Purpose– The present paper aims to explore to what extent the quality of facility services can be related to the differences in educational achievements in higher education.Design/methodology/approach - This paper is based on the first preliminary analyses of a national online survey among 1,752 lecturers of 18 Dutch Universities of Applied Sciences. Via explorative desk research, additional data were gathered regarding the educational achievements, size and religious identity of the institutions. Exploratory factor analysis and multiple regressionwere used to test the propositions.Findings – The results seem to indicate that the perceived quality of facility services that are education-related and provide personal comfort to teachers have a positive relationship with study success. Layout, fitting out, and general facility services show no statistically significant relationship with study success, whereas (traditional) workplaces have a negative relationship. Also, we found that the size of the education institution strongly negatively relates to studysuccess, and institutions with a Christian identity outperform non-Christian institutions.Practical implications– These preliminary research findings suggest that a prime consideration in learning space design is the facilitation of social interaction, creating a (virtual) small-scale learning environment in large institutions.Originality/value - This paper suggests that facility services can assist the quality of higher education.
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The design of a spatial distribution structure is of strategic importance for companies, to meet required customer service levels and to keep logistics costs as low as possible. Spatial distribution structure decisions concern distribution channel layout – i.e. the spatial layout of the transport and storage system – as well as distribution centre location(s). This paper examines the importance of seven main factors and 33 sub-factors that determine these decisions. The Best-Worst Method (BWM) was used to identify the factor weights, with pairwise comparison data being collected through a survey. The results indicate that the main factor is logistics costs. Logistics experts and decision makers respectively identify customer demand and service level as second most important factor. Important sub-factors are demand volatility, delivery time and perishability. This is the first study that quantifies the weights of the factors behind spatial distribution structure decisions. The factors and weights facilitate managerial decision-making with regard to spatial distribution structures for companies that ship a broad range of products with different characteristics. Public policy-makers can use the results to support the development of land use plans that provide facilities and services for a mix of industries.
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Distribution centres are becoming more and more relevant for spatial planning, due to their rapidly increasing size and number. There is little literature, however, that provides a generalized analysis of the size and functional attributes of distribution centres, and none that discusses the relationships between these attributes. Our aim is to fill this gap by providing new evidence and analysis to understand this relationship. We make use of an extensive database of 2888 DCs in the Netherlands to develop a new typology of DCs based on the geographical location of DCs, their functional attributes and client sector characteristics. The analysis shows that the context in which medium sized DCs are operating is more heterogeneous than in the case of very large and small size DCs. This study is a first attempt to analyse this relationship between facility size and functions based on a rich and extensive dataset of large population of DCs. The results can serve as input for further quantitative statistical analysis and international comparison.
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