A conceptual model of medical tourism service supply chain

Purpose: Medical tourism service requires involvement of multiple parties from the service network, however medical tourism is not well studied from a supply chain management perspective. This study suggests a conceptual model of medical tourism service supply chain (MTSSC) to provide a clearer understanding of its nature, and defines its business processes. Design/methodology/approach: Triangulation which makes use of literature review, in-depth interviews, and expert evaluations was applied to develop and validate the suggested model. The proposed model is initialized based on the relevant literature. In-depth interviews were used to refine and finalize the model. Expert evaluations ensure the trustworthiness of the model and the business process definitions. Findings: The proposed model uses a nested process structure rather than a one-dimensional supply chain model, where the assistance company maintains an intermediary role between the patient and all the service providers (e.g. medical institutions, transportation, accommodation). Additionally, the conceptual model identifies seven business processes: service design, service recovery management, customer relationship management, supplier relationship management, demand management, capacity and resource management, and service delivery management. Practical implications: The results provide a better understanding of the MTSSC structure and processes, and a recognition of the MTSSC members. The process definitions give the members an idea about their roles in the service design and delivery in practice. Additionally, a better understanding of the system as a whole leads to better process development and control. MTSSC members may shape their organizations internally and supply chain-wide by considering this conceptual model. Moreover, the model acts as a basis for supply chain collaboration decisions. Originality/value: The conceptual model is built upon the theories and practice of medical tourism services, supply chain management, and service operations management. This study contributes to the theory of medical tourism services management by explaining the MTSSC concepts and business processes, and extends existing knowledge.Peer Reviewe

LEVERAGING SOCIAL NETWORK DATA FOR ANALYTICAL CRM STRATEGIES - THE INTRODUCTION OF SOCIAL BI

The skyrocketing trend for social media on the Internet greatly alters analytical Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Against this backdrop, the purpose of this paper is to advance the conceptual design of Business Intelligence (BI) systems with data identified from social networks. We develop an integrated social network data model, based on an in-depth analysis of Facebook. The data model can inform the design of data warehouses in order to offer new opportunities for CRM analyses, leading to a more consistent and richer picture of customers? characteristics, needs, wants, and demands. Four major contributions are offered. First, Social CRM and Social BI are introduced as emerging fields of research. Second, we develop a conceptual data model to identify and systematize the data available on online social networks. Third, based on the identified data, we design a multidimensional data model as an early contribution to the conceptual design of Social BI systems and demonstrate its application by developing management reports in a retail scenario. Fourth, intellectual challenges for advancing Social CRM and Social BI are discussed

Intelligent Integrated Management for Telecommunication Networks

As the size of communication networks keeps on growing, faster connections, cooperating technologies and the divergence of equipment and data communications, the management of the resulting networks gets additional important and time-critical. More advanced tools are needed to support this activity. In this article we describe the design and implementation of a management platform using Artificial Intelligent reasoning technique. For this goal we make use of an expert system. This study focuses on an intelligent framework and a language for formalizing knowledge management descriptions and combining them with existing OSI management model. We propose a new paradigm where the intelligent network management is integrated into the conceptual repository of management information called Managed Information Base (MIB). This paper outlines the development of an expert system prototype based in our propose GDMO+ standard and describes the most important facets, advantages and drawbacks that were found after prototyping our proposal

Modelling outputs from a stakeholders' self-modeling to catch environmental uncertainty: A case study in the Sahel

A participatory modeling approach called "self-design" has been experimented in Senegal with the aim of letting farmers design their own model of the local natural resources management issues. The success of the experiment and its outputs led to a new participatory modeling approach based on the central principle of letting stakeholders design and use their own conceptual model of environmental management. This unusual endogenous design resulted in a qualitative but nevertheless worthy model of the Sahelian environmental uncertainty, which is currently enriching the debate about the value of local worldviews for environmental modeling

Conservation process model (cpm). A twofold scientific research scope in the information modelling for cultural heritage

The aim of the present research is to develop an instrument able to adequately support the conservation process by means of a twofold approach, based on both BIM environment and ontology formalisation. Although BIM has been successfully experimented within AEC (Architecture Engineering Construction) field, it has showed many drawbacks for architectural heritage. To cope with unicity and more generally complexity of ancient buildings, applications so far developed have shown to poorly adapt BIM to conservation design with unsatisfactory results (Dore, Murphy 2013; Carrara 2014). In order to combine achievements reached within AEC through BIM environment (design control and management) with an appropriate, semantically enriched and flexible The presented model has at its core a knowledge base developed through information ontologies and oriented around the formalization and computability of all the knowledge necessary for the full comprehension of the object of architectural heritage an its conservation. Such a knowledge representation is worked out upon conceptual categories defined above all within architectural criticism and conservation scope. The present paper aims at further extending the scope of conceptual modelling within cultural heritage conservation already formalized by the model. A special focus is directed on decay analysis and surfaces conservation project

Sustainable operations and maintenance of water supplies: a conceptual model for engineers and development workers : a thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirement for the degree of Master of Philosophy in Development Studies and Agricultural Engineering at Massey University

There have been major problems with the sustainability of many water supply projects in the Developing World. One major area that influences this sustainability is the ongoing operation and maintenance of the water supply. A number of different surveys have shown that within 12 months of a water project being constructed and handed over to the community or government water dept. between 30-70% are not functioning at all or are not producing their original design supply. The purpose of the research was to produce a conceptual model that could be used by development agencies and engineers to increase the sustainability of water supplies. A review of the literature revealed that the major factors influencing sustainable operation and maintenance of water supplies were, technology, infrastructure for parts, training of both agency and community in maintenance of the water supply, the source of funding for O & M, design, ownership and responsibility, and management. These factors were incorporated into a conceptual model, each factor fitting into one or more of the different stages of a water supply project, namely: 1. Planning; 2. Design; 3. Construction; 4. Transfer Ceremony; and 5. Operations. There were up to four major groups of people involved in this process, namely, an International Development Agency, a Government Water Dept., a Community Water Committee, and a Community or Users. Surveys were conducted in Ethiopia, looking at both urban and rural water projects. The results were used to substantiate the model and/or to revise the model. It was concluded from the survey that the following were influential upon sustainable operation and maintenance in Ethiopia: Community ownership does not equate to community responsibility for O & M; Training of the individual or group responsible for O & M is essential; A lack of infrastructure leds to O & M problems; And, community involvement in all stages of the water supply project is essential. The revised conceptual model presents the processes and factors needed to instigate sustainable O & M of water supply projects in developing countries

A Query-Driven Spatial Data Warehouse Conceptual Schema For Disaster Management

Malaysia has experienced various types of disasters. Such events cause billions of USD and posing great challenges to a nation’s government to provide better disaster management. Indeed, disaster management is an important global problem. The National Security Council’s (NSC) Directive No. 20 outlines Malaysia’s policy on disaster and relief management demonstrates government efforts and initiatives to efficiently respond to disasters. In this regard, decision making is a key factor for organizational success. Positive outcomes are dependent on available data that can be manipulated to provide information to the decision maker, who faces the difficult and complex task of anticipating upcoming events and analyzing multiple parameters. Disaster management involves multiple sources for data collection at various levels as well as a wide array of stakeholders. Hence, accessibility to heterogenous spatial data is challenging. It is crucial to address this problem in terms of data distribution, query operation, and the analyzation task because each resource, level, and stakeholder involved has personal preferences with regard to its format, structure, syntax, and schema.The main purpose of this research is to support the complex decision-making process during disaster management by enriching the body of knowledge on spatial data warehousing, particularly for conceptual schema design. A major research problem identified are the heterogeneity of a spatial resource data model, the most appropriate approach to schema design, and the level to which the schema is dependent on the given tools. These problems must be addressed as they are main roadblocks to the process of accessing and retrieving information. The existence of heterogeneous data sources and restricted accessibility to relevant information during a disaster causes several issues with spatial data warehouse design. It can be classified into three considerations namely, the need for guidelines and formalism, schema generation model and a schema design framework and finally, a generalized schema. Four strategies have been designed to address the aforementioned problems: identifying relevant requirements, creating a conceptual design framework, deriving an appropriate schema, and refining the proposed method. User queries are prioritized in the conceptual design framework. Outputs from the formalization process are used with a schema algorithm to effectively derive a generalized schema. The conceptual model framework is taken to be representative of a potential application/ system that has been developed to design a conceptual schema using the problematic heterogeneous data and a restricted approach concerning any corresponding query formalisms. In the schema derivation phase, the conceptual schema that was produced by implementing the proposed framework is presented along with the final conceptual schema. This design is then incorporated into a tool to run an experiment demonstrating that queries from a heterogeneous context are capable of performing context-appropriate conceptual schema design in generic way. Such results outshine the capabilities of a restricted design approach and could potentially answer any relevant queries in less time

A Web Content Management and Personalization Model Using One-to-One Strategy for Higher Educational Institutions

This research explored a Web content management and personalization model for higher educational institutions. Through a review of literature and data collected from users, it formulated a conceptual model for Web content management and personalization. The study used the Web site of School of Technology at Eastern Illinois University as a typical case from which to develop the model for higher educational institutions. Understanding the factors influencing user attitudes about the adoption of new Web technologies is extremely important. Such an understanding can help Web developers develop a theoretical framework for a Web model as well as identify its components. Cognizant of user-centered design principles, the study surveyed School of Technology students to assess their attitudes and expectations about applying one-to-one marketing strategy to the School\u27s Web site and to identify the content of the site. Based on the survey results, it formulated design guidelines that helped ascertain the one-to-one Web marketing strategy for the model. Finally, the study formulated a conceptual Web content management and personalization model in Unified Modeling Language formats

Use of COTS functional analysis software as an IVHM design tool for detection and isolation of UAV fuel system faults

This paper presents a new approach to the development of health management solutions which can be applied to both new and legacy platforms during the conceptual design phase. The approach involves the qualitative functional modelling of a system in order to perform an Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM) design – the placement of sensors and the diagnostic rules to be used in interrogating their output. The qualitative functional analysis was chosen as a route for early assessment of failures in complex systems. Functional models of system components are required for capturing the available system knowledge used during various stages of system and IVHM design. MADe™ (Maintenance Aware Design environment), a COTS software tool developed by PHM Technology, was used for the health management design. A model has been built incorporating the failure diagrams of five failure modes for five different components of a UAV fuel system. Thus an inherent health management solution for the system and the optimised sensor set solution have been defined. The automatically generated sensor set solution also contains a diagnostic rule set, which was validated on the fuel rig for different operation modes taking into account the predicted fault detection/isolation and ambiguity group coefficients. It was concluded that when using functional modelling, the IVHM design and the actual system design cannot be done in isolation. The functional approach requires permanent input from the system designer and reliability engineers in order to construct a functional model that will qualitatively represent the real system. In other words, the physical insight should not be isolated from the failure phenomena and the diagnostic analysis tools should be able to adequately capture the experience bases. This approach has been verified on a laboratory bench top test rig which can simulate a range of possible fuel system faults. The rig is fully instrumented in order to allow benchmarking of various sensing solution for fault detection/isolation that were identified using functional analysis

Design dis-integration Silent, Partial, and Disparate Design

Michael Porter’s frameworks for analysing and planning competitive differentiation (Porter 1980, 1985) are established ‘textbook’ tools, widely taught to business students today. As the claim of design’s strategic importance is increasingly heard, we ask where does design fit in established strategy thinking? This paper documents a proposed conceptual model based on Porter’s value chain model for strategic planning. The concept outlined is the result of the first stage of a larger study of design’s potential role at strategic level and the difficulties faced by organisations in exploiting design strategically. This exploratory phase comprised a review of literature on design management and models of strategy, followed by nineteen interviews with senior design professionals. These then informed a novel revision of the value chain diagram reflecting the strategic role of design, and the identification of three key phenomena concerning design integration (silent design, partial design and disparate design). These phenomena are also represented in modified versions of the value chain. This overall project follows a research approach based on the design research method and on procedural action research, and aims to develop a tool or method to help organisations increase design integration. This project is ongoing, and the results will be published separately. Keywords: Strategic; value chain; silent; partial; disparate; integrated</p