Arshinder Kaur

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to provide strategic recommendations for Indian hotel administrators for improving sustainability practices: environment, economic and social with respect to the supply chain members by analyzing performance dimensions and the importance attached to them. Design/methodology/approach: Importance performance analysis is a tool to analyze the perception of top-level, middle-level and first-level managers in hotels. Questionnaire is developed to collect the hotel manager’s perceptions. The snowball sampling method is used for data collection. Findings: The paper introduces specific sustainability practices, namely, environment, economic and social factors, at the interface of the tourism supply chain (TSC). This will allow the hotels to identify the importance and performance of various sustainability practices to achieve a long-term competitive advantage. The present work finds that the responding hotel managers have given highest importance to the sustainability practices within the organization and the hotel manager’s perception of sustainability practices in the TSC will vary with respect to the supply chain members. Research limitations/implications: The effort has been made to capture specific sustainability practices across the supply chain. The paper reinstates the fact that sustainability practices are not firm specific and should be practiced at the supply chain interface. The data for the study were taken from focal organizations perspective which is the hotels. Practical implications: Results provide the hotel administrators to develop appropriate strategies to improve their practices and functions by analyzing their strengths and weakness regarding their tangible and intangible assets. The identified sustainability practice attributes can act as a benchmark and drive the hotel industry toward possible cost-saving conditions by prioritizing the allocation of the resources while taking care of overall performance. Social implications: Results will help the hotel administrators to identify the better sustainability practices which will reduce the negative effects and protect the Mother Nature. Originality/value: The study included hotels/resorts from tourism locations: hill station, backwaters and coastal areas, specifically in the Indian context.

The purpose of the research paper is to provide insight to the Indian hotel administrators by identifying key sustainability practices that can be jointly adopted with their supply chain members and will effectively contribute to the management of hospitality operations. A comprehensive framework is developed and a confirmatory factor analysis is used to test the relationship between the observed indicators and their factors. A set of reliable and valid measurements of sustainability practices in tourism supply chain that aims at the betterment of hospitality management methods is an outcome of the paper. The identified sustainability practices are used for conceptualisation of the model which can be logically used by the practicing managers in tourism supply chain and gain competitive advantage. The findings clearly suggest that sustainability practices need to be looked from the supply chain perspective than as individually.

Food can become unsafe or contaminated at any point from farm to fork. Customers and stakeholders are concerned about food safety and prompt delivery. Hence, there is a need for a visible food supply chain (FSC) which can be accomplished through innovative technologies. However, these technologies are expensive and take a long time to implement. Hence, operational efficiency, which takes into account cost, time, and waste, has become a priority for the parties involved in the FSC. This study aims to conduct a content analysis-based literature review to understand the impact of Industry 4.0 technologies in FSC in terms of visibility and operational efficiency. It is found that Blockchain, Internet of Things, and Radio Frequency Identification are considered to have great potential in the FSC. Although the FSC can tremendously benefit from other technologies, such as artificial intelligence, edge computing, and robots, they are not currently deployed in a practical or efficient way. This study also discovers how supply chain organisations can implement a technology cost-sharing system. Our study includes 16 emerging Industry 4.0 technologies and shows their impact on the FSC, as well as cost-sharing mechanisms. The findings of this work assist firms in technology cost sharing and selecting the right technologies for their supply chain. Finally, a conceptual framework is proposed to show how future work can be done to improve visibility and operational efficiency in the FSC using Industry 4.0 technologies.

Flexibility has a variety of dimensions attached with it. In the context of supply chain (SC), flexibility needs to be defined. In this paper, an attempt is made to describe various connotations attached with the flexibility, possible sources of variability and a proposed model on coordination by contracts. The contracts offer opportunities in implementing and measuring flexibility in SCs. Supply chain flexibility (SCF) measurement is presented while coordinating the SC. An analytical model based on newsboy problem is developed to understand implications of flexibility in a three-level SC. The proposed framework may act as a decision-making tool for selecting contracts for a particular type of demand based on a number of scenarios (varying price, cost and time period) generated. This framework may help SC members to decide which contract is beneficial under various situations of uncertainty. This paper has proposed a framework which by adopting SC contracts can be an indicator of SCF which can bear variability. Copyright © 2012 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

Sustainability integration in the processes of managing and delivering projects is essential to ensure the sustainability of the projects and that of the assets created. This research synthesises over two decades of published research on sustainability integration in management of construction projects (SIMCP). A three stage research process is used for searching and shortlisting, systematically reviewing, and Morphological Analysis (MA) of 130 selected journal articles. The use of MA here, perhaps the first such attempt in sustainable construction literature, has enabled compact tabular-visual representation of the large body of knowledge on SIMCP by categorising it under 7 dimensions, viz., Motivations, Stakeholder Orientation, Organizational Context, Temporal Orientation, Benefits, Barriers, and Risks, and 31 variants. MA has confirmed significant future research scope and revealed at least 236 specific research gaps. The study has significant implications for practitioners and academicians. While the former can use it to understand the state-of-the-art in SIMCP, the latter can utilize the identified gaps to decide their future lines of academic and intellectual inquiries.

Food supply will need to increase by around 70% from its current levels in order to meet the world population growth of 9.6 billion by 2050. Food waste is the biggest challenge in global food security, wherein approximately 20–30% of food waste occurs in the post-harvest stage of the food supply chain (FSC) in developing countries. This food waste generates significant negative environmental effects in addition to the unnecessary usage (and wastage) of resources consumed in producing the wasted food. Whilst India is the major producer and exporter of many agricultural crops, there is a lack of research that evaluates the environmental impact of the Indian FSCs. The environmental impact of the same product varies according to the resources consumed and so it is important that the environmental impact of individual supply chains be considered. Also, there is a lack of studies that uses the result of environmental impact assessment to identify the operational and resource inefficiencies in FSC and develop a framework for sustainable FSC. Thus, this study aims to identify operational and resource inefficiencies present in FSC through environmental impact assessment and propose a framework for redesigning the FSC to improve environmental sustainability. Life cycle assessment approach is used for assessing the environmental impact. This framework has been applied to a mango food supply chain.

In the wake of disaster, several organizations work for the welfare of the disaster victims, although lack of coordination among them hampers the performance of relief operations. This study sets out to explore and prioritize the coordination barriers in the humanitarian supply chain management (HSCM), particularly in the Indian context to enhance the performance of relief operations. The study is divided into three phases. Initially, barriers to coordination were identified through an extensive literature review, allied to brainstorming sessions with experts. These were then grouped into 5 categories, i.e. management barriers, technological barriers, cultural barriers, people barriers and organizational barriers. Secondly, a survey questionnaire was designed, tested and refined to incorporate the views of the managers involved in the relief operations of the disaster that occurred in the Uttarakhand (a Northern state in India) on June 14, 2013 in order to empirically verify the barriers to coordination. Finally, barriers were prioritized on the basis of their severity using fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (F-AHP) which considers the uncertainty of the data and impreciseness rather than crisp value. The results indicate that lack of top management commitment, improper organizational structure to create and share knowledge and lack of policy for coordination are the major barriers. These are the areas that need to be handled first in order to remove coordination barriers. The findings of the study throw some new light on the coordination issues in HSCM and provide a more effective, efficient, robust and systematic way to overcome coordination barriers.

In developing countries like India, number of people using public transport for everyday commute is large. Trip planner is a tool which helps commuters to plan their travel beforehand. In case of public transportation systems, trip with the minimum travel time is often of interest. A trip planner solves the time dependent shortest path problem (TDSPP) in a multimodal transport network to optimize one or more criteria like travel time, the number of transfers, etc. One subclass of this is the departure time planner. It suggests the optimal departure time from origin such that travel time to reach the destination will be minimum. This paper presents development of multimodal departure time planner using General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) data. A citywide public transportation network is constructed with bus, metro and walking as modes of transport. Nodes represent transit stops and edges represent transportation services available in between nodes. The schedule corresponding to every mode is incorporated in the network. Origin, destination, and the latest arrival time at the destination for the trip are inputs from the user. A schedule-based algorithm is implemented which runs backward in time to calculate optimal labels at every node of the network. The results produced by the trip planner are found to be promising in terms of accuracy and feasibility.

The rising construction output in India and its future potential, fuelled by rapid economic growth and socio-economic transitions, has necessitated sustainability integration into lifecycles of construction projects. The imperatives and implications of this integration transcend India's boundaries by influencing the global efforts in mitigating climate change and realizing the sustainable development goals. Yet, there is lack of studies that synthesize and critically evaluate the available literature to provide an overview of the current state of sustainable construction (SC) research in India and provide directions for future research. To this end, a systematic literature review (SLR) has been undertaken here using deductive content analysis. It reveals that the current SC research endeavours are predominantly oriented towards the macro-industry level, the environmental dimension and the internal stakeholders. Additionally, more emphasis has been provided on the final project deliverable compared to the project processes. Overall, this study makes three specific contributions: i) the current thrust areas of SC research in India have been identified while pointing out the imbalance in this academic pursuit; ii) a deductive content analysis framework has been developed that provides a generic template for conducting similar SLRs in the context of other countries; and iii) multiple research gaps have been identified and suggestions to design future studies are proposed based on extant SC literature, especially from similar developing economies. Therefore, despite its Indian focus, this review allows implications for other developing economies set for a similar socio-economic transition and growth in construction output.

In requirement analysis, goal models play an important role in assessing alternative design options of a software system. Many qualitative and quantitative goal reasoning approaches have been proposed for goal models such as Knowledge Acquisition in Automated Space (KAOS), Non- Functional Requirements (NFR), and Goal Oriented Requirement Language (GRL). However, for i∗ goal model only qualitative reasoning has been proposed in Requirement Engineering literature. The aim of this paper is to present a quantitative goal reasoning for i∗ goal model. The proposed approach was validated with case studies from existing literature and offers a guide in the decision process. To support the validation a simulation was developed in Visual C++.