World Class Supply Chain 2019: Next Generation Ideas

Next Generation Ideas, being the theme for the Fourth Annual World Class Supply Chain Summit, reflected summit’s focus on understanding what is becoming and what will continue to be of increasingly of high priority for current and future supply chain professionals. The summit, which was held on May 8th, 2019 in Milton, Ontario, brought together invited executives, scholars, and students to present and carefully examine a range of emerging ideas that are worthy of the supply chain community’s interest. The diversity of such ideas (e.g., new technologies, geopolitical developments, and the role of supply chain analytics) necessitated a diverse range of perspectives for structuring the summit deliberations. This was done through a summit program comprising three presentations to feature the following perspectives: Perspectives of a vastly experienced industry executive perspective who has amassed an extensive body of material on ecological considerations in supply chains Perspectives of an economist with evidence-based understanding of how decisions by national governments impact firms with both domestic and transnational supply chains Perspectives of a supply chain scholar whose research projects are strongly motivated by how companies have had (and will have) to rethink their distribution networks From the formal presentations and the question and answer component for each presentation, the essence of the insights could be summarized by this notion: While firms must still exemplify traditional supply chain fundamentals (trusted partners, robust IT infrastructure, etc.), they face the additional and an increasingly pressing imperative of needing the agility to be responsive to changes, especially from customers and competitors. Arguably, this is not an original statement because one can make a convincing case that dynamic change has always been a feature of the business landscape. Rather than originality, the statement is meant to underscore that, at this time in the development of the supply chain field, practitioners seem to be experiencing a very distinct level of bewilderment about the array of changes to be contemplated. The summit not only brought that bewilderment to the fore, it also: facilitated discussion of the opportunities resulting from the changes presented real-world examples of innovative and entrepreneurial responses to the changes addressed the interests and concerns of students - the next generation of supply chain professionals This white paper reports on (1) the substantive specifics of those elements of the summit and (2) issues requiring further study in order to be understood more clearly

Innovation Initiatives in Large Software Companies: A Systematic Mapping Study

To keep the competitive advantage and adapt to changes in the market and technology, companies need to innovate in an organised, purposeful and systematic manner. However, due to their size and complexity, large companies tend to focus on maintaining their business, which can potentially lower their agility to innovate. This study aims to provide an overview of the current research on innovation initiatives and to identify the challenges of implementing the initiatives in the context of large software companies. The investigation was performed using a systematic mapping approach of published literature on corporate innovation and entrepreneurship. Then it was complemented with interviews with four experts with rich industry experience. Our study results suggest that, there is a lack of high quality empirical studies on innovation initiative in the context of large software companies. A total of 7 studies are conducted in such context, which reported 5 types of initiatives: intrapreneurship, bootlegging, internal venture, spin-off and crowdsourcing. Our study offers three contributions. First, this paper represents the map of existing literature on innovation initiatives inside large companies. The second contribution is to provide an innovation initiative tree. The third contribution is to identify key challenges faced by each initiative in large software companies. At the strategic and tactical levels, there is no difference between large software companies and other companies. At the operational level, large software companies are highly influenced by the advancement of Internet technology. Large software companies use open innovation paradigm as part of their innovation initiatives. We envision a future work is to further empirically evaluate the innovation initiative tree in large software companies, which involves more practitioners from different companies

Rush Hour Traffic Optimization

This project develops a route-planning web application that is specifically designed to work well for recurring rush hour conditions. Users can specify their trip\u27s start and end points, the desired time of arrival (or departure), and obtain driving directions and a time estimate based on the system\u27s knowledge of average traffic patterns in that area. Users may also provide typical traffic data for areas with which they are familiar. With each piece of user-submitted data, the system\u27s knowledge base grows to improve accuracy for future users

Conceptualisation of "crowdsourcing" term in management sciences

Background. Crowdsourcing is a relatively new concept, nonetheless it has been raising more and more interest with researchers. This is a result of its potential since it enables improving business processes, creating open innovations, building of competitive advantage, access to experience, information, crowd skills and work, problem solving, crisis management, expanding the organisation's existing activity and offer, creating the organisation's image, improving communication with the surroundings, optimising costs of the organisation's activity. However, although the subject of crowdsourcing constitutes one of the currently emerging directions of research on the basis of management sciences, one observes a peculiar exploration difficulty. It may result from incoherence in conceptualisation or explication of this term. Research aims. The aim of this article is an attempt, basing on the existing research efforts, to conceptualise crowdsourcing based on management sciences. In the article a proposal of conceptualising the notion of crowdsourcing was presented including its levels. Methodology. For the needs of specifying, evaluation, and identification of the existing state of knowledge on crowdsourcing, a systematic literature review was conducted. It enabled getting familiar with the results of similar research, its selection and critical analysis and based on that it was used for expanding the earlier findings of other researchers. The biggest, full text databases i.e Ebsco, Elsevier/Springer, Emerald, Proquest, Scopus, and ISI Web of Science, which include the majority of journals on strategic management were analysed. In order to establish the state of knowledge and existing findings a review of databases in Poland: BazEkon and CEON was also conducted. 54 elaborations of English language databases and 41 from Polish language databases from the period of 2006-2017 were analysed. Key findings. A review of the scientific output revealed incoherence in the conceptualisation of the term of crowdsourcing. The approaches proposed in the existing literature are inadequate and do not allow for full understanding of crowdsourcing

Human-Centered Automation for Resilience in Acquiring Construction Field Information

abstract: Resilient acquisition of timely, detailed job site information plays a pivotal role in maintaining the productivity and safety of construction projects that have busy schedules, dynamic workspaces, and unexpected events. In the field, construction information acquisition often involves three types of activities including sensor-based inspection, manual inspection, and communication. Human interventions play critical roles in these three types of field information acquisition activities. A resilient information acquisition system is needed for safer and more productive construction. The use of various automation technologies could help improve human performance by proactively providing the needed knowledge of using equipment, improve the situation awareness in multi-person collaborations, and reduce the mental workload of operators and inspectors. Unfortunately, limited studies consider human factors in automation techniques for construction field information acquisition. Fully utilization of the automation techniques requires a systematical synthesis of the interactions between human, tasks, and construction workspace to reduce the complexity of information acquisition tasks so that human can finish these tasks with reliability. Overall, such a synthesis of human factors in field data collection and analysis is paving the path towards “Human-Centered Automation” (HCA) in construction management. HCA could form a computational framework that supports resilient field data collection considering human factors and unexpected events on dynamic job sites. This dissertation presented an HCA framework for resilient construction field information acquisition and results of examining three HCA approaches that support three use cases of construction field data collection and analysis. The first HCA approach is an automated data collection planning method that can assist 3D laser scan planning of construction inspectors to achieve comprehensive and efficient data collection. The second HCA approach is a Bayesian model-based approach that automatically aggregates the common sense of people from the internet to identify job site risks from a large number of job site pictures. The third HCA approach is an automatic communication protocol optimization approach that maximizes the team situation awareness of construction workers and leads to the early detection of workflow delays and critical path changes. Data collection and simulation experiments extensively validate these three HCA approaches.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering 201

Towards understanding the process of tournament crowdsourcing:the value co-creation perspective

In the contemporary business environment, firms are increasingly moving from creating business value internally to co-creating business value with external stakeholders. Value cocreation refers to the process where a focal firm involves external stakeholders in its previously in-house performed business processes and interacts intensively with each other to create a stream of value. Tournament crowdsourcing, as an application of crowdsourcing, has become an emerging approach for firms to engage with external crowds in pursuit of business value. In the existing Information Systems literature, scholars’ understanding of valueco-creation and crowdsourcing is still at an explorative stage. The process of value co-creation and crowdsourcing have not been extensively studied. In this research, we adopt an interpretive approach and employ multiple-case designs to investigate the process of tournament crowdsourcing through the lens of value co-creation. The findings of this research contribute to the literature on crowdsourcing by 1) introducing the process framework which examines value-generating phases and value propositions from both the perspective of the focal entity and the crowd, 2) revealing the dynamic involvement of the crowd, the process from value creation to value co-creation, and the dynamic value stream, 3) identifying the combined usage of multiple systems and mechanisms for tournament crowdsourcing by contemporary platforms, and potential conflicts related to the governance of the platform,and 4) identifying phases and associated activities relevant to finding the right crowd members from the perspective of the focal entity during the process of tournament crowdsourcing. The findings of this research also contribute to the literature on value cocreation by 1) introducing a thorough definition of value co-creation, 2) conceptually and empirically enriching the most salient components in value co-creation, and 3) bringing in new insights into the value co-creation phenomenon by examining the context of tournament crowdsourcing. In practical terms, the findings of this research may inspire practitioners of generating better understanding about their roles in facilitating value co-creation, the strategic usage of systems and mechanisms, being aware of potential conflicts and finding the right crowd members when conducting tournament crowdsourcing initiatives

USING CROWDSOURCING FOR PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Crowdsourcing is coined first by Jeff Howe and become more popular in recent years. It is concept of outsourcing in the crowd. Crowdsourcing can be useful to project managers when they need to perform tasks with low budget, massive participants, multi-disciplinary, expert or non-experts. Using 10 rules from Howe will help a project manager manage the crowd and achieve their project objective. By addressing some questions such as why should a project manager use crowdsourcing? What the benefits and risks of crowdsourcing. This articles explain the contribution of crowdsourcing in project and change managemen