Alessandro Creazza

The growth of e-commerce has transformed traditional retail, and “omnichannel” has emerged as the new paradigm of a continuous shopping experience through the synergistic management of multiple consumer touchpoints. This posed new distribution challenges for retailers, who are required to design appropriate fulfilment processes to build consumers’ satisfaction and loyalty. The objective of this paper is to provide retailers with insights for the design of their omnichannel logistics strategy, by leveraging consumers’ preferences for the online fulfilment. We explore the online fulfilment process in terms of features, options at the disposal of consumers and logistics solutions at the disposal of retailers for arranging deliveries and return of products purchased online. We investigate consumers’ preferences to ascertain their choices and evaluate their level of satisfaction and loyalty. To achieve the research objective, we conduct a literature review on the abovementioned themes, followed by a survey study about Millennials’ online fulfilment preferences. The results presented in this work consist of descriptive statistics obtained from the data collected through the survey and pave the way to conduct additional analyses for isolating the antecedents of consumers’ satisfaction and loyalty, related to the online fulfilment process and related logistical issues.

Like most companies, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have become reliant on digital technology for their day-today business operations. While valuable, this comes with challenges; one of which is the rise in cybercrime. In terms of their cybersecurity resilience and risk, SMEs are among the most vulnerable and least mature. This article addresses a gap in the literature that has neglected cybersecurity readiness in SMEs. The study proposes a CyberSecurity Readiness Model for SMEs (CSRM-SME) based on a Socio-Technical view of organizations. The model was applied to three SMEs to assess their cybersecurity readiness and further understand the environment and strategies adopted to prevent and manage cyber-attacks.

The challenges and opportunities of local and regional development center around the
desires of individual areas to enhance prosperity, improve well-being, and increase living standards
through a locality. Regions around the world where growth is taking place, can become prejudiced
by individual stakeholder influence misalignment as businesses, local authorities, public bodies, and
central government sometimes unintentionally, negatively impact the ‘common-good’. The Humber
estuaries burgeoning renewables sector is presented here as a case study example; specifically, the
on-going non-fulfilment of the objective to bring inward investment of 1st and 2nd tier offshore wind
supply chain businesses, including Operations and Maintenance (O&M) and Original Equipment
Manufacturers (OEM) to the area.

Despite an increasing number of third-party logistics service providers (3PLs) are regarding environmental sustainability as an opportunity and a key area of management, there is still a great deal of uncertainty on how 3PLs implement environmental strategies and actions and on how they translate green efforts into practice. The purpose of this paper is to explore environmental strategies in a sample of medium-sized 3PLs operating in Italy and the UK. It specifically analyses the environmental strategies implemented in terms of environmental organisational culture, initiatives, and influencing factors (i.e. drivers and barriers). Research approach: The investigation conducted in this research relied on a qualitative approach and specifically it was based on a comparative case study analysis involving ten medium-sized 3PLs operating in the Italian and UK markets. Findings and originality: Our analysis shows that, notwithstanding environmental sustainability is generally recognised by companies as a strategic priority, a certain degree of diversity in the deployment of the environmental strategy still exists. First of all, not all companies embed the environmental sustainability strategy within the wider corporate strategy. Only few examples of companies have a specific organisational unit dedicated to the environmental management. In terms of adopted initiatives, a limited capacity in implementing supply chain wide initiatives is generally observed. Insights and discussions on the influencing factors are also provided. This paper is original since the extant literature on green strategies in the 3PLs' industry provides findings predominantly from a single country perspective and mainly investigates cases of large or multinational organizations. Research impact: This paper contributes to deepen the knowledge on how 3PLs in two different countries respond to changing market conditions driven by green pressures, and on how they translate their environmental strategy into action. By taking the perspective of medium-sized companies, this paper contributes to the literature on environmental strategies of a category of 3PL organizations overlooked in the extant body of knowledge. Practical impact: The paper provides indications that can help managers of medium-sized 3PL companies in positioning their business compared to the current environmental strategies and practices of 3PLs operating in different countries. This is particularly meaningful in a sector, such as the 3PL industry, where the population of medium-sized organizations is significant in terms of generated turnover and market value.

Supply chain sustainability has recently gained an increasing attention in the supply chain context both from the practitioners’ perspective and as a research area. The aim of the present paper is to investigate the strategies currently undertaken by companies in the supply chain sustainability arena and to study the criteria commonly used for priority-setting amongst different initiatives within the same supply chain phase.