EFFECT OF PROCUREMENT OUTSOURCING ON PERFORMANCE OF KENYA AIRWAYS LIMITED

Purpose: The study sought to establish the effects of procurement outsourcing on performance of firms in the airline industry in Kenya with a focus on Kenya Airways Limited. The study specifically looked at the effect of purchasing functions outsourcing, transport and logistics services outsourcing, warehousing services outsourcing and procurement information systems management outsourcing on performance of firms in the airline industry with a focus on Kenya Airways Company Limited.Methodology: The study was guided by Transaction Cost Theory, SCOR Model, the Principal Agency Theory and Resource Dependency Theory. A case study was adopted in the study as a research design and targeted 75 employees in procurement and logistics departments at Kenya Airways Company departments. The study adopted a census technique with respect to the unit of analysis which was Kenya Airways Company Limited. The study used both descriptive as well as inferential statistics for analysis. Descriptive statistics of frequency distributions, percentages and frequency tables were used while inferential statistics of correlation and regression analysis were employed using SPSS version 24.0 to establish the relationship between procurement outsourcing practices and performance of firms in the airline industry.Results: The findings of the study revealed that purchasing functions outsourcing, transport and logistics services outsourcing, warehousing services outsourcing and procurement information system management outsourcing positively and significantly affect performance of firms in the airline industry.Contributions to policy and practice: The study recommends that Kenya Airways Limited should focus on outsourcing purchasing functions since the practice positively and significantly affects performance of the firm. The study also recommends that Kenya Airways Limited should enhance transport and logistics outsourcing since the practice positively and significantly affects performance of the firm. The study further recommends that Kenya Airways Limited should promote outsourcing of warehousing services since the practice positively and significantly affects performance of the firm. The study finally recommends that Kenya Airways Limited should enhance outsourcing of procurement information system management since the practice positively and significantly affects performance of the firm.

Private Prisons

The chapter considers privatization, private prisons, and prison services outsourcing within a Sun Belt to Global South framework. Eschewing the inclination to frame the Sunbelt as a region that merely modernized the South, the chapter reveals instead a series of contradictions—chief among them neoliberal rhetoric and anti-statist politics alongside the seemingly contrasting policies that were dependent on New Deal–era public infrastructure and government planning. By analyzing such service industries as health care, telecommunications, food catering, and construction within a public–private partnership, this chapter reveals how privatization masks neoliberal anti-statism even when growing the state through mass incarceration. The model for this fusion of public services and private industries was the Cold War’s defense industries, where contractors played a pivotal role in decision making within a symbiotic partnership. The chapter concludes that the modern-day prison industrial complex is more a product of the New Deal state than of a neoliberal conservative ascendency. When the Sunbelt’s private–public partnership partnered with corporate globalization, contemporary prison labor occurs within a “Global South” marketplace more than a framework of “neo-slavery.”

Survey of State-of-Art in Green Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is witnessing tremendous growth at one time when climate change and reducing emissions from energy use is gaining attention. With the growth of the cloud, however, comes an increase in demand for energy. There is growing global awareness about reducing greenhouse gas emissions and healthy environments. Green computing in general aims to reduce the consumption of energy and carbon emission and also to recycle and reuse the energy usage in a beneficial and efficient way. Energy consumption is a bottleneck in internet computing technology. Green cloud computing related technology arose as an improvement to cloud computing. Cloud data centers consume inordinate amounts of energy and have significant CO2 emissions as they have a huge network of servers. Furthermore, these data centers are tightly linked to provide high performance services, outsourcing and sharing resources to multiple users through the internet. This paper gives an overview about green cloud computing and its evolution, surveys related work, discusses associated integrated green cloud architecture – Green Cloud Framework, innovations, and technologies, and highlights future work and challenges that need to be addressed to sustain an eco-friendly cloud computing environment that is poised for significant growth.

Vertical relatedness and services outsourcing: a firm-level analysis

This paper analyzes the relationship between local-level vertical relatedness and firms’ services outsourcing, using a data set of 46,671 Italian manufacturing firms observed over the period 1999–2007. The analysis uses a firm-level index of services outsourcing based on the Adelman index, and it proposes a new measure of vertical relatedness. Overall, the results suggest that it is not agglomeration per se that matters for services outsourcing but rather the presence of vertically related industries. The role of firm-level heterogeneity in terms of size, geographic location, and technological regime also emerges.

Confidentiality-Preserving Publicly Verifiable Computation Schemes for Polynomial Evaluation and Matrix-Vector Multiplication

With the development of cloud services, outsourcing computation tasks to a commercial cloud server has drawn attention of various communities, especially in the Big Data era. Public verifiability offers a flexible functionality in real circumstance where the cloud service provider (CSP) may be untrusted or some malicious users may slander the CSP on purpose. However, sometimes the computational result is sensitive and is supposed to remain undisclosed in the public verification phase, while existing works on publicly verifiable computation (PVC) fail to achieve this requirement. In this paper, we highlight the property of result confidentiality in publicly verifiable computation and present confidentiality-preserving public verifiable computation (CP-PVC) schemes for multivariate polynomial evaluation and matrix-vector multiplication, respectively. The proposed schemes work efficiently under the amortized model and, compared with previous PVC schemes for these computations, achieve confidentiality of computational results, while maintaining the property of public verifiability. The proposed schemes proved to be secure, efficient, and result-confidential. In addition, we provide the algorithms and experimental simulation to show the performance of the proposed schemes, which indicates that our proposal is also acceptable in practice.

Determinants of success in transport services outsourcing: empirical study in Europe

Purpose This research proposes ideal interaction patterns for structural dimensions (buyer and supplier representatives involved in the interaction and buyer and supplier critical capabilities) for transport service outsourcing. The purpose of this paper is to establish whether those ideal interaction patterns are determinants of success of the interaction. In this paper, the latter is measured against the corresponding process success and outcome success. Design/methodology/approach This paper proposes a conceptual model based on the prior literature and adapted to this specific case of transport services. The proposed model is approached using the partial least squares simultaneous equation models. For this, the result of a survey to senior management at European machinery, electronics and automotive sector manufacturing plants has been used. Findings When companies possess the proposed ideal patterns for the structural dimensions, this brings with it positive effects on both the process success and the outcome success obtained by the outsourcing plant. Therefore, buyer-supplier relationships have been recognized to play a key role in the outcomes of this interaction and that the design and management of interfaces between companies and their logistics providers are critical. Practical implications Managers can use the present research findings to produce an appropriate interaction design that includes the representatives and capabilities required to make transport service outsourcing a success. Originality/value This paper contributes to the literature on transport research by specifically establishing ideal interaction patterns for the structural dimensions that buyer and supplier’s companies need to consider for achieving successful transport services outsourcing. Besides, the present research proposes a multidimensional measure of outcome success that combines major strategic, operational and financial outputs. Finally, this research represents the first survey-based empirical evidence on the topic, having used a sample of 93 plants belonging to many different companies in five European countries.