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A trend in modern supply chain management has been to substitute information for inventory. In this chapter, an approach to how information and communication technology can be used to achieve this in a maritime logistics context is outlined and described based upon a bulk shipping case.

The approach used is based on data-driven modeling and analysis, in which current logistics and commodity storage costs are benchmarked against a “best possible solution.”

To make a new solution operative, a change should be made based upon an analytical decision-making approach, ICT infrastructure development, and inter-organizational development. Thus, the proper use of analytical and transactional information and communication technology in maritime logistics would enable logistics chain stakeholders to track stock levels and ultimately allocate vessels to move cargo when that is logistically most cost effective. Further, this could support a development in the contractual relationships between producer and shipping line changing from a Contract of Affreightment to a Service Level Agreement relationship.

There is room for enhanced use of information and communication technology to provide decision and operational support at strategic, tactical, and operational levels within maritime logistics. This chapter explains some of the driving forces for this, together with a tested approach and method for this, given into a specific, practical case.

The environmental consequences of international trade and transport have gained importance as a result of the current climate debate. Products are increasingly being produced in one part of the world, transported to another country and then redistributed to their final country of consumption. Since more than 80% of world trade tonnage measured in metric tons is carried by seagoing vessels, maritime transport will continue to be a core part of most supply chains while rail and road mainly are used for hinterland transport and to and from ports. This chapter presents a methodology for assessing the environmental impact of maritime transport and transport in general, with a specific focus on greenhouse gas emissions. The first section gives an introduction to why Green Maritime Logistics and Sustainability are important topics, while the second offers a framework for measuring greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) for transport systems. The third section presents a model for measuring seaborne transport and its greenhouse gas emissions, and in the fourth section we compare greenhouse gas emissions from different modes of transportation.

Aim of the present monograph is the economic analysis of the role of MNEs regarding globalisation and digital economy and in parallel there is a reference and examination of some legal aspects concerning MNEs, cyberspace and e‐commerce as the means of expression of the digital economy. The whole effort of the author is focused on the examination of various aspects of MNEs and their impact upon globalisation and vice versa and how and if we are moving towards a global digital economy.

The purpose of this paper is to record the author’s personal reflections on his career as a marketing scholar.

Personal reflections in an autobiographical approach.

The author’s career as student, teacher and scholar is described in some detail.

The paper records events and memories that might otherwise be forgotten. No other such account has been published of Christian Grönroos’s career.

Health care is an example of an organization where the needs of potential clients are much greater than the capabilities of the service delivery system. The implementation of any medical procedure, as well as the provision of any service, just like the manufacturing of any product, can be decomposed into a series of tasks. The purpose of this paper is to propose a model for measuring the effectiveness of quality assurance tasks in health-care delivery processes.

The authors analyze a system of factors that affect the implementation of tasks in a process. In their considerations, they have focused on four areas of science that describe conditions that are related to the implementation of tasks: Scheduling as a methodology for allocating resources to perform tasks; Capacity planning as a methodology for assigning values to given resources expressed by the number of tasks that can be executed with the resources; Queueing theory, used as a methodology for describing phenomena in which not all planned tasks are performed within the prescribed specification limits; and Quality management, as a methodology to ensure appropriate conditions for completing tasks (CCTs), where CCT is a representation of parameters of casual relationship between variables.

The authors show that the effectiveness of executing any scheduled tasks in the process is determined by the difference between the capacity of resources allocated (at a given time interval) and the number of tasks planned to be carried out at that time. The CCT conditions determine the level of capacity of the fixed amount of resources. It is shown that their deviation from the reference CCT specification may cause the nominally correct amount of resources be either too small (causing queue formation and longer wait time in hospitals) or too large to contribute to the waste in the system by creating idle capacity.

The scope of application of the model is wide. It covers tasks performed with different degrees of uncertainties regarding the capacity of resources. It applies in all areas of health care where unlike manufacturing, the services delivered and the tasks performed in the health-care delivery system are seldom identical. Every patient is treated differently than the one waiting next in line. The workloads are pre-arranged in the order they are needed and completed in accordance with the FI-FO (first in-first out) principle. The model presented in this paper makes it possible to better understand the mechanism of effectiveness and efficiency improvement and the role of humans as a specific carrier of capacity.

As most of the health-care organizations are still stuck in the soft side of quality assurance, there has been little research conducted to test the applicability of well-known productions/operation management methodologies and theories benefitting health-care systems. The formulation of a reference point of CCT in this study is to serve as a stabilizing control point with the same connotation as that of a central reference line in the statistical process control chart. The correct capacity planning is needed to determine with a high degree of probability of success in implementation of all tasks to assure quality all the time.

MR. DENIS HOWELL, M.P., Minister for Libraries, who was to have told Conference how public libraries had progressed since the Act, had to withdraw and so we did not find out how the responsible minister felt about us.