• Fashion & Textile Research Journal
• /
• v.12 no.3
• /
• pp.291-301
• /
• 2010

Today Korean clothing companies are experiencing difficulties in the global market due to unfavorable business conditions including poor production environments, labor shortage, rising costs, the further opening of the domestic distribution market, and increased competition among them. As a result, this has caused many of Korean clothing companies to transfer their production bases abroad in search of relatively inexpensive labor force, instead of using domestic plants. This study attempted to examine how Korean clothing companies perceive production environments and labor standards with regard to their offshore outsourcing. In such an attempt, in-depth interviews were conducted with 24 brand-name clothing firms. Those interviewed firms were the brands for the domestic or foreign market that were found to produce more than 200,000 pieces of clothing per year, and also the group of interviewees included some promotion service providers. The key findings from this study are as follows: First, a large number of the interviewed clothing companies were found to manage their foreign contract manufacturers by "visiting their factories regularly on a seasonal basis" or "stationing their personnel in factory for management purposes." Second, in relation to quality control in their foreign manufacturers, the most frequent response was to "have personnel stationed in those manufacturers." A smaller number of the clothing companies answered that they had "engaged their production management teams in quality control from time to time," or "used their inspectors to inspect products." Third, when asked about labor standards in foreign contract manufacturers, the largest number of the clothing companies responded, "we apply our own standards." The results of this study suggest that most of domestic clothing companies still use offshore sourcing just as a means of reducing their initial labor costs. However, in the continuously changing environment of the global clothing industry, clothing businesses are required to escape from the early phases of their manufacturing environments and set up more globalized standards.

• Journal of Convergence for Information Technology
• /
• v.7 no.6
• /
• pp.259-265
• /
• 2017

This study reviewed the existing studies in order to set up a strategy that can achieve the trust and business performance of the franchisers, who are actually operating franchised business, breaking from the research trend centered around franchise headquarters and added the factors of the franchise headquarters' strategy for expanding franchises, including word-of-mouth communication and advertising & publicity and added the exercise of recruitment agency outsourcing, flagship store, recently utilized often as preceding variables to verify the causal relation between the trust of the franchiser and the business performance of the franchise. The implications of this study, it can be concluded that the government authority for the attraction of healthy franchises can continuously attract franchises and enter the market can continuously attract franchises by increasing the trust of the franchises, and powerfully investing and managing them for the effort through word-of-mouth marketing. It is expected that this study will be helpful in the establishment of a business strategy for forming a continuous relationship as well as the franchise head office's strategy for the recruitment of new franchises.

• Design Convergence Study
• /
• v.16 no.4
• /
• pp.1-16
• /
• 2017

As the local manufacturing industry has entered a phase of stagnation, service and product design based on user experience has been highlighted as an alternative for the innovation. However, SMEs(Small and Medium-sized Enterprises) are still struggling to overcome the current crisis. One of the reasons is that SMEs do not have enough contact points with the validated UX firms and experts. Thus, SMEs has a high barrier to invest in new opportunity area, user experience. In this study, we aim to figure out UX experts' competence to perform the UX method to solve the UX problems based on the KSA framework(Knowledge, Skill, Attitude). Based on the literature review and expert workshop, we grouped the UX method according to the similarity of the competence required to conduct the method. With cluster analysis, 5 different groups of UX method were defined based on the competence, Panoramic Analysis, Meticulous Observation and Analysis, Intuitive Interpretation, Agile Visualization, and Logical Inspection. The results would be applied to compose a portfolio of UX experts and to implement a mechanism that could recommend the professional experts to the company.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
• /
• v.20 no.1
• /
• pp.195-211
• /
• 2014

Cloud computing services provide IT resources as services on demand. This is considered a key concept, which will lead a shift from an ownership-based paradigm to a new pay-for-use paradigm, which can reduce the fixed cost for IT resources, and improve flexibility and scalability. As IT services, cloud services have evolved from early similar computing concepts such as network computing, utility computing, server-based computing, and grid computing. So research into cloud computing is highly related to and combined with various relevant computing research areas. To seek promising research issues and topics in cloud computing, it is necessary to understand the research trends in cloud computing more comprehensively. In this study, we collect bibliographic information and citation information for cloud computing related research papers published in major international journals from 1994 to 2012, and analyzes macroscopic trends and network changes to citation relationships among papers and the co-occurrence relationships of key words by utilizing social network analysis measures. Through the analysis, we can identify the relationships and connections among research topics in cloud computing related areas, and highlight new potential research topics. In addition, we visualize dynamic changes of research topics relating to cloud computing using a proposed cloud computing "research trend map." A research trend map visualizes positions of research topics in two-dimensional space. Frequencies of key words (X-axis) and the rates of increase in the degree centrality of key words (Y-axis) are used as the two dimensions of the research trend map. Based on the values of the two dimensions, the two dimensional space of a research map is divided into four areas: maturation, growth, promising, and decline. An area with high keyword frequency, but low rates of increase of degree centrality is defined as a mature technology area; the area where both keyword frequency and the increase rate of degree centrality are high is defined as a growth technology area; the area where the keyword frequency is low, but the rate of increase in the degree centrality is high is defined as a promising technology area; and the area where both keyword frequency and the rate of degree centrality are low is defined as a declining technology area. Based on this method, cloud computing research trend maps make it possible to easily grasp the main research trends in cloud computing, and to explain the evolution of research topics. According to the results of an analysis of citation relationships, research papers on security, distributed processing, and optical networking for cloud computing are on the top based on the page-rank measure. From the analysis of key words in research papers, cloud computing and grid computing showed high centrality in 2009, and key words dealing with main elemental technologies such as data outsourcing, error detection methods, and infrastructure construction showed high centrality in 2010~2011. In 2012, security, virtualization, and resource management showed high centrality. Moreover, it was found that the interest in the technical issues of cloud computing increases gradually. From annual cloud computing research trend maps, it was verified that security is located in the promising area, virtualization has moved from the promising area to the growth area, and grid computing and distributed system has moved to the declining area. The study results indicate that distributed systems and grid computing received a lot of attention as similar computing paradigms in the early stage of cloud computing research. The early stage of cloud computing was a period focused on understanding and investigating cloud computing as an emergent technology, linking to relevant established computing concepts. After the early stage, security and virtualization technologies became main issues in cloud computing, which is reflected in the movement of security and virtualization technologies from the promising area to the growth area in the cloud computing research trend maps. Moreover, this study revealed that current research in cloud computing has rapidly transferred from a focus on technical issues to for a focus on application issues, such as SLAs (Service Level Agreements).