Model for warehouse shipping and store provisioning: Worten case study

Nowadays with the increase of competition and demanding customers, it is normal for companies to feel the need of improving their internal processes, using them to gain a margin over competition and reaching the customer faster. Worten, is the best electronic retail company in Portugal, but to increase its value, can recognize that should be in continuous improvement on its supply chain and on internal processes that are ruling for too long, becoming obsolete and not adding value for the final customer. The capability of Worten to always identifying improvement opportunities and wanting to do better, culminated in the realization of this project. In this project, the actual processes in practice in Worten warehouse were described and afterwards th were analysed and improving proposals were presented as well as the impact before and after their implementation.Com o aumento da concorrência e de clientes cada vez mais exigentes, é normal que as empresas sintam necessidade de melhorar os seus processos internos, utilizando-os para ganhar margem sobre a concorrência e chegar aos clientes com maior rapidez. A Worten, é considerada a melhor empresa de retalho eletrónico em Portugal, mas para aumentar o seu valor, reconhece que deve procurar estar em melhoria contínua na sua cadeia de abastecimento e nos processos internos que estão em prática há demasiado tempo, tornando-se obsoletos e não acrescentando valor para o cliente final. A capacidade da Worten em identificar oportunidades de melhoria e querer fazer melhor, culminou na realização deste projeto. Neste projeto foram descritos os processos em prática atualmente, no armazém da Worten e posteriormente analisados assim como foram apresentadas propostas de melhoria e bem como o impacto antes e depois da sua implementação

A conceptual framework to assess the impact of training on equipment cost and availability in the military context

Designing military support is challenging and current practices need to be reviewed and improved. This paper gives an overview of the Industry current practices in designing military support under Ministry of Defence/Industry agreements (in particular for Contracting for Availability (CfA)), and identifies challenges and opportunities for improvement. E.g. training delivery was identified as an important opportunity for improving the CfA in-service phase. Thus, an innovative conceptual framework is presented to assess the impact of training on the equipment availability and cost. Additionally, guidelines for improving the current training delivery strategies are presented, which can also be applied to other Industry contexts

The effect of production costs on the provisioning management of materials: evidence from paper industry in Peru

This paper presents an empirical investigation to evaluate the impact of purchase, storage and inventory management on the production costs of materials supply management in the Peruvian paper industry. A linear regression model was used under the ordinary least squares method to determine the causal relationship between the provisioning of materials and production costs. It was concluded that the evaluation of the effect between the study variables was inversely proportional, that is, as the management of purchase, storage, and inventory in companies improve, the production costs may also be reduced

Industrialization in Cloud Computing with Enterprise Systems: Order-to-Cash Automation for SaaS Products

Industrialization has led to efficiency and effectiveness gains in manufacturing industries. Industrialization approaches such as standardization or sourcing are also key concepts in modern service companies. Therefore, current IS research studies how to transfer industrialization approaches to IT service production in order to increase efficiency and effectiveness. Automated and integrated value creation, as supported by ERP systems, have only been limitedly researched in the context of IT service production, although companies see this as an important area of improvement. In this paper, a model of how to automate and integrate an order-to-cash process for providers who offer SaaS products is proposed. The focus lies on the service provisioning process step and the model is evaluated with a prototype implementation. This research has implications for researchers and practitioners alike, as it proposes how to more effectively and efficiently deliver IT services, and use established IS research to do so

Individual Tariffs for Mobile Services: Analysis of Operator Business and Risk Consequences

A design approach is offered for individual tariffs for mass customized mobile service products, whereby operators can determine their contract acceptance rules to guarantee with a set probability their minimum profit and risk levels. It uses realistic improvements to earlier reported negotiation algorithms [1], and a full operator operational model including infrastructure and content acquisition. Value at risk and profit are analyzed when a random user has consistent characteristics to a survey group, so that risk and profits are pooled. This analysis is necessary to give the supplier business guarantees to enter individual tariff agreements. A full numerical case is given for a class of mobile service.risks;mobile communication services;Individual tariffs

Optimisation of stochastic networks with blocking: a functional-form approach

This paper introduces a class of stochastic networks with blocking, motivated by applications arising in cellular network planning, mobile cloud computing, and spare parts supply chains. Blocking results in lost revenue due to customers or jobs being permanently removed from the system. We are interested in striking a balance between mitigating blocking by increasing service capacity, and maintaining low costs for service capacity. This problem is further complicated by the stochastic nature of the system. Owing to the complexity of the system there are no analytical results available that formulate and solve the relevant optimization problem in closed form. Traditional simulation-based methods may work well for small instances, but the associated computational costs are prohibitive for networks of realistic size. We propose a hybrid functional-form based approach for finding the optimal resource allocation, combining the speed of an analytical approach with the accuracy of simulation-based optimisation. The key insight is to replace the computationally expensive gradient estimation in simulation optimisation with a closed-form analytical approximation that is calibrated using a single simulation run. We develop two implementations of this approach and conduct extensive computational experiments on complex examples to show that it is capable of substantially improving system performance. We also provide evidence that our approach has substantially lower computational costs compared to stochastic approximation

Improving MRO order processing by means of advanced technological diagnostics and data mining approaches

Production planning based on uncertain load information may lead to low schedule adherence or low capacity utilization. Thus, maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) service providers are striving to improve their business processes to achieve high logistics efficiency. To estimate repair expenditures and material demands as early as possible, different approaches may be pursued. In this paper, the advancement of technological diagnostics to enable condition assessment without prior disassembly and the use of data mining to generate reliable forecasts are discussed. Thereby, the potential for planning MRO order processing is focused using the example of aircraft engines and rail vehicle transformers