Launching breakthrough and incremental new products is vital to firm performance; it also resonates with both ego (i.e., directly connected partners) and global (i.e., interconnected ties in an industry) network perspectives. Prior research has listed several ego network-and global network-level factors that affect innovations, but this study goes a step further, to reveal the interactions of these factors as critical product launch mechanisms. An analysis of alliance networks in the consumer packaged goods industry from 1990 to 2010 shows that a central position in a global network represents a double-edged sword: it improves a firm's incremental new product launches but harms its breakthrough new product launches. Furthermore, a firm's ego network (manifested as density and diversity) and R&D capability enable it to leverage its global network position by enhancing the benefits for incremental new products and mitigating its hazards for breakthrough new products. This study's findings thus offer new insights into the role of ego and global networks in facilitating or hindering new product launches.

Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) describes a synergistic relationship among all organizational functions, but particularly between production and maintenance, for continuous improvement of product quality, operational efficiency, capacity assurance, and safety. This article provides the key factors that are critical to the successful implementation of TPM. It is thus crucial to provide and discuss those factors for more effective TPM implementation. Also, this study explores the impact of TPM on the competitiveness of the company. This research concludes that long-term benefits of TPM are the result of considerable investment in human resource development and management. For TPM practitioners, we advise to build a supportive culture and environment with a strong emphasis on human and organizational aspects to promote effective TPM implementation.

Due to competitive pressure and information asymmetry, manufacturers will produce quality inspection avoidance behaviour to gain short-term economic benefits, but this behaviour affects the ultimate quality and safety of the product. This paper studies the two-echelon supply chain consisting of a manufacturer and a retailer, and analyses whether the manufacturer's quality inspection avoidance behaviour model is considered or not. This paper discusses the impact of quality inspection level, quality loss cost, product repair cost, product return rate on the profit and optimal decision-making behaviour of both actors of the supply chain. It is found that when the manufacturer's quality inspection avoidance level is high, the increase of retailer' quality inspection effort level, manufacturer's internal failure cost, consumer product return rate and retailer' external quality loss cost will lead to the decrease of manufacturer's quality effort level instead of increasing. Finally, the numerical study is given to verify the above conclusion, and analysed the influence of different parameters on the optimal decision and supply chain actors profits.

Existing online multiple object tracking (MOT) algorithms often consist of two subtasks, detection and reidentification (ReID). In order to enhance the inference speed and reduce the complexity, current methods commonly integrate these double subtasks into a unified framework. Nevertheless, detection and ReID demand diverse features. This issue would result in an optimization contradiction during the training procedure. With the target of alleviating this contradiction, we devise a module named Global Context Disentangling (GCD) that decouples the learned representation into detection-specific and ReID-specific embeddings. As such, this module provides an implicit manner to balance the different requirements of these two subtasks. Moreover, we observe that preceding MOT methods typically leverage local information to associate the detected targets and neglect to consider the global semantic relation. To resolve this restriction, we develop a module, referred to as Guided Transformer Encoder (GTE), by combining the powerful reasoning ability of Transformer encoder and deformable attention. Unlike previous works, GTE avoids analyzing all the pixels and only attends to capture the relation between query nodes and a few self-adaptively selected key samples. Therefore, it is computationally efficient. Extensive experiments have been conducted on the MOT16, MOT17 and MOT20 benchmarks to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed MOT framework, namely RelationTrack. The experimental results indicate that RelationTrack has surpassed preceding methods significantly and established a new state-of-the-art performance, e.g., IDF1 of 70.5% and MOTA of 67.2% on MOT20.

As more and more people use e-commerce for shoppi ng, manufacturers are willing to open online sales channels in order to obtain more profits. This paper discusses a dual-channel supply chain (DCSC) compos ed of a retailer with a traditional channel and a manufacturer wi th a di rec t channel. In the external environment of uncertain market demand and defective products produced by manufacturers, manufacturers make efforts to promote online products, and consumers hav e free ri der behaviour. Therefore, three game models under the leadershi p of manufac turers are established: (a) noncooperative game model; (b) coordi nation model under revenue-sharing contract; (c) coordination model under profi t-shari ng contract. The results indicate that the produc t defec t rate has a certain influenc e on channel pricing and s ale efforts. The competi tion between the actors of the dual-channel is beneficial to the consumers who pursue the price. Considering the overall profit of the DCSC, the cooperation between the manufac turer and retailer is more profitable than the channel competition, and they are more willing to make produc t sale efforts. The retailer's expec ted profit under revenuesharing contrac t is less than that under profit-sharing contract, but the total profit of coordination model is more than the latter.