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Supplier diversity has roots in US supply chains going back 50  years. Unfortunately, supplier diversity programs have been hindered by less than wholehearted buyer adoption and stakeholder engagement. The original scoping of supplier diversity also holds limitations when comparing to the multidimensionality of the diversity and inclusion concept. The purpose of this article is to share lessons learned from the development of an innovative supplier diversity program by Moet Hennessy aimed at more sustainably scoping, scaling and stimulating supplier diversity programs.

The development and the design of Moet Hennessy’s supplier diversity program is presented. The design was informed, and partially supported by, a collaboration with the author. Critical reflections on pitfalls and outstanding questions are developed based upon the program design.

Moet Hennessy developed a supplier diversity program that is more comprehensively defined, targets a more global scale and includes innovative stakeholder engagement techniques such as the development of supplier diversity champions in the business. The program also is embedded in existing environmental social and governance initiatives.

Moet Hennessy’s supplier diversity program was not mandated by one of its customers but sourced from an academic collaboration and stimulated by competitive opportunity. The program was designed bottoms up, not top down. The program is sponsored outside of procurement and has champions throughout the business. The program expands beyond the traditional scoping of supplier diversity programs. Pathways and pitfalls for managers are identified based upon insights from Moet Hennessy’s experience. These inform suggestions for further research.

The purpose of this paper is to present an objective decision-making framework and conduct a benchmarking study in the air cargo industry.

The decision-making framework and benchmarking methodology evaluates the aircraft value for money (VfM) as a benefit-to-cost ratio calculated adopting a measure of relative efficiency. This efficiency score is measured as a comprehensive efficiency index obtained by combining several efficiency scores calculated by implementing four data envelopment analysis (DEA) models.

The framework is used to carry on a benchmarking study in the air cargo industry on a sample of 27 airplanes. The average VfM is 67.04 percent, with measurements between 39.96 and 116.03 percent. Only three airplanes achieve full VfM and behave as benchmarks to the remaining airplanes. Boeing B727-200 is a broad player in the market. Some old cargo models (DC 9-30F) deliver the same amount of VfM as more recent aircraft models (i.e. MD-11F and A300-600F).

The decision-making framework and benchmarking methodology can usefully support managers to make sound decisions and plans. Even though DEA generates attributes weights to different alternatives that are independent of the buyer preferences, the framework flexibility allows introducing a weighting scheme to take into account the managers preferences for certain aircraft performance/functional features. It can easily include new functional/performance measurements and adapt the VfM measurement to the particular economic context, strategy, and business model of the airlines, or be transferred to different industries.

The framework combines technical, functional performance, and economic cost measurements to get a unique efficiency index to evaluate the airplane VfM.

This article examines how a profit-centered restructuring of labor relations in an academic medical center undermined team-based care practices in its intensive care unit. The Institute of Medicine has promoted team-based care to improve patient outcomes, and the staff in the intensive care unit researched for this paper had established a set of practices they defined as teamwork. After hospital executives rolled out a public relations campaign to promote its culture of teamwork, they restructured its workforce to enhance numerical and functional flexibility in three key ways: implementing a “service line” managerial structure; cutting a range of staff positions while combining others; and doubling the capacity of its profitable and highly regarded intensive care unit. Hospital executives said the restructuring was necessitated by changes to payment models brought forth by the Affordable Care Act. Based on 300 hours of participant-observation and 35 interviews with hospital staff, findings show that the restructuring lowered staff resources and intensified work, which limited their ability to practice care they defined as teamwork and undermined the unit’s collective identity as a team. Findings also show how staff members used teamwork as a sensitizing concept to make sense of what they did at work. The meanings attached to teamwork were anchored to positions in the hospitals’ organizational hierarchy. This paper advances our understanding of he flexible work arrangements in the health care industry and their effects on workers.

The strategic role of corporate communication within modern organisations is recognised by both scholars and practitioners. Corporate communication supports management in interpreting contextual dynamics or in aligning corporate strategies with stakeholders’ needs. However, despite the growing acknowledgement of communication relevance, contributions about how professionals could effectively support organisations in creating value lack empirical examination. To fill this gap, this chapter adopts a managerial perspective for examining how communication strategically contributes to create shared value. In particular, it introduces the Creating Shared Value approach to the body of knowledge in strategic communication. A qualitative case study research design has been implemented. It was focused on Barilla Group, the international food company. This chapter enriches the strategic communication perspective by better defining the contribution of communication to the value creation process. It also outlines specific strategic competences that practitioners should acquire if they want to play a strategic role within organisations.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a methodological framework that combines several data envelopment analysis (DEA) models to deal with the problem of evaluating and ranking advanced manufacturing technologies (AMTs) without introducing any subjectivity in the analysis.

The methodology follows a two-phase procedure. First, the relative efficiency of every technology is calculated by implementing different DEA cross-efficiency models generating the same number of high-order indicators as efficiency vectors. Second, high-order indicators are used as outputs in a SBM-DEA super-efficiency model to obtain a comprehensive DEA-like composite indicator.

The framework is implemented to evaluate a sample of flexible manufacturing systems. Comparing it to other methods, results show that the methodology provides reliable information for AMTs selection and effective support to management decision-making.

This paper contributes to the body of knowledge about the utilization of DEA to select AMTs. The framework has several advantages: a discriminating power higher than the basic DEA models; no subjective judgment relative to weights necessary to aggregate single indicators and choice of aggregation function; no need to perform any transformation normalizing original data; independence from the unit of measurement of the DEA-like composite indicator; and great flexibility and adaptability allowing the introduction of further variables in the analysis.

Green economy and economic development with high quality have set higher requirements for the development of the urban logistics industry. It can grasp the recent development level of the urban logistics industry by measuring its environmental efficiency to guide its future development direction. The purpose of this study is to improve the environmental efficiency and development level of the urban logistics industry by using a reasonable evaluation method.

This paper uses information entropy to directly aggregate index weights from different models to acquire comprehensive index weights (CIWs) for calculating peer-evaluation efficiency. Then, we weight self and peer-efficiencies to obtain final efficiency. The environmental efficiencies of the urban logistics industry in Anhui Province in 2019 are obtained according to the above method.

Several findings are summarized below. The logistics industry in Anhui is in urgent need of improving environmental efficiency. The environmental efficiency of the logistics industry in North Anhui is the highest one, showing that the logistics industry in North Anhui has achieved a relative balance between economic development and environmental protection. Their final cross-efficiency values based on the CIWs are smaller than those based on the comprehensive efficiency. And the environmental efficiency of almost all urban logistics industries is lower than its economic efficiency. The findings show that the proposed method is feasible and more reasonable. More economic implications and suggestions are proposed.

This paper proposes an extended cross-efficiency evaluation method based on information entropy to measure the environmental efficiency of the urban logistics industry, effectively avoiding the overestimation of efficiency results.