Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the omnichannel practices to propose a conceptualoverview to offer guidance on how to handle their inherent complexities.

Design/methodology/approach – This study is based on a literature review of more than 100academics papers about the multichannel practices and omnichannel practices in the global market.

Findings – To this end, this paper identifies and addresses three limitations of the contemporaryomnichannel literature: the failure to articulate the sources of value creation generated by omnichannelpractices, the conception of omnichannel as targeting a single customer actor only and the static conception ofomnichannel practices. In response to these limitations, this study offers the following: four sources of valuecreation based on the business model concept, a multi-actor customer conception, where several actorspartake in the overall purchase decision and an evolutionary notion of omnichannel practices in terms of theirconstitution and use as part of the overall evolution of a marketplace.

Originality/value – The framework presented in this paper provides a map to take new research beyondits current boundaries and an audit tool to help managers identify their firm’s current omnichannel situation,including limitations and opportunities for further development.

A novel service price equation is advanced to explain how prices in the services market depend on service workers' cognitive time in relation to the actual clock time (physical time) that is contracted for a service. Cognitive time affects service revenues, costs, the targeted service profit, and budgeted service time. The equation shows how the cognitive time of service workers produces a hidden price-lever effect, in which the service price behavior becomes non-linear. A minor difference between the cognitive time and the physical time of a given service generates a significant change in the price level required to realize a targeted service profit. If the workload of a service worker is increased to a certain level, there is a potential service price collapse, implying that the service provider cannot reach the budgeted profit. This collapse condition further advances the emerging literature on behavioral pricing of services.

The present study advances a novel productivity function of knowledge workers. Cognitive science studies provide clear evidence that, for a given event, there is a difference between a worker's cognitive time and physical clock time; this difference gives rise to a cognitive time distortion. The proposed productivity function accounts for workers' dual experiences of time and the kinds of contracts utilized by an economic organization and its customers and workers. This function shows-for the first time and contrary to intuition-that, given certain conditions, workers' cognitive time and the form of contracts utilized are the only conditioners of knowledge worker productivity. The proposed productivity function unearths a hidden economic lever effect whereby a minor degree of time distortion generates a significant level of worker inefficiency. This constitutes a novel contribution to the literature on knowledge worker productivity.

Although IT is playing a significant role in road freight transportation and logistics, there exists a lack of comprehensive knowledge of IT and productivity in the area. This paper presents a review of the research on IT-productivity in the operations and maintenance of road freight transportation and logistics as well as proposes directions for future research. We have conducted the review in both academic and non-academic sources. Based on 26 papers, we have structured the review in three levels: industry level, firm level, and individual level. A number of insights have been made, which characterize the current state of knowledge. Several insights call for further research. We have found that there is a diversity in the terminologies when referring to the positive impact of IT on fuel efficiency for road freight transportation and logistics. Our findings suggest that there is a lack of methodological diversity while understanding the effect of IT on load efficiency in transportation. The existing field experiments can be characterized by two phase design, small sample size and short time for the intervention phase. There is a lack of conceptualization of complementarities when the existing studies show the importance of incentives and training with the introduction of a new digital technology in relation to productivity. This paper is a first attempt to synthesize relevant research on IT-productivity in the operations and maintenance in road freight transportation and logistics.

Increasing the fuel efficiency of industrial machines through digitalization can enable the transport and logistics sector to overcome challenges such as low productivity growth and increasing CO2 emissions. Modern digitalized machines with embedded sensors that collect and transmit operational data have opened up new avenues for the identification of more efficient machine use. While existing studies of industrial machines have mostly focused on one or a few conditioning factors at a time, this study took a complementary approach, using a large set of known factors that simultaneously conditioned both the fuel consumption and productivity of medium-range forklifts (n = 285) that operated in a natural industrial setting for one full year. The results confirm the importance of a set of factors, including aspects related to the vehicles’ travels, drivers, operations, workload spectra, and contextual factors, such as industry and country. As a novel contribution, this study shows that the key conditioning factors interact with each other in a non-linear and non-additive manner. This means that addressing one factor at a time might not provide optimal fuel consumption, and instead all factors need to be addressed simultaneously as a system.

Factors affecting productivity and particularly IT‑enabled productivity increase have been and still remain the major concern for many business sectors. While previously researchers investigated what factors and their complementary relationships affect organizational productivity, organizational economists came to the conclusion that an organization cannot be regarded anymore as a black box since it is not an organization per se that conducts the very work but its resources with the basic elements being a single worker and a single IT system. Currently, it is proposed that we understand organizational internal mechanisms and their functioning for productivity through the lens of complementarity theory and maintain that when factors are synchronized correctly they can bring significant productivity increase. Identification of the complementarity factors and their synchronization bring, however, a major challenge for research methodology. Unlike conventional studies where a few variables independent of each other cause a reaction to dependent variables, in the context of complementarities, the assumption is closer to the real‑world experiences where a set of factors interact with each other to affect one or several dependent variables. The present paper addresses this difficulty of researching complementary factors for an individual knowledge worker and their productivity. The approach taken here is to use multiple and different research methods in a complementary manner, so that the results from each study of the same kind of phenomenon uncover new insights that cannot be derived from any such single study. The results from this multi‑method approach demonstrate new insights into the interplay between the studied factors that condition the productivity of knowledge workers and show the importance of analysing a complex phenomenon with complementary research methods. 

Numerous studies have attempted to determine factors that condition the IT-enabled productivity of information workers but have not yet arrived at a comprehensive conclusion. A so-called complementarity systems approach has been proposed recently, holding that a number of factors need to be managed in a deliberately synchronized manner in order to generate productivity gains from such workers. However, this proposal does not provide specifications for how such synchronization must be conducted and researched. To remedy this gap, this research conducts two parallel and differently designed studies: a longitudinal quasi-randomized field experiment and a well-controlled online experiment. Regarded jointly, each study offers insights into the investigated phenomenon that the other does not, indicating that both studies complement each other. In particular, these two different research approaches to study the complementarities of productive IT use help us to establish how further research design should be developed to investigate individual productivity when a new, more aligned IT system in a company is used together with complementary factors. Moreover, the results from both studies jointly demonstrate that a mandatory context of IT use might provide better access to individuals with both adaptive and innovative cognitive styles than a voluntary working environment. Finally, both studies demonstrate that more detailed research is needed to understand how the productivity of individuals differs when inappropriate cognitive styles are included in complementarity set-ups. Therefore, the two studies offer new insights into the interplay between the studied factors that condition the productivity of information workers and show the importance of analysing a complex phenomenon with multiple, different, and complementary research designs, as each design has inherent conditions with opportunities and limitations, in order to reveal characteristics about the phenomenon being investigated.

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to identify the impact of enterprise systems (ESs), in particular radio frequency identification (RFID) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, on supply chain management (SCM). The results of this conceptual paper demonstrate that ERP and RFID systems contribute to SCM by improving supply chain integration. Supply chain integration occurs to facilitate the flow of financing, products, and information throughout the chain. In this regard, ERP and RFID contribute to integration by enhancing the information flow across the supply chain. Design/methodology/approach - This paper proposes a conceptual model developed from the findings of literature review within the research domains of SCM, ESs, and supply chain integration. Findings - This conceptual study contributes to the existing theory by linking the concept of information technology, ESs to SCM. The conceptual model in this paper may provide insights for executives who wish to implement ERP or RFID systems in their businesses in order to achieve higher integration, both within internal sectors and also with supply chain partners. Originality/value - The findings in this study contribute to the theory base by linking the concept of information technologies, ESs to SCM. The conceptual model presented in this paper can provide insights for executives who wish to implement ERP or RFID systems in their businesses in order to achieve higher integration within internal sectors and with supply chain partners. This study offers new understandings by investigating the impact of ERP and RFID together on SCM.

During the last few decades, the PSS literature has documented industrial firms’ transformation from the product dominant logic of business to product-service bundles constituted by machines and related services. This transformation has had several dramatic implications on firms’ profitability, strategy, operations, organizational setting, sales and marketing approaches, and R&D practices. However, more recently, industrial firms have started to adopt various smart technologies that are embedded within the PSS. The use of smart technologies in PSS gives rise to the new types of PSS that are referred to in this paper as Smart PSS. Based on a literature review of 43 papers from relevant academic fields, this paper seeks answer to the following research question: what are the value creating features of smart product service systems (Smart PSS) in industrial firms? We synthesize the knowledge on Smart PSS to provide a definition and show the distinctive features of Smart PSS and propose an agenda for future research.

A temporal workload model is introduced to identify the relationship between the work time and economic performance of the activities conducted by a human agent in the context of an economic organization. The model's novelty derives from the account of time perception and its consequent cognitive time distortion, the latter being understood as a discrepancy between physical and cognitive time. Current praxis, both theoretical and empirical, assumes only physical time. This assumption is challenged here through the inclusion of time perception and cognitive time distortion in estimating the temporal workload of an economic agent. This inclusion enables a novel comprehension of frequent operational challenges, such as work delays, human stress, output quality issues, and economic inefficiencies. The main contribution to the literature is a specification of a new condition that governs the performance of any economic organization where human agents conduct time assessments.