Purpose The popularity of social networks has created business opportunities to the electronic commerce environment, being recently named as social commerce. The purpose of this paper is to analyze – from the perspective of the consumer – the main factors and characteristics (personal or related to the products bought) that have influenced consumers to participate in social commerce buying, recommending, comparing and sharing information about products and services in online marketplace and communities. Design/methodology/approach The study is characterized as an exploratory descriptive research, operationalized through a survey, applied to 229 participants of the social network Facebook. The research involves a qualitative stage for identifying potential variables that influence the participation of consumers in social commerce, followed by a quantitative one, including data collection procedures, validation and data analysis. Findings The results show trust, perceived usefulness and information quality as the factors that most influence consumer participation in social commerce, being trust in the website the main predictor. Concerning the characteristics, the findings also show that more expensive products and products classified as computers and electronics use ratings, recommendations and comments online more intensively than books, travel, household appliances and fashion products. Research limitations/implications As limitations of the study, the authors highlight the small number of interviews conducted during the qualitative stage, which may have left out other relevant factors of the analysis on consumers’ participation in social commerce. Another limitation refers to the selection of the participants of the study; all members of the social network Facebook are identified by the contact net of the authors – though it has been tried to enlarge this contact list by requesting the respondents to share the questionnaire link with their acquaintances, we should be cautious about the generalization of the results. Originality/value The study proposes an instrument to identify factors and characteristics that are taken into consideration by the consumers when participating in social commerce. Such a tool can be replicated by firms included in this type of commerce, in order to evaluate the behavior and perception of their customers about their performance in the online environment. This study also highlights trust, information quality and perceived usefulness of the website as the most influencing factors of the consumers’ participation in social commerce. In addition, the authors identified that more expensive products and products classified as computers and electronics seem to use more intensively ratings, recommendations and comments online provided by other people. This fact supports the research literature that (positive or negative) online recommendations influence the consumers purchase behavior, reducing uncertainties about the products and increasing credibility and trust.

The increasing complexity of hospital management indicates a greater need for scientific instruments that underlie the performance evaluations of the organizational processes in this sector. From this perspective, this work evaluates the performance of the main activities of the internal logistics process of a Brazilian public teaching hospital's supply chain. To this end, a multicriteria decision analysis approach is used as an instrument of intervention. The multicriteria model constructed serves as a decision support system to aid decision makers, allowing managers to measure logistics performance in the hospital context and to visualize the performance profile of the main logistics activities, enabling the identification of activities requiring greater attention and improvement.

This paper describes a proposal to redesign the containers handling process in a Brazilian retroportuary terminal using the Business Process Management (BPM) methodology. It employs applied research utilised through the different stages of a case study, and embodies the various aspects that influence the implementation of the internal handling process of containers in the concerned organisation. The mapping of the process allowed for a better understanding of the activity flow in the study. The new processes were laid out and redesigned. Their analysis displayed a considerable 43% reduction in container handling compared to the current process. Evaluation of the gathered data at the end of the study showed that the proposed redesigning of processes provided the organisation under study with the possibility of major improvements, which had a significant positive impact on the robustness, dynamics, and overall understanding of its business activities.

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