Dr.Sreekumar
@rimsedu.ac.in
Professor, Management
Rourkela Institute of Management Studies
EDUCATION
Ph.D (Management)
RESEARCH, TEACHING, or OTHER INTERESTS
Management of Technology and Innovation, Marketing
Scopus Publications
Scholar Citations
Scholar h-index
Scholar i10-index
Scopus Publications
Sreekumar, Swati Das, Bikash Ranjan Debata, Rema Gopalan, and Shakir Khan
Springer Nature Singapore
Sreekumar, Swati Das, Rema Gopalan, and Bikash Ranjan Debata
IGI Global
Retail industry plays an important role in global economic scenario and contributes around 27 percent of world economy. The use of information technology enhances customer self-awareness, and it is a proven fact that consumers who enjoy their shopping experience end up buying more and more things. Retail is one of the sectors that has seen significant change since the introduction of Industry 4.0 technologies like cloud computing, IoT, fog computing, artificial intelligence, etc. This change can be seen in supermarkets like Amazon Go store, Alibaba Hema store, IKEA, and many more. The study focuses on various technological advancement including application of fog computing for giving the Indian retail industry a competitive advantage. The study also observes that store organizations that emphasize store design and adoption of technological innovations to simplify the purchasing process have been very successful in creating loyal customers for their stores.
Sreekumar, Rema Gopalan, and Biswajit Satpathy
IGI Global
This article attempts to develop a model by integrating interpretive structural modeling (ISM) and quality function deployment (QFD) methodology by establishing the relationship between the Indian retail service quality dimensions and service quality enablers. The integrated approach is employed to translate customers' requirements/needs into specific service design factors/requirements in the Indian retail context. The retail service quality dimensions are identified using factor analysis and are considered as the customer demands in QFD process. Thirteen retail enablers were identified through an extensive literature survey and expert opinions. The enablers identified for the study were treated as design requirement for employing quality function deployment (QFD) in order to prioritize the design requirements. The results found showed that retail enablers ‘Image of the Store' and ‘Value Conscious Consumers' can be emphasized more in a priority basis by the Indian retailers followed by retail enablers ‘Location of store' and ‘Globalization/Competition'.
Santosh Kumar Biswal, N.A. Sreekumar, and Arun Kumar Panda
Inderscience Publishers
Retail industry in India is pivotal for its economy contributing around 20% to the country's gross domestic product. The competition is retaining and attracting new customers to the store. There are many tangible and intangible factors influencing the success of a store. Store image, which is formed by the stake holders encompassing all the components of retail mix play an important role in store success. The research is carried out in seven major cities in the eastern part of India. A structured questionnaire containing 32 items was developed based on literature review. A total of 552 usable responses were collected across different demographic profile for the study. The paper identifies eight factors influencing the store image viz. store reputation, physical characteristics, customer service, convenience, product reliability, supporting facilities, services, and pricing policy. It is found in the study, supporting facility has more influence on overall image of the store, followed by product reliability and services. It is also observed that pricing policy of the store has least impact on store image. In the emerging economic scenario Indian retailers shall be more scientific in their approach and give right importance to the parameters influencing their bottom line.
Rema Gopalan, Sreekumar ., and Biswajit Satpathy
Emerald
Purpose– With the growing importance of service quality in Indian retail, it becomes critical for the retailers to identify the appropriate dimensions for their retail stores. In the process of evaluating service quality the decision maker is often faced with ambiguities due to the imprecise information gained from the respondents. The purpose of this paper is to present an integrated fuzzy (fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) approach to help the decision makers/retailers in practicing and judging the priorities of service quality strategies and accordingly benchmarking retail stores in Indian retail environment.Design/methodology/approach– The study incorporated the five basic dimensions of Retail Service Quality Scale proposed by Dabholkaret al.(1996) and the FAHP approach to three leading apparel retail stores of a major city (Rourkela) of Orissa (an Indian state located in eastern part of the country) to determine the weights of criteria and sub-criteria of retail service quality.Findings– The study identified that the dimensions, namely, personal interaction, physical aspects, reliability and policy are perceived as important by the Indian consumers. Merchandise and the store’s willingness to handle returns and exchanges emerge as the most influencing variable affecting the overall service quality of the store.Research limitations/implications– The study was restricted to a major city of Orissa and to three apparel stores. The results obtained may not be extrapolated to the country as a whole. The authors believe that the integrated approach of FAHP could be used by a variety of service industries to evaluate the service quality. The study did not investigate switching behavior among the respondents as they had been visiting all the three apparel stores during the preceding months.Practical implications– The integrated approach of FAHP makes an empirical contribution to the service quality and retail marketing literature by overcoming the uncertainty of concepts those are associated with human beings’ subjective judgments.Social implications– The retailer can improve the quality of service provided by them based on the parameters important in Indian context, which will lead to higher customer satisfaction.Originality/value– This paper can help the retail service providers to identify which of the retail service quality dimensions requires much attention to create sustainable competitive advantage.
Bikash Ranjan Debata, Bhaswati Patnaik, S.S. Mahapatra, and N.A. Sreekumar
Inderscience Publishers
The main purpose of the present study is to develop an appropriate construct to benchmark medical tourism in India for effective decision-making by minimising deficiencies and implementing possible strategies to improve the medical tourism performance. A total of 39 medical tourism service providers in India are chosen for benchmarking purpose. Data envelopment analysis (DEA), being a robust mathematical tool has been employed to evaluate the efficiency of medical tourism. The peer group and peer weights for the inefficient medical tourism service providers have been identified. The study identifies the parameters in which the inefficient decision-making units (DMUs) lack for formulating necessary strategies to improve upon them. The method being a generic one can be adopted by the managers to assess medical tourism performance and finds a suitable peer to which it should follow to improve own technical efficiency followed by in what respect it has to improve.
Sreekumar and Gokulananda Patel
IGI Global
In the present economy, both at national and international front service sector, is playing a pivotal role as a major contributor towards the GDP. The importance of service sector necessitates the efficiency measurement of various service units. The opening of Indian economy (Liberalisation – Privitisation – Globalisation) has affected every segment of Indian industry and service sector, education being no exception. Today, management education is one of the most sought after higher education options for Indian students. Management education in India has also undergone many changes in the last decade or so, meeting the need of industries. Meeting this growing demand has lead to proliferation of management institutions, and in many a cases the quality of education is compromised. Some popular Indian magazines and journals started ranking the Indian B-Schools intending to give information to all the stake holders involved. All these methods either use weighted average or clustering method to rank the institutes. This chapter proposes an alternative method based on efficiency analysis using Data Envelopment Analysis to rank the Indian B-Schools. The B-schools are observed over multiple periods of time, and the variations of efficiency are used to draw a conclusion about the performance of B-schools. Window analysis is used to compare the performance of B-schools over the period of time.
Rajeev Kumar Panda
Informa UK Limited
In agribusiness, profitability critically depends on the choice of proper marketing channels. This article studies the factors influencing marketing channel choices of vegetable farmers. Vegetable farmers have generally 3 choices to sell their produce, which are formal and informal market participation vis-à-vis nonmarket participation. Ten independent variables are considered for the study and a multinomial logistic regression model is used for the analysis. The study finds 4 major variables that can influence farmers’ decision to shift from nonmarket participation to informal or formal market participation. The article further identifies 4 microlevel marketing channels and assesses their efficiency.
Bikash Ranjan Debata, Bhaswati Patnaik, S.S. Mahapatra, and N.A. Sreekumar
Inderscience Publishers
This paper attempts to develop a medical tourism service quality construct that will be used for evaluation of the medical tourism service providers in India. Cross-sectional survey of medical tourists at seven hospitals including Joint Commission International (JCI) accredited and non-accredited hospitals across India is carried out and 332 responses are collected from seven hospitals. The data were collected between March 2010 and June 2010. Analysis of data helps to propose a 36-item scale. Ten dimensions of perceived medical tourism service quality are identified viz., accessibility/convenience, treatment satisfaction, courtesy, physical environment features, technical quality of care competency, promptness, facility premises, alternative therapy, finance factors for medical services and pharmaceutical services. Reliability, validity, and factor structure of the construct are evaluated. The interrelationship between medical tourism design requirements is identified using interpretative structural modelling (ISM). These aforesaid dimensions are treated as voice of customers (VoC) and 11 design requirements (medical tourism design requirements) from extensive literature review are treated as design requirement for employing quality function deployment (QFD) in order to prioritise the design requirements.
Debendra Mahalik and Gokulananda Patel
IGI Global
The increasing rate of technology growth has resulted in decrease in cost of information. These technologies are helpful in coordinating the activities resulting in effective management of the supply chain. Literature shows that the use of Information Technology (IT) plays an important role in managing the processes of SCM. This has resulted in increasing use of IT in SCM. The computerization of SCM processes, if implemented in one go may result in failure. IT implementation prioritization in supply chain is a major issue before the planner as there is no clear cut formula to solve this problem. This paper considers components of SCM like material management, purchase management, production management, logistics and distribution and customer interface for IT implementation prioritization. Two multi-criteria decision making methods (MCDM) viz. analytical hierarchy process (AHP) and a technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) are used in this paper. The novelty of the paper lies in integration of AHP and TOPSIS methods for IT implementation prioritization. The weights of the criterions and the alternatives are calculated using AHP method which is used as an input for TOPSIS analysis for prioritization of IT implementation.
Sabita Mahapatra, Sreekumar, and S.S. Mahapatra
Elsevier BV
M.S. Khan, S.S. Mahapatra, and N.A. Sreekumar
Inderscience Publishers
In the present emerging global economy, the focus has been shifted from manufacturing to service sector necessitating the quality assessment in service sector as an important issue. Education sector, especially Technical Education System (TES), is characterised as highly process oriented, intangibility and multistakeholder situations. Therefore, difficulty arises in evaluating quality of education being imparted aggregating the inputs and outputs of the system. This paper proposes an alternative method viz. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) which can aggregate the input and output components in such situations for obtaining an overall performance measure. Selected technical institutions in India are assessed for their service quality using DEA and suggestion is put forward for the non-performing institutions. The result shows significant difference between the conventional system of evaluation and DEA methods.