28,362 research outputs found
Contribution of two diagnosis tools to support interface situation during production launch
Organised by: Cranfield UniversityFirms are urged to constantly introduce new products. Hence, the New Product Development process should be mastered, especially its final phase, the production launch. This paper addresses the critical issue of the information exchange during production launch. Two diagnosis tools considering production launch as a key interface are presented. They permit to examine the information flows, to highlight their weaknesses and hence to find solutions for further improvements. This paper also presents the results of a case study where the diagnosis tools were implemented during a switchgear development project.Mori Seiki – The Machine Tool Compan
An agent-based fuzzy cognitive map approach to the strategic marketing planning for industrial firms
This is the post-print version of the final paper published in Industrial Marketing Management. The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2013 Elsevier B.V.Industrial marketing planning is a typical example of an unstructured decision making problem due to the large number of variables to consider and the uncertainty imposed on those variables. Although abundant studies identified barriers and facilitators of effective industrial marketing planning in practice, the literature still lacks practical tools and methods that marketing managers can use for the task. This paper applies fuzzy cognitive maps (FCM) to industrial marketing planning. In particular, agent based inference method is proposed to overcome dynamic relationships, time lags, and reusability issues of FCM evaluation. MACOM simulator also is developed to help marketing managers conduct what-if scenarios to see the impacts of possible changes on the variables defined in an FCM that represents industrial marketing planning problem. The simulator is applied to an industrial marketing planning problem for a global software service company in South Korea. This study has practical implication as it supports marketing managers for industrial marketing planning that has large number of variables and their cause–effect relationships. It also contributes to FCM theory by providing an agent based method for the inference of FCM. Finally, MACOM also provides academics in the industrial marketing management discipline with a tool for developing and pre-verifying a conceptual model based on qualitative knowledge of marketing practitioners.Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (Korea
Cache Serializability: Reducing Inconsistency in Edge Transactions
Read-only caches are widely used in cloud infrastructures to reduce access
latency and load on backend databases. Operators view coherent caches as
impractical at genuinely large scale and many client-facing caches are updated
in an asynchronous manner with best-effort pipelines. Existing solutions that
support cache consistency are inapplicable to this scenario since they require
a round trip to the database on every cache transaction.
Existing incoherent cache technologies are oblivious to transactional data
access, even if the backend database supports transactions. We propose T-Cache,
a novel caching policy for read-only transactions in which inconsistency is
tolerable (won't cause safety violations) but undesirable (has a cost). T-Cache
improves cache consistency despite asynchronous and unreliable communication
between the cache and the database. We define cache-serializability, a variant
of serializability that is suitable for incoherent caches, and prove that with
unbounded resources T-Cache implements this new specification. With limited
resources, T-Cache allows the system manager to choose a trade-off between
performance and consistency.
Our evaluation shows that T-Cache detects many inconsistencies with only
nominal overhead. We use synthetic workloads to demonstrate the efficacy of
T-Cache when data accesses are clustered and its adaptive reaction to workload
changes. With workloads based on the real-world topologies, T-Cache detects
43-70% of the inconsistencies and increases the rate of consistent transactions
by 33-58%.Comment: Ittay Eyal, Ken Birman, Robbert van Renesse, "Cache Serializability:
Reducing Inconsistency in Edge Transactions," Distributed Computing Systems
(ICDCS), IEEE 35th International Conference on, June~29 2015--July~2 201
From e-trash to e-treasure: how value can be created by the new e-business models for reverse logistics
Reverse logistics, that is, all operations related to the reuse of used products, excess inventory and packaging materials, gain increasing attention globally both for their promising financial potentials, the sustainable growth alternative they offer and the environmental positive impact they have. In this paper, we introduce reverse logistics and we explain how the adoption of e-commerce provides new possibilities to existing business models and what are the new e-business models in reverse logistics that have emerged. We compare these three new e-business models, namely, returns aggregators, specialty locators and integrated solution providers on a number of aspects and identify keys for their competitive advantage. Finally, we discuss conceptual and actual opportunities for these e-business models to thrive and advance and present some e-commerce tools that are being developed with the aim to address the distributed, dynamic and knowledge-intensive aspects of applications that contribute to the advancement of e-businesses in the field of reverse logistics.e-commerce;Reverse logistics;e-business models
The potential impact of Open Access repositories and library scholarly publishing on ‘traditional’ publishing models
This presentation will consider the potential impact of Open Access repositories and library scholarly publishing on ‘traditional’ publishing models. Stone will argue that the suggestion that repositories will deliberately shift use away from journal platforms is irrelevant, and that the increase in dissemination of research and citations far outweighs the potential drop in usage on a particular platform. He will also suggest that low-cost library scholarly publishing for books and monographs can co-exist alongside larger publications and in some cases could provide a supply of early career researchers who are better equipped to move up the publishing ladder
Feasibility study of an Integrated Program for Aerospace vehicle Design (IPAD). Volume 2: The design process
The extent to which IPAD is to support the design process is identified. Case studies of representative aerospace products were developed as models to characterize the design process and to provide design requirements for the IPAD computing system
The Effects of Product Feature Complexity, Market Activity, and Update Scheduling on Mobile App Life Cycles
Rapid advancements in telecommunication devices and the emergence of the mobile app ecosystem have immensely impacted our lives. Innovative apps have helped improve market efficiency in agriculture, contributed to environmental sustainability through peer-to-peer sharing services, and stimulated financial inclusion in developing economies. However, mobile app developers have to deal with challenges that can hinder the app to reach its full potential. In order to achieve commercial success in the hyper-competitive business landscape where freemium business models are dominating, developers need deep understanding on how non-price operational levers such as product design, delivery, and continued service lead to user adoption.
From the two essays that comprise this dissertation, the first essay aims to explain user downloads of free mobile apps during the introduction stage in the lifecycle based on app feature designs and launch timings. The second essay estimates the effect of app enhancement updates on app downloads and explores contextual factors such as update regularity, lifecycle stage, and market activity levels that may further influence the effectiveness of the enhancements. Research questions proposed in the essays are answered by statistical analysis of heteroskedasticity-based instrumental variables regression and difference-in-differences analysis on free iOS mobile game app data acquired from app market Application Programming Interface (API) that contains daily performance observations over a 3.5-year time horizon. Data extraction and sample construction relied on naive Bayes tf-idf document classification algorithms and Bass diffusion model predictions which are performed via multi-thread processing on a high-performance cluster computing (HPC) server
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