Loyalty programs are widely used by organizations as a structured customer relationship management (CRM) tool to build and extend customer-supplier relationship. Although a large number of benefits are offered through them to both companies and consumers, loyalty programs face a set of planning and implementation pitfalls. Scholars or practitioners rarely discuss such pitfalls. Thus, this paper intends to add further values to the current literature by exploring/investigating the main loyalty scheme pitfalls, both theoretically and practically. The study explores a set of loyalty program planning problems and some of the execution’s drawbacks, including clear aim need, loyalty program design, budgeting and experienced employee involvement. In addition to loyalty programs benefits and rewards offered, loyalty programs target customer selection problems using loyalty program promotional tools. For the study, 161 managers and employees who were involved in loyalty program planning and execution were surveyed. Smart-PLS was used to test the developed model and hypotheses. The study found that all studied loyalty program elements identified affected their planning and implementation. However, some of these elements where seen important to be considered when planning loyalty schemes, such schemes’ benefits and rewards offered were still not planned properly and did not meet customer needs or even expectations and, in most cases, the loyalty programs’ aims were not clear to all their stakeholders. The paper also provides additional discussion about additional issues of loyalty schemes planning and execution problems and proposes a set of solutions and recommendations, which might highlight some of the future venues with this regard.

In today’s complex and competitive environment, supply function becomes more a strategic differentiator and a core competency. This function is strongly related to relationship between buyer and supplier. In addition, buyer supplier relationships (BSR) have undertaken considerable changes during the last decade. Although previous empirical research has found the importance of identifying factors that influence BSR, the present paper analyses the factors influencing the successful relationship between buyer and seller. Based on the Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISM), the complex interrelationships between the established factors are inspected. Classification of factors has been carried out based on dependence and driving power by using MICMAC analysis. The present study highlights “Innovation and technology” and “Information exchange” as the most significant factors with high influential power for the BSR. This study aims to aid the decision makers (buyer or supplier) in evolving effective business strategies.

The paper analyzes factors which exert significant impact on supply chain finance (SCF) of real estate sector in Vietnam. Since this interesting topic has not been commonly investigated in empirical research, its results will be meaningful not only on Vietnam but also on other economies. By employing generalized method of moment (GMM) in estimation, the authors report the negative impact of firm profitability (ROA), financial leverage (LEV), firm size (SIZE) and economic growth (GDP) on supply chain finance (SCF). These valuable findings are essential for consideration by the management in improving supply chain finance, especially that of real estate sector.

This research is conducted to examine the determinants of customer satisfaction in using debit cards issued by the Vietnam commercial banks (CB). By applying the exploratory factor analysis (EFA), logistic regression and linear regression on a dataset of 428 customers, we find that the features and price of products were the key determinants influencing the frequency of using debit cards. However, the impact of each determinant is heterogeneous among different groups of customers. Product price and features are more likely to influence the users using debit cards to purchase goods or services in stores or online than customers working for the public agencies or frequently using non-cash payment for high-valued transaction.

Logistics system is one of the basic concepts of effective supply chain management. In the Republic of Kazakhstan, all types of public transport constitute a single transport system (ETS), which includes railway, river, sea, road, air and pipeline transport. An important element of the ETS of the country is the transport network, which determines the possible directions of transportation and the points between which a particular type of communication is established. It consists of communications of different types of public and non-public transport. The formation of effective supply chain management and transport network is due to a number of socio-economic factors: the development and location of the economy; urban settlements; the direction and power of the main transport and economic relations; location of large resort and tourist sites, the need to optimize costs. Additionally, this research analyzes the trends in innovation for logistic services of supply chain management in the targeted region through multiple aspects, intellectual capital, and organizational resources. Research findings show that both multiple aspects and intellectual capital are positively and significantly associated with innovation in logistic services for the supply chain management. However, the study finds no evidence for the relationship between organizational resources and innovation for logistic services in supply chain management. As a result of the research, practical aspects and significance of the management of the transport and logistics system of the republic are determined, on the basis of which the relevant conclusions were made.

Supply chain finance has become an interesting research topic which attracts lots of attention from scholars recently, particularly after the global financial crisis. However, only few studies have examined the causal relationship between supply chain finance and firm performance. More specially, there is a big research gap when almost none of existing research has analysed the nonlinear impact of supply chain finance on firm performance. With this aim, this paper succeeds in giving first empirical evidence on the U-shaped nonlinear relationship between supply chain finance and the performance of seafood firms in Vietnam. Specifically, a bad performance of supply chain finance (the increase in cash conversion cycle - CCC) causes a lower firm performance (FP). Nevertheless, if any decrease in firm performance reaches its minimum (CCC*), the restructuring of the firm will gradually improve it. In addition, firm performance is significantly influenced by controlled variables of firm-specific, firm size (SIZE) and capital structure (CAP), and macroeconomic, economic growth (EG), factors. The findings are valuable for the management as well as scholars in bringing a more comprehensive perspective on the causal relationship between supply chain finance and firm performance.

Supply chains need to redesign their existing strategies and must develop new strategies to effectively face the challenges posed by certain disruptions, both man-made and natural. This requires the supply chains to be highly flexible, visible, reliable and cost-effective leading to the achievement of Agile Supply Chain (ASC). In today’s competitive market, achieving agility in supply chain needs dynamic leadership, strategic vision, mutual cooperation from all members and effective utilization of information technology through customer focus. In spite of their initiatives to achieve ASC for improving their organizational performance, barring a few large companies, the medium and small size manufacturing companies have not yet been able to adopt and design supply chains which lead to ASC. This may be due to various challenges in the process of achieving agility. Also, the published literature in this area is very scanty. Therefore, to fill this gap, the purpose of this study is to determine the mediating role of Information Sharing Strategy (ISS) on Agile Supply Chain (ASC) practices for achieving Supply Chain Performance (SCP) in medium size manufacturing companies in UAE. An empirical survey of supply chain managers in UAE is conducted for this purpose. It is found that information sharing plays a major mediating role in ASC to achieve superior supply chain performance.

This paper investigates the impact of financial leverage and supply chain finance on firm performance of Vietnamese construction sector. Although there is a big gap in the literature needed to be filled, little empirical evidence can be found on this interesting topic. Therefore, the results are essential for Vietnamese firms, particularly those in construction industry. By adopting the generalized method of moment (GMM), the results reveal the significant influence of financial leverage and supply chain finance on the performance of construction firms. In particular, firm performance (FP) is more influenced by financial leverage (FL) than supply chain finance (SCF). The findings also show that supply chain finance plays a key role in enhancing firm performance. Meanwhile, more debts and their inefficient use exert a negative impact on firm performance, which is an unprecedented finding of this study.

The objective of this paper is to assess the impact of supply chain linkage on the performance of aluminum profiles enterprises in Northern Vietnam. After qualitative research results, the research team has discovered a new variable in the linkage model which is the Policy linkage. The study performs official quantitative research on 289 aluminum profiles in Northern Vietnam and the results were analyzed on SPSS 22 and Smart PLS 3.0 software. The results indicate that the links in the supply chain include: Supply linkage, customer linkage, policy linkage and internal linkage all contribute significantly to supply chain management efficiency. Moreover, the supply chain management efficiency had a positive effect on business performance of aluminum profiles in the northern region of Vietnam. Finally, the study gives solutions and recommendations to help aluminum bar enterprises shape the northern region of Vietnam to better link in the supply chain and improve business performance.

The growing environmental and economic concerns oblige logistics operations managers to look for simple solutions to optimize their processes and to corporate sustainability in logistics networks. Logistics collaboration is one of the management practices to foster the sustainability of freight transport. This paper presents an ‘ex ante’ decision support tool to evaluate the economic and ecologic impacts of shippers’ horizontal collaboration in urban freight delivery. Optimization model as a two-echelon location routing problem (2E-LRP) is exploited to demonstrate the benefits of joining facility location and vehicle routing decisions under multi-objective optimization approach. Numerical instances reproducing the real urban network are regenerated to test the proposed mechanism. Scenario analysis is conducted to analyze and discuss the effect of parameters’ changes in generated gains.