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Research questions: Attaining competitive advantages is a result of satisfying customer demands with a certain service/product composition. The business process model approach has become popular in order to meet service needs. In addition more and more companies create value along supply chains and the function of logistics becomes part of such a value creation. Collaboration is one major influencing success factor. By adjusting to market changes companies focus on internal processes and costs instead of targeting on customer and supply chain total benefits/costs and especially quality chances. Restructuring business processes therefore is estimated to be under evaluated. IT hereby shows a manifold impact. This value is analyzed and conducted on an ongoing business process redesign project of a logistics service provider (LSP).
Methods: The theoretical part of the paper illustrates the framework of business processes, evaluation, development of redesign techniques and strategies by linking this background to the role of IT with focus on a customer service process. In a second step an equitation model evaluates hypotheses from a LSP and customer perspective in order to formulate innovation potentials targeting the customer collaboration process.
Results: The findings express the need to overcome company borders in supply chains, include partners and use IT tools to develop information quality to raise a final higher customer satisfaction. Companies rely more and more on their networks, while cost and business process programs don´t include relationship and process gains. Especially the impact of rising information quality in the supply chain gives the possibility to evaluate and raise quality developments.
This study investigates chemical grafting with fatty acid chlorides as a method for the surface modification of hydrophilic web materials. The resulting changes in the water repellence and barrier properties were studied. For this purpose, different grades of polyvinyl alcohol (PVOH) were coated on regenerated cellulose films (“cellophane”) and paper and then grafted with fatty acid chlorides. The PVOH grades varied in their degree of hydrolysis and average molecular weight. The surface was esterified with two fatty acid chlorides, palmitoyl (C16) and stearoyl chloride (C18), by chemical grafting. The chemical grafting resulted in water-repellent surfaces and reduced water vapor transmission rates by a factor of almost 19. The impact of the surface modification was greater for a higher degree of hydrolysis of the polyvinyl alcohol and for shorter fatty acid chains. Although the water vapor barrier for palmitoyl-grafted PVOH was higher than for stearoyl-grafted PVOH, the contact angle with water was lower. Additionally, it was shown that a higher degree of hydrolysis led to higher water vapor barrier improvement factors after grafting. Furthermore, the oxygen permeability decreased after grafting significantly, due to the fact that the grafting protects the PVOH against humidity when the humidity is applied on the grafted side. It can be concluded that the carbon chain length of the fatty acid chlorides is the limiting factor for water vapor adsorption, but the grafting density is the bottleneck for water diffusing in the polymer.