• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.43 no.3
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• pp.101-111
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• 2020

Companies struggle to make their best products with high quality and service at a competitive price in global markets. However, customer needs and requirements keep changing with a variety of situations. Companies that face the changes can not stay the same and make an effort to adapt themselves to new circumstances. They would probably review the overall management system that is currently implementing to improve management efficiency. Among other things, quality might be considered to be a crucial element if they are manufacturing industries to be sustained in global markets. KSA (Korean Standards Association) is a government-affiliated organization under the Ministry of Trade, Infrastructure, and Energy. It is a Korean standards provider for quality and service industry. KSA confers national commendations for organizations, quality circles, artisans, QCEC (Quality Competitive Excellent Company), and the most honorable KNQA (Korean National Quality Award) every year. KSA established KNQA on the basis of Malcom Baldrige National Quality Award, Deming Prize, and European Quality Award. Research on quality awards shows that there are many similarities in the framework. Although KSA summarizes two factors for 13 evaluation indicators in the quality competitive excellent model of QCEC, the categorization is ambiguous to explain them according to earlier studies. We performed a deep analysis of foreign quality awards and background for KNQA and QCEC. We conducted a content analysis of KNQA and QCEC and matched evaluation items that were closely related. We proposed a quality competitiveness model with three factors, Technology, System, and Tools, summarizing 13 evaluation indicators in QCEC. Based on audit data for six years from 2012 to 2017 we carried out a confirmatory factor analysis for the proposed model by examining the model validity and fitness.

• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.585-593
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• 2021

The service industry has become the driving force of economic development in recent years. With the current fierce competitive situation, competing businesses have continually provided a superior quality of service, and an excellent perceived brand image to gain customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. This study's current purpose is to empirical research the linking between service quality, brand image, customer satisfaction, and customer loyalty. We collect research data from 299 consumers who bought goods at supermarkets in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, using a convenient sampling technique. We proposed the conceptual model from prior studies and considered it in Vietnam's context. PLS-SEM was conducted to test the relationships in the conceptual model. We have estimated the scale's reliability by Cronbach's alpha values and composite reliability values. Moreover, we have evaluated discriminant validity by the Fornell-Larcker standard. The findings showed that service quality positively affects the brand image, customer satisfaction, and customer loyalty. Likewise, the results also confirmed brand image had a positive impact on customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. Moreover, the outcomes also disclosed that customer satisfaction had a positive relationship with customer loyalty. The research suggested implications for managers, limitations, and directions for future research from the above findings.

• IE interfaces
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.52-63
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• 2012

Up-to-date enlargement of the scale of global outsourcing has brought about the need of systematic and efficient tools for competitive supplier discovery located in various areas. A web-based business supporting system, referred to as Excellent Manufacturer Scouting System(EMSS), is being developed to serve core business functions including supplier discovery, negotiation, and collaboration between overseas buyers and domestic suppliers throughout the process of supply chain formation. In this paper, a supplier assessment model devoted to evaluation of core manufacturing capability is proposed by targeting small and medium sized mold companies. The assessment model will eventually be loaded to EMSS. Even if many well-designed models for supplier assessment have been presented in literature, most of them limit the evaluation criteria to somewhat general information on a given supplier, such as cost, delivery time, quality, rather than core manufacturing capability itself. This research is pioneering work on supplier assessment from the viewpoint of manufacturability. The proposed assessment model classifies assessment indices into six criteria, which have been drawn by intensive survey and analysis of the mold industry. Actual assessment indices for each criterion are also presented along with an exemplary evaluation result.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.12 no.12
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• pp.742-760
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• 2012

Festival contents have played a role as a mediator that connects consumers and producers of the Festivals to express the purpose or theme of those. The successful quality factors to be successively sustainable excellent Festivals include ritual, experience, exhibition, sales, education, competitive, performance. In this study, Festival contents scales, that is named CONTSQUAL, being consisted of seven factors were drawn through the analysis of Cultural Tourism Festival 2012. Festival CONTSQUAL is ritual, experience, exhibition, sales, education, competitive, performance. The research sample is participants in the "Geumsan Insam Festival". Empirical analysis was carried out for visitors to verify the scales and research model. As a result, among festival CONTSQUAL, all components of qualities affected positively on Festival Flow but ritual and education. Festival flow affected positively on festival satisfaction while festival satisfaction affected positively on behavior intention. This study not only measured festival quality through the newly developed CONTSQUAL scales underlying sustainable competitive festival, but also built basic foundation for objectively assessing the festival contents quality, which would result in ensure successful local festival.

• Industrial Engineering and Management Systems
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.155-164
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• 2012

As the global market becomes more competitive, manufacturing industries face relentless pressure caused by a growing tendency of greater varieties of products, shorter manufacturing cycles and more sophisticated customer requirements. Efficient and effective supplier selection and order allocation decisions are, therefore, important decisions for a manufacturer to ensure stable material flows in a highly competitive supply chain, in particular, when customers are willing to accept products with less desirable product attributes (e.g., color, delivery date) for economic reasons. This paper attempts to solve optimally the challenging problem of supplier selection and order allocation, taking into consideration the customer flexibility for a manufacturer producing multi-products to satisfy the customers' demands in a multi period planning horizon. A new mixed integer programming model is developed to describe the behavior of the supply chain. The objective is to maximize the manufacturer's total profit subject to various operating constraints of the supply chain. Due to the complexity and non-deterministic polynomial-time (NP)-hard nature of the problem, an improved genetic approach is proposed to solve the problem optimally. This approach differs from a canonical genetic algorithm in three aspects: a new selection method to reduce the chance of premature convergence and two problem-specific repair heuristics to guarantee feasibility of the solutions. The results of applying the proposed approach to solve a set of randomly generated test problems clearly demonstrate its excellent performance. When compared with applying the canonical genetic algorithm to locate optimal solutions, the average improvement in the solution quality amounts to as high as ten percent.

• Archives of design research
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.77-86
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• 2004

User-Centered Design Approach plays important role in dealing with usability issues for developing modern technology products. Yet it is still questionable whether the User-Centered approach is enough for the development of successful consumer contents since the User-Centered Design is originated from the software engineering field where meeting customers' functional requirement is the most critical aspect in developing a software. However, modern consumer market is already saturated and in order to meet ever increasing consumer requirements, the User-Centered Design approach needs to be expanded. As a way of incorporating the User-Centered Approach into the consumer product development, Jordan suggested the 'Pleasure-based Approach' in industrial design field, which usually generates multi-dimensional user requirements: 1)physical, 2)cognitive, 3)identity and 4) social. It is the current tendency that many portal and community service providers focus on fulfilling both functional and emotional needs for users when developing new items, contents and services. Previously fulfilling consumers' emotional needs solely depend on visual designer's graphical sense and capability. However, taking the customer-centered approach on withdrawing consumers' unknown needs is getting critical in the competitive market environment. This paper reviews different types of user research techniques and categorized into 6 ways based on Kano(1992)'s product quality model. Based on his theory, only performance factors, such as suability, can be identified through the user-centered design approach. The user-centered design approach has to be expanded to include factors include personality, sociability, pleasure, and so on. In order to identify performance as well as excellent factors through user research, a user-research framework was established and tested through the case study, which is ' the development of new online service for teens '. The results of the user research were summarized at the end of the paper and the pros and cons of each research techniques were analyzed.