Henry Osahon Osazevbaru

This study investigates the effects of inventory management on customers` satisfaction with lead time as a moderator variable in government-owned hospitals in Delta State, Nigeria. It aims to contribute to the extant literature on inventory management and customer satisfaction in developing countries, focusing on Delta State in Nigeria. Two hundred and sixty-five (265) questionnaires were distributed, comprising one hundred and five to measure inventory management variables administered among Medical Doctors, Nurses, Pharmacists, and Medical Laboratory Scientist. Similarly, one hundred and sixty questionnaires designed to measure customer satisfaction were administered to Patients. The study adopts multiple regression and structural equation modeling to analyze the data. Also, studying the impact of inventory management on customers` satisfaction some marketing analysis approaches were used. The obtained results support the appropriateness of the model as lead time possesses the qualities of a moderator between strategic supplier partnership, lean inventory, and information technology that are proxies of inventory management and customer satisfaction. Besides, the results record a positive and statistically significant relationship between strategic supplier partnership, lean inventory, and customer satisfaction at a 5 percent level of significance, respectively.
In addition, lead time has a positive and statistically significant relationship with customer satisfaction. Impliedly, this study concludes that inventory management proxies and lead time drive customer satisfaction. Thus, the government is recommended to focus on the lead time to avert the dearth of basic inventories in the hospitals.

This paper examines the intricate link between unobservable characteristics of directors on the corporate board and firm performance. It aims to extend the literature on corporate governance and firm strategic performance from the perspective of emerging African economies. A mix of performance measures were used (Tobin Q, return on assets, and share price) and unobservable characteristics were captured as a stochastic element or heterogeneity of observable board characteristics (board activity, gender diversity, size, and independence). The study applied non-linear generalized auto-regressive conditional heteroscedasticity model to examine the data set consisting of 299 firm-year observations from 23 financial firms listed on the Nigerian Stock Exchange from 2006 to 2018. Positive skewness and leptokurtic distribution were found for all the variables. Correlation matrix revealed no multicollinearity, as the highest value was 0.2386. Empirical results suggest that unobservable characteristics significantly and positively influence firm performance as measured by return on assets and share price. This is because the coefficient of the lagged-value of the variance scaling parameter is positive and significant at the 1% level. However, with respect to Tobin Q measure, the result was positive but not significant at the 5% level. Implicitly, the result is sensitive to performance proxies. Accordingly, this study concludes that unobservable characteristics drive firm performance. It is recommended that boards and regulators should pay attention to unobservable characteristics.