25,318 research outputs found
Reducing the delivery lead time in a food distribution SME through the implementation of six sigma methodology
Purpose â Six sigma is a systematic data driven approach to reduce the defect and improve the quality in any type of business. The purpose of this paper is to present the findings from the application of six sigma in a food service âsmall to medium sized enterpriseâ (SME) in a lean environment to reduce the waste in this field.
Design/methodology/approach â A simplified version of six sigma is adopted through the application of appropriate statistical tools in order to focus on customer's requirements to identify the defect, the cause of the defect and improve the delivery process by implementing the optimum solution.
Findings â The result suggests that modification in layout utilization reduced the number of causes of defect by 40 percent resulting in jumping from 1.44 sigma level to 2.09 Sigma level which is substantial improvement in SME.
Research limitations/implications â Simplicity of six sigma is important to enabling any SME to identify the problem and minimize its cause through a systematic approach. Practical implications â Integrating of supply chain objectives with any quality initiatives such as lean and six sigma has a substantial effect on achieving to the targets.
Originality/value â This paper represents a potential area in which six sigma methodology along side the lean management can promote supply chain management objectives for a food distribution SME
Solutions for decision support in university management
The paper proposes an overview of decision support systems in order to define the role of a system to assist decision in university management. The authors present new technologies and the basic concepts of multidimensional data analysis using models of business processes within the universities. Based on information provided by scientific literature and on the authorsâ experience, the study aims to define selection criteria in choosing a development environment for designing a support system dedicated to university management. The contributions consist in designing a data warehouse model and models of OLAP analysis to assist decision in university management.university management, decision support, multidimensional analysis, data warehouse, OLAP
Intelligent customer relationship management (ICRM) by EFLOW portal
Customer relationship management (CRM) has become a strategic initiative aimed at getting, growing, and retaining the right customers. A great amount of numeric data and even more soft information are available about customers. The strategy of building and maintaining customer relations can be described with 'if⌠then' rules acquired from experts. Doctus Knowledge-Based System provides a new and simplified approach in the field of knowledge management. It is able to cope with tacit and implicit rules at the same time, so decision makers can clearly see the satisfactory solution (then and there). It reasons both deductive and inductive, so it enables the user to check on the model graph why is the chosen solution in the given situation most appropriate. It is upgradeable with in telligent portal, which presents the personalized (body-tailored) information for decision makers. When we need some hard data from a database or a data warehouse, we have automatic connection between case input interface and the database. Doctus recognizes the relations between the data, it selects them and provides only the needed rules to the decision maker. Intelligent portal puts our experience on the web, so our knowledge base is constantly improving with new 'if⌠then' rules. We support decision mak ing with two interfaces. On the Developer Interface the attributes, the values and the 'if⌠then' rules can be modified. The intelligent portal is used as a managerial decision support tool. This interface can be used without seeing the knowledge base, we only see the personalized soft information. ICRM (intelligent Customer Relationship Management) helps customer to get the requested information quickly. It is also capable of customizing the questionnaires, so the customer doesn't have to answer irrelevant questions and the decision maker doesn't have to read endless reports
Benchmarking Summarizability Processing in XML Warehouses with Complex Hierarchies
Business Intelligence plays an important role in decision making. Based on
data warehouses and Online Analytical Processing, a business intelligence tool
can be used to analyze complex data. Still, summarizability issues in data
warehouses cause ineffective analyses that may become critical problems to
businesses. To settle this issue, many researchers have studied and proposed
various solutions, both in relational and XML data warehouses. However, they
find difficulty in evaluating the performance of their proposals since the
available benchmarks lack complex hierarchies. In order to contribute to
summarizability analysis, this paper proposes an extension to the XML warehouse
benchmark (XWeB) with complex hierarchies. The benchmark enables us to generate
XML data warehouses with scalable complex hierarchies as well as
summarizability processing. We experimentally demonstrated that complex
hierarchies can definitely be included into a benchmark dataset, and that our
benchmark is able to compare two alternative approaches dealing with
summarizability issues.Comment: 15th International Workshop on Data Warehousing and OLAP (DOLAP
2012), Maui : United States (2012
An Intelligent Data Mining System to Detect Health Care Fraud
The chapter begins with an overview of the types of healthcare fraud. Next, there is a brief discussion of issues with the current fraud detection approaches. The chapter then develops information technology based approaches and illustrates how these technologies can improve current practice. Finally, there is a summary of the major findings and the implications for healthcare practice
Enterprise modeling:process and REA value chain perspective
The paper focuses on enterprise business value chain modeling as an alternative to business process modeling. Well known REA methodology proposed by McCarthy and Geerts is used as the basic modeling framework. The research presented in the paper results in a generic semantic enterprise model using REA ontology. This rather static model is then converted into UML activity, sequence and state diagrams thus achieving dynamic view of the REA model. The dynamic REA view connects the process model and the value chain perspectives. It is shown that by using REA model transition called dynamization not only process models at task level can be achieved but also a consistency check of the REA model can be accomplished. By means of step by step value chain modeling of the enterprise a consistent process model can be reached preserving all advantages of the typical business process modeling methodsProcess model; Value chain model; REA; Production planning
High-Level Object Oriented Genetic Programming in Logistic Warehouse Optimization
DisertaÄnĂ prĂĄce je zamÄĹena na optimalizaci prĹŻbÄhu pracovnĂch operacĂ v logistickĂ˝ch skladech a distribuÄnĂch centrech. HlavnĂm cĂlem je optimalizovat procesy plĂĄnovĂĄnĂ, rozvrhovĂĄnĂ a odbavovĂĄnĂ. JelikoĹž jde o problĂŠm patĹĂcĂ do tĹĂdy sloĹžitosti NP-teĹžkĂ˝, je vĂ˝poÄetnÄ velmi nĂĄroÄnĂŠ nalĂŠzt optimĂĄlnĂ ĹeĹĄenĂ. MotivacĂ pro ĹeĹĄenĂ tĂŠto prĂĄce je vyplnÄnĂ pomyslnĂŠ mezery mezi metodami zkoumanĂ˝mi na vÄdeckĂŠ a akademickĂŠ pĹŻdÄ a metodami pouĹžĂvanĂ˝mi v produkÄnĂch komerÄnĂch prostĹedĂch. JĂĄdro optimalizaÄnĂho algoritmu je zaloĹženo na zĂĄkladÄ genetickĂŠho programovĂĄnĂ ĹĂzenĂŠho bezkontextovou gramatikou. HlavnĂm pĹĂnosem tĂŠto prĂĄce je a) navrhnout novĂ˝ optimalizaÄnĂ algoritmus, kterĂ˝ respektuje nĂĄsledujĂcĂ optimalizaÄnĂ podmĂnky: celkovĂ˝ Äas zpracovĂĄnĂ, vyuĹžitĂ zdrojĹŻ, a zahlcenĂ skladovĂ˝ch uliÄek, kterĂŠ mĹŻĹže nastat bÄhem zpracovĂĄnĂ ĂşkolĹŻ, b) analyzovat historickĂĄ data z provozu skladu a vyvinout sadu testovacĂch pĹĂkladĹŻ, kterĂŠ mohou slouĹžit jako referenÄnĂ vĂ˝sledky pro dalĹĄĂ vĂ˝zkum, a dĂĄle c) pokusit se pĹedÄit stanovenĂŠ referenÄnĂ vĂ˝sledky dosaĹženĂŠ kvalifikovanĂ˝m a trĂŠnovanĂ˝m operaÄnĂm manaĹžerem jednoho z nejvÄtĹĄĂch skladĹŻ ve stĹednĂ EvropÄ.This work is focused on the work-flow optimization in logistic warehouses and distribution centers. The main aim is to optimize process planning, scheduling, and dispatching. The problem is quite accented in recent years. The problem is of NP hard class of problems and where is very computationally demanding to find an optimal solution. The main motivation for solving this problem is to fill the gap between the new optimization methods developed by researchers in academic world and the methods used in business world. The core of the optimization algorithm is built on the genetic programming driven by the context-free grammar. The main contribution of the thesis is a) to propose a new optimization algorithm which respects the makespan, the utilization, and the congestions of aisles which may occur, b) to analyze historical operational data from warehouse and to develop the set of benchmarks which could serve as the reference baseline results for further research, and c) to try outperform the baseline results set by the skilled and trained operational manager of the one of the biggest warehouses in the middle Europe.
Value-driven Security Agreements in Extended Enterprises
Today organizations are highly interconnected in business networks called extended enterprises. This is mostly facilitated by outsourcing and by new economic models based on pay-as-you-go billing; all supported by IT-as-a-service. Although outsourcing has been around for some time, what is now new is the fact that organizations are increasingly outsourcing critical business processes, engaging on complex service bundles, and moving infrastructure and their management to the custody of third parties. Although this gives competitive advantage by reducing cost and increasing flexibility, it increases security risks by eroding security perimeters that used to separate insiders with security privileges from outsiders without security privileges. The classical security distinction between insiders and outsiders is supplemented with a third category of threat agents, namely external insiders, who are not subject to the internal control of an organization but yet have some access privileges to its resources that normal outsiders do not have. Protection against external insiders requires security agreements between organizations in an extended enterprise. Currently, there is no practical method that allows security officers to specify such requirements. In this paper we provide a method for modeling an extended enterprise architecture, identifying external insider roles, and for specifying security requirements that mitigate security threats posed by these roles. We illustrate our method with a realistic example
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