available, technology producers and users must identify priorities for such tasks. When not overlooked, vulnerability-patching tasks often are prioritized based on vulnerability disclosure dates, thus vulnerabilities disclosed earlier usually have patches developed and deployed earlier. We suggest priorities also should focus on time-dependent likelihoods of exploits getting published. We analyze data on software exploits to identify factors associated with the duration between a vulnerability discovery date and the date when an exploit is publicly available, a time window for patching before exploit attack levels may escalate. Actively prioritizing vulnerability patching based on likelihoods of exploit publication may help lessen losses due to exploit attacks. Technology managers might apply the insights to better estimate relative risk levels, and better prioritize protection efforts toward vulnerabilities having higher risk of earlier exploitation.