Vicky Ching Gu

An operations management perspective on adopting customer-relations management (CRM) software

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are made up of software that chiefly support individual functional areas (e.g., operations management practices and policies), but seeks to share information to support organisation-wide integration goals. In this paper we examine the influences of operations management (OM) customer focus policies and practices, as well as software vendor capabilities in supporting OM, on ERP reasons for adoption of software and vendor selection of customer relations management (CRM) systems. An empirical study utilising structural equation modeling (SEM) is used to determine if an OM customer focus affects the adoption of CRM. The results show that collaboration between OM and marketing managers in the acquisition of CRM software improves business performance and supports the prior research that advocates the need for closer integration of these two functional areas. The results also show that OM reasons for adoption of CRM can have a moderating effect on business performance as well.

Consumer Perceptions of Product Quality Revisited: Made in China

An earlier consumer perception study of manufactured products revealed through value metrics that China had quality management problems. This paper revisits and expands the application of the same quality metrics into a longitudinal study. The authors measure the current state of product quality improvement in Chinese manufactured goods by U.S. customer perceptions and compare them to the previous state of quality from the prior study. The results reveal a continued, substantial, and consistent need for Chinese manufacturers to focus additional efforts toward improving product quality in almost all product lines. Results also identify and suggest new priorities for Chinese product quality improvement.

Relationship between learning styles and effectiveness of online learning systems

Online learning has become a popular medium to disseminate knowledge for both institutions of learning and for companies. The economic benefits to deliver knowledge and training online are well documented; however, there are still issues as to its effectiveness. One way that online learning may be more effective is by taking into account a student’s learning style. Our research seeks to understand if online learning tools account for learning styles, will users find them useful and easier to use thus resulting in a successful online learning environment? We propose an extended Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) to include learning styles as an external variable. Our results show significance for six of the seven hypotheses. Educators and corporate training departments can use these findings to design a better online learning environment for their students and workforce.

Using Complexity Measures to Evaluate Software Development Projects: A Nonparametric Approach

In this article, we use newly developed complexity metrics for software development projects that are more useful than traditional measures such as lines of code and functional points. Next, we present an approach to assessing the relative efficiency of software projects using these complexity measures as outputs. Due to the nature of the complexity measures, the constant returns to scale assumption often used in data envelopment analysis (DEA) is not appropriate. We relax this assumption and estimate the DEA model assuming variable returns to scale. This two-step approach provides project managers with a decision support tool to assess project productivity, categorize projects, and evaluate critical success/failure factors in software development projects.