• Asia pacific journal of information systems
• /
• v.21 no.1
• /
• pp.1-27
• /
• 2011

In an attempt to cope with widespread, dynamic, and accelerating changes in both internal and external business environments, companies often utilize information technologies such as SCM(Supply Chain Management). To date, SCM research has mainly focused on the effects of dynamic factors on SCM success and emphasized adoption strategies and critical success factors. Consequently, the effects of more static factors such as interdependency between SCM partners have been largely ignored. The purpose of this study, therefore, is to examine the effects of both dynamic and static factors on SCM performance by controlling for information quality and partnership quality. The five factors examined in this study include innovative ness, mutual dependency, quality of information, partnership quality, and SCM performance. All factors were examined from the perspective of part suppliers, except the mutual dependency which was examined from two aspects: supplier's dependency on customer and customer's dependency on supplier. Data was collected through five hundred survey questionnaires distributed to the part supplier companies that have implemented SCM systems for at least one year. As a result, a total of 170 valid responses were obtained. A structural equation research model was fitted using SAS 9.1.3 and SMART-PLS 2.0. The results of this study can be summarized as follows. First, innovativeness positively affected SCM information quality. SCM partnership quality, and ultimately SCM performance. The path coefficient between innovativeness and information quality was 0.387, with a t-value of 3.528. Innovativeness also had a positively direct effect on partnership quality. The path coefficient was 0.351 with a t-value of 3.366. The total effect of innovativeness on partnership quality was significant, although its indirect effect on partnership quality by altering information quality was negligible. The total indirect effect of innovativeness on SCM performance by affecting information quality and partnership quality was significant with a p-value of 0.014. Innovativeness played an important role in determining SCM performance. Second, mutual dependency showed no significant effect on SCM information quality. This result contradicts the earlier assertion that the more dependent two companies are, the more accurate and timely the information they exchange ought to be. This study showed that this may not be the case; a partner may provide information of poor quality even when it is strongly dependent on the other. Mutual dependency showed significant effect on partnership quality. However, when the mutual dependency perceived by suppliers was divided into two parts, one being a supplier's dependency on its customer company and the other being a customer's dependency on the supplier, the latter showed a significant impact on the perceived SCM partnership quality. This result indicates that a customer company can hardly improve the partnership quality perceived by suppliers by making them more dependent. It improves only when the suppliers perceive that their partners, typically having more bargaining power, are more dependent on them. The overall effect of mutual dependency of any kind on SCM performance, however, was not significant. Although mutual dependency has been mentioned as an important static factor influencing almost every aspect of cooperation on a supply chain, its influences may not be as significant as it was initially perceived to be. Third, the correlation between information quality and partnership quality was 0.448 with a p-value of less than 0.001. Information quality had a path coefficient of 0.256 to partnership quality with a t-value of 2.940. The quality of information exchanged between partners may have an impact on their partnership quality. Fourth, information quality also had a significant impact on SCM performance with a path coefficient of 0.325 with a t-value of 3.611. In this study, SCM performance was divided into four categories: product quality, cost saving, service quality, and order fulfillment. Information quality has Significant impacts on product quality, cost saving and service quality, but not on order fulfillment. Fifth, partnership quality, as expected, had a significant impact on SCM performance. The path coefficient was 0.403 with a t-value of 3.539. Partnership quality, like information quality, had positive impacts on product quality, cost saving and service quality, but showed no impact on order fulfillment. It seemed that order fulfillment is the hardest category of performance that SCM can satisfy. One major limitation of this study is that it surveyed only the suppliers. To better understand the dual aspects of SCM, it is important to survey both suppliers and the assemblers, especially in pairs. This research, to our best knowledge, was the first attempt to study the level of dependency between the two groups by measuring the dual aspects of SCM and studying mutual dependency from the categories of suppliers and assemblers each.. In the future, a more comprehensive and precise measurement of SCM characteristics needs to be achieved by examining from both the supplier's and assembler's perspectives.

• The Korean Journal of Emergency Medical Services
• /
• v.14 no.3
• /
• pp.13-28
• /
• 2010

Purpose: In this study, we investigated the better application of the law which is about the AED installation and more effective ways of emergency medical care system, to understand the law and to research the current condition of public facilities which belong to local governments, and to seize the aspect of safety guards who currently work in order to provide the installation of AED in the public facilities and to provide more efficient emergency medical service with the effectuation of the immunity law of the good intention of first-aid treatment. Methods: In Gwang-ju, 234 public facilities have been identified by 31 December, 2008. With the exception of the duplication, we researched 158 facilities and received the answers from 95 of them. Results: In the research, 53% of them have had internal emergency first-aid education, and 55% of them didn't have this education and a CPR education manual, and 30% of the facilities even didn't know how to connect with the manager of the company for the first-aid department. On the other hand, most of them were highly interested in CPR and AED education on the ratio of 91% and 93%. 88% of them have been trained about first-aid, 51% of them haven't been retrained, 17% have never been trained. so, the reality of emergency system at public facilities is serious. 78% of them knew they are working at public facilities, though 49% of them didn't know about AED installation. 57% of them didn't know the fact there is the immunity law related with good intentions for first-aid treatment. 63% of the facilities have security guards, and 30% of them didn't answer the questions. Also, many of them agreed to the opinion that all employees should have first-aid training. At representative survey report of participator of public-facility, emergency treatment is 61%, 16% of patients calling. Accordingly they importantly think better doing an on-site first-aid than evacuating the patient. And the rates show that 57% of them answerers tend to call Fire-Office(119) for evacuating the patients, and 28% of them EMIC(1339) for the first-aid. Conclusions: In this study, we are suggest to improve the details of the efficient operations and management after the grasp of the uninstallation, indifference, and unreliable conditions of AED. 1) Need a publicity of AED install cognition which is an emergency medical instrument at public facilities. 2) Arrangement of safety agents at facilities and concerns about them for good management from the parties concerned. 3) Need a designation of legal details according to the decision of the AED installation and the standard of the AED installation. 4) Training about first-aid of safety guards and the persons concerned in the facilities should be practiced participation with the positive and through this, first-aid treatment could be done by anyone who knows the immunity law related to medical emergency. 5) The brochures for the potential users and the results form practicing the instructions need to be improved in many ways through recording the emergency cases that have happened.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
• /
• v.12 no.6
• /
• pp.1-12
• /
• 2017

This paper is brought to asses the training effect of KS-QFD boot camp for the companies in the early growth stage. In particular, the focus of research falls on measuring transfer intension of the participants from the early stage companies older than three years old, motivating effect of applying knowledges acquired from KS-QFD training camp into their real business case. KS-QFD program is presented to help company in the early stage companies over three years old of boosting up their sales volume more than 5 times than now for the next 18 months by this training. The training program of KS-QFD is ultimately to design more practical and helpful program to real business and spread out. The research establish model by setting the learner readiness and perceived content validity by doing training design as independent variables, self-efficacy of learner as mediating variable, and transfer intension as dependant variable. Research results shows the following outcomes. First, learner readiness does not have directly effect on transfer intension under keeping statistical significance. But as the parameter of self-efficacy, it has perfect mediating effect. Second, research proves that perceived content validity have directly impact on learning transfer intension of mediating by self-efficacy partially. This research contributes on proving that learning by doing KS-QFD boot camp enable the participants to build up their self-efficacy and lead to enhance transfer intension. In more steps, the research validates that KS-QFD training camp have delivered very practical and helpful on-site knowledge to the participants.

• THE INTERNATIONAL COMMERCE & LAW REVIEW
• /
• v.70
• /
• pp.159-179
• /
• 2016

Companies do not be resolved by the FTA services of external aid should be operational by assigning dedicated personnel inside the company. FTA is a choice, not an essential trade agreement requirements. If the exporter contracts to provide a certificate of origin in trade agreements, it shall issue a certificate of origin of goods originating management is performed. When considering the future trend of spreading wide FTA, it should be extended to one year to take advantage of the FTA Certificate of Origin environments utilizing a comprehensive environment for regional countries that require proof of origin between certain countries, such as current. FTA utilization of the future is to utilize the GVC(Global Value Chain) efficiently. In other words, the expansion of the consumer market and take advantage of an efficient production base across borders. These environmental changes are needed development of the FTA utilization promotion and FTA experts. The experts studying how to procure raw materials or intermediate goods exports in a variety of regional foreign countries, to meet the rules of origin is required for a successful FTA utilization. One of the objectives of Origin managers are qualified experts in the country of origin can take advantage of the FTA plan. Therefore, managers of origin shall collect their ability to expand the understanding and information about the industry as an international business perspective beyond the Certificate of Origin. In addition, it should be in their best learning expertise for the introduction and development of country of origin control system in an effort to effectively perform its international FTA utilization. Once the FTA is more widespread in the future and build a common origin information it must not be disconnected until the export enterprises from terminal manufacturers systematically. Therefore origin management is preferred by expanding the knowledge base of teaching and learning in the common sense to the universal subject of specialization from professional schools to promote the relevant departments so that they can be opened in a college or university. An FTA hub linking East and West, also need the confidence that in order to become a center of Glabal Supply Chain Using an FTA Certificate of Origin and stable environment for importers to import products from the country offers. Certificate of Origin and all of them thoroughly exporters and companies related to the administration of origin and should create an atmosphere that can effectively respond to the origin verification. Korea shall endeavor to elicit a geopolitical value (FTA Hub), as well as securing a competitive advantage in the global industry leverage, trading at a reasonable price competitive products thereby enhancing production and economic growth through the FTA.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
• /
• v.19 no.11
• /
• pp.278-286
• /
• 2018

The existing test-based qualification system does not sufficiently reflect the demand for skills in industries and there exist concerns regarding its efficacy. In response, an innovative national technical qualification system, which uses a course-based qualification system, has been introduced to supplement the test-type qualification system. This study investigates the impact of the national technical qualification system on companies' decisions concerning employment by analyzing survey data from companies that employed persons who obtained course-based qualifications. Analysis results found the degree of company demand for skills had a positive impact on overall employment decisions. Especially, it was highly likely for those companies that experienced loss due to the lack of technology in the past to decide continued employment and expansion of employment. This suggests that it is necessary to design the national technical qualification system in response to the demand for technological skills of each industry in the future.

• Journal of Industrial Convergence
• /
• v.20 no.8
• /
• pp.41-52
• /
• 2022

Education for an organization is implemented to improve the organizational and each individual's performance. However, the actual results are not as expected. Accordingly, this study is committed to investigate the education related factors that have impact on the organizational performance, which is defined by the trainee's organizational commitment and work performance. Based on the acquired knowledge, we suggest things to consider when designing corporate training for performance creation. First, it is investigated whether the task value and job relevance(educational content characteristics) and the degree of support for education within the company(organizational characteristics) affect learning-transfer of trainees. After that, the causal relationship from the learning-transfer to organizational commitment and work performance(organizational effectiveness) is analyzed. In this overall process, the effect of on-/off-line education is analyzed and compared. As a result, it is found that the task value, the job relevance, and organizational compensation have a significant impact on the learning-transfer, and the learning-transfer has impact on organization commitment and work performance. In addition, the moderating effect of the on-/off- education is identified. This study is conducted only with franchise enterprises and as a future study, a more general sampling is required to extend this work.

• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
• /
• v.19 no.3
• /
• pp.28-36
• /
• 2009

While existing literature has focused extensively on the strengths and weaknesses of the Chaebol and their ownership and governance, there have been few studies of Korean non-Chaebol firms. However, Lee, Lee and Pennings (2001) did not specifically investigate the competitive strategies that non-Chaebol firms use to survive against the Chaebol in the domestic Korean market. The motivation of this paper is to document, through four exploratory case studies, the successful competitive strategies of non-Chaebol Korean companies against the Chaebol and then offer some propositions that may be useful to other entrepreneurial firms as well as public policy makers. Competition and cooperation as conceptualized by product similarity and cooperative inter.firm relationship respectively, are major dimensions of firm.level marketing strategy. From these two dimensions, we develop the following $2{\times}2$ matrix, with 4 types of competitive strategies for non-Chaebol companies against the Chaebol (Fig. 1.). The non-Chaebol firm in Cell 1 has a "me-too" product for the low-end market while conceding the high-end market to a Chaebol. In Cell 2, the non-Chaebol firm partners with a Chaebol company, either as a supplier or complementor. In Cell 3, the non-Chaebol firm engages in direct competition with a Chaebol. In Cell 4, the non-Chaebol firm targets an unserved part of the market with an innovative product or service. The four selected cases such as E.Rae Electronics Industry Company (Co-exister), Intops (Supplier), Pantech (Competitor) and Humax (Niche Player) are analyzed to provide each strategy with richer insights. Following propositions are generated based upon our conceptual framework: Proposition 1: Non-Chaebol firms that have a cooperative relationship with a Chaebol will perform better than firms that do not. Proposition 1a; Co-existers will perform better than Competitors. Proposition 1b: Partners (suppliers or complementors) will perform better than Niche players. Proposition 2: Firms that have no product similarity with a Chaebol will perform better than firms that have product similarity. Proposition 2a: Partners (suppliers or complementors) will perform better than Co.existers. Proposition 2b: Niche players will perform better than Competitors. Proposition 3: Niche players should perform better than Co-existers. Proposition 4: Performance can be rank.ordered in descending order as Partners, Niche Players, Co.existers, Competitors. A team of experts was constituted to categorize each of these 216 non-Chaebol companies into one of the 4 cells in our typology. Simple Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) in SPSS statistical software was used to test our propositions. Overall findings are that it is better to have a cooperative relationship with a Chaebol and to offer products or services differentiated from a Chaebol. It is clear that the only profitable strategy, on average, to compete against the Chaebol is to be a partner (supplier or complementor). Competing head on with a Chaebol company is a costly strategy not likely to pay off for a non-Chaebol firm. Strategies to avoid head on competition with the Chaebol by serving niche markets with differentiated products or by serving the low-end of the market ignored by the Chaebol are better survival strategies. This paper illustrates that there are ways in which small and medium Korean non-Chaebol firms can thrive in a Chaebol environment, though not without risks. Using different combinations of competition and cooperation firms may choose particular positions along the product similarity and cooperative relationship dimensions to develop their competitive strategies-co-exister, competitor, partner, niche player. Based on our exploratory case-study analysis, partner seems to be the best strategy for non-Chaebol firms while competitor appears to be the most risky one. Niche players and co-existers have intermediate performance, though the former do better than the latter. It is often the case with managers of small and medium size companies that they tend to view market leaders, typically the Chaebol, with rather simplistic assumptions of either competition or collaboration. Consequently, many non-Chaebol firms turn out to be either passive collaborators or overwhelmed competitors of the Chaebol. In fact, competition and collaboration are not mutually exclusive, and can be pursued at the same time. As suggested in this paper, non-Chaebol firms can actively choose to compete and collaborate, depending on their environment, internal resources and capabilities.

• Korean small business review
• /
• v.31 no.2
• /
• pp.85-102
• /
• 2009

With the continued globalization of world markets, transfer pricing has become one of the dominant sources of controversy in international taxation. Transfer pricing is the process by which a multinational corporation calculates a price for goods and services that are transferred to affiliated entities. Consider a Korean electronic enterprise that buys supplies from its own subsidiary located in China. How much the Korean parent company pays its subsidiary will determine how much profit the Chinese unit reports in local taxes. If the parent company pays above normal market prices, it may appear to have a poor profit, even if the group as a whole shows a respectable profit margin. In this way, transfer prices impact the taxable income reported in each country in which the multinational enterprise operates. It's importance lies in that around 60% of international trade involves transactions between two related parts of multinationals, according to the OECD. Multinational enterprises (hereafter MEs) exert much effort into utilizing organizational advantages to make global investments. MEs wish to minimize their tax burden. So MEs spend a fortune on economists and accountants to justify transfer prices that suit their tax needs. On the contrary, local governments are not prepared to cope with MEs' powerful financial instruments. Tax authorities in each country wish to ensure that the tax base of any ME is divided fairly. Thus, both tax authorities and MEs have a vested interest in the way in which a transfer price is determined, and this is why MEs' international transfer prices are at the center of disputes concerned with taxation. Transfer pricing issues and practices are sometimes difficult to control for regulators because the tax administration does not have enough staffs with the knowledge and resources necessary to understand them. The authors examine transfer pricing practices to provide relevant resources useful in designing tax incentives and regulation schemes for policy makers. This study focuses on identifying the relevant business and environmental factors that could influence the international transfer pricing of MEs. In this perspective, we empirically investigate how the management perception of related variables influences their choice of international transfer pricing methods. We believe that this research is particularly useful in the design of tax policy. Because it can concentrate on a few selected factors in consideration of the limited budget of the tax administration with assistance of this research. Data is composed of questionnaire responses from foreign firms in Korea with investment balances exceeding one million dollars in the end of 2004. We mailed questionnaires to 861 managers in charge of the accounting departments of each company, resulting in 121 valid responses. Seventy six percent of the sample firms are classified as small and medium sized enterprises with assets below 100 billion Korean won. Reviewing transfer pricing methods, cost-based transfer pricing is most popular showing that 60 firms have adopted it. The market-based method is used by 31 firms, and 13 firms have reported the resale-pricing method. Regarding the nationalities of foreign investors, the Japanese and the Americans constitute most of the sample. Logistic regressions have been performed for statistical analysis. The dependent variable is binary in that whether the method of international transfer pricing is a market-based method or a cost-based method. This type of binary classification is founded on the belief that the market-based method is evaluated as the relatively objective way of pricing compared with the cost-based methods. Cost-based pricing is assumed to give mangers flexibility in transfer pricing decisions. Therefore, local regulatory agencies are thought to prefer market-based pricing over cost-based pricing. Independent variables are composed of eight factors such as corporate tax rate, tariffs, relations with local tax authorities, tax audit, equity ratios of local investors, volume of internal trade, sales volume, and product life cycle. The first four variables are included in the model because taxation lies in the center of transfer pricing disputes. So identifying the impact of these variables in Korean business environments is much needed. Equity ratio is included to represent the interest of local partners. Volume of internal trade was sometimes employed in previous research to check the pricing behavior of managers, so we have followed these footsteps in this paper. Product life cycle is used as a surrogate of competition in local markets. Control variables are firm size and nationality of foreign investors. Firm size is controlled using dummy variables in that whether or not the specific firm is small and medium sized. This is because some researchers report that big firms show different behaviors compared with small and medium sized firms in transfer pricing. The other control variable is also expressed in dummy variable showing if the entrepreneur is the American or not. That's because some prior studies conclude that the American management style is different in that they limit branch manger's freedom of decision. Reviewing the statistical results, we have found that managers prefer the cost-based method over the market-based method as the importance of corporate taxes and tariffs increase. This result means that managers need flexibility to lessen the tax burden when they feel taxes are important. They also prefer the cost-based method as the product life cycle matures, which means that they support subsidiaries in local market competition using cost-based transfer pricing. On the contrary, as the relationship with local tax authorities becomes more important, managers prefer the market-based method. That is because market-based pricing is a better way to maintain good relations with the tax officials. Other variables like tax audit, volume of internal transactions, sales volume, and local equity ratio have shown only insignificant influence. Additionally, we have replaced two tax variables(corporate taxes and tariffs) with the data showing top marginal tax rate and mean tariff rates of each country, and have performed another regression to find if we could get different results compared with the former one. As a consequence, we have found something different on the part of mean tariffs, that shows only an insignificant influence on the dependent variable. We guess that each company in the sample pays tariffs with a specific rate applied only for one's own company, which could be located far from mean tariff rates. Therefore we have concluded we need a more detailed data that shows the tariffs of each company if we want to check the role of this variable. Considering that the present paper has heavily relied on questionnaires, an effort to build a reliable data base is needed for enhancing the research reliability.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
• /
• v.16 no.3
• /
• pp.99-120
• /
• 2010

Due to the wide spread of customers' frequent access of non face-to-face services, there have been many attempts to improve customer satisfaction using huge amounts of data accumulated throughnon face-to-face channels. Usually, a call center is regarded to be one of the most representative non-faced channels. Therefore, it is important that a call center has enough agents to offer high level customer satisfaction. However, managing too many agents would increase the operational costs of a call center by increasing labor costs. Therefore, predicting and calculating the appropriate size of human resources of a call center is one of the most critical success factors of call center management. For this reason, most call centers are currently establishing a department of WFM(Work Force Management) to estimate the appropriate number of agents and to direct much effort to predict the volume of inbound calls. In real world applications, inbound call prediction is usually performed based on the intuition and experience of a domain expert. In other words, a domain expert usually predicts the volume of calls by calculating the average call of some periods and adjusting the average according tohis/her subjective estimation. However, this kind of approach has radical limitations in that the result of prediction might be strongly affected by the expert's personal experience and competence. It is often the case that a domain expert may predict inbound calls quite differently from anotherif the two experts have mutually different opinions on selecting influential variables and priorities among the variables. Moreover, it is almost impossible to logically clarify the process of expert's subjective prediction. Currently, to overcome the limitations of subjective call prediction, most call centers are adopting a WFMS(Workforce Management System) package in which expert's best practices are systemized. With WFMS, a user can predict the volume of calls by calculating the average call of each day of the week, excluding some eventful days. However, WFMS costs too much capital during the early stage of system establishment. Moreover, it is hard to reflect new information ontothe system when some factors affecting the amount of calls have been changed. In this paper, we attempt to devise a new model for predicting inbound calls that is not only based on theoretical background but also easily applicable to real world applications. Our model was mainly developed by the interactive decision tree technique, one of the most popular techniques in data mining. Therefore, we expect that our model can predict inbound calls automatically based on historical data, and it can utilize expert's domain knowledge during the process of tree construction. To analyze the accuracy of our model, we performed intensive experiments on a real case of one of the largest car insurance companies in Korea. In the case study, the prediction accuracy of the devised two models and traditional WFMS are analyzed with respect to the various error rates allowable. The experiments reveal that our data mining-based two models outperform WFMS in terms of predicting the amount of accident calls and fault calls in most experimental situations examined.

• Journal of Nuclear Fuel Cycle and Waste Technology(JNFCWT)
• /
• v.10 no.1
• /
• pp.63-75
• /
• 2012

This paper gives some basic requirements and preferences of various geological environmental conditions for the final deep geological repository of spent nuclear fuel (SNF). This study also indicates how the requirements and preferences are to be considered prior to the selection of sites for a site investigation as well as the final disposal in Korea. The results of the study are based on the knowledge and experience from the IAEA and NEA/OECD as well as the advanced countries in SNF disposal project. This study discusses and suggests preliminary guideline of the disposal requirements including geological, mechanical, thermal, hydrogeological, chemical and transport properties of host rock with long term geological stabilities which influence the functions of a multi-barrier disposal system. To apply and determine whether requirements and preferences for a given parameter are satisfied at different stages during a site selection and suitability assessment of a final disposal site, the quantitative criteria in each area should be formulated with credibility through relevant research and development efforts for the deep geological environment during the site screening and selection processes as well as specific studies such as productions of safety cases and validation studies using a generic underground research laboratory (URL) in Korea.