Customizing Information Capture and Access

This article presents a customizable architecture for software agents that capture and access information in large, heterogeneous, distributed electronic repositories. The key idea is to exploit underlying structure at various levels of granularity to build high-level indices with task-specific interpretations. Information agents construct such indices and are configured as a network of reusable modules called structure detectors and segmenters. We illustrate our architecture with the design and implementation of smart information filters in two contexts: retrieving stock market data from Internet newsgroups and retrieving technical reports from Internet FTP sites

Customizing BPMN Diagrams Using Timelines

BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation) is widely used standard modeling technique for representing Business Processes by using diagrams, but lacks in some aspects. Representing execution-dependent and time-dependent decisions in BPMN Diagrams may be a daunting challenge [Carlo Combi et al., 2017]. In many cases such constraints are omitted in order to preserve the simplicity and the readability of the process model. However, for purposes such as compliance checking, process mining, and verification, formalizing such constraints could be very useful. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for annotating BPMN Diagrams with Temporal Synchronization Rules borrowed from the timeline-based planning field. We discuss the expressivity of the proposed approach and show that it is able to capture a lot of complex temporally-related constraints without affecting the structure of BPMN diagrams. Finally, we provide a mapping from annotated BPMN diagrams to timeline-based planning problems that allows one to take advantage of the last twenty years of theoretical and practical developments in the field

Toward an expert project management system

The purpose of the research effort is to prescribe a generic reusable shell that any project office can install and customize for the purposes of advising, guiding, and supporting project managers in that office. The prescribed shell is intended to provide both: a component that generates prescriptive guidance for project planning and monitoring activities, and an analogy (intuition) component that generates descriptive insights of previous experience of successful project managers. The latter component is especially significant in that it has the potential to: retrieve insights, not just data, and provide a vehicle for expert PMs to easily transcribe their current experiences in the course of each new project managed

An Evaluation of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Practices among Agribusiness Firms

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has received much attention in the business press as a management process to enhance firm performance. This research highlights differences between groups of respondents who believe their firm's CRM program is performing at a high level, as compared to those not satisfied with the performance of their CRM initiative. Cluster analysis was used to develop a taxonomy of respondents based on their perceived CRM performance. The resulting clusters are then profiled on both demographic variables as well as a core set of activities/behaviors to better understand key differences in the CRM programs of agribusinesses.customer relationship management (CRM), marketing, strategy, information technology, cluster analysis., Agribusiness,

Customized Employment: Applying Practical Solutions for Employment Success (Volume 1)

[Excerpt] The Customized Employment process is a flexible blend of strategies, services, and supports designed to increase employment options for job seekers with complex needs through voluntary negotiation of the employment relationship with an employer. The job seeker is the primary source of information and drives the process. The Customized Employment process begins with an exploration phase, which lays the foundation for employment planning. Planning results in a blueprint for the job search where an employment relationship is negotiated to meet the needs of both the job seeker and the employer

4 Wynnes Boating Manufacturing Company: A Market Analysis and Business Plan for Northwest Arkansas

This thesis focuses on a business plan for the opening and developing of a boat manufacturing company in Northwest Arkansas and, specifically, manufacturing of duck hunting boats. South Arkansas and Eastern Arkansas have boat-manufacturing companies, but none exist in Northwest Arkansas. Having developed an interest in duck hunting over the years, I have discovered a tremendous need to bring the boats to where a large portion of Arkansas population exists. The objective of this business is to identify the Northwest Arkansas market viability for a customized duck boat manufacturing company. This analysis and evaluation is meant to provide a business prospectus for a successful and long-term company

Economic Evaluation of Food Traceability Systems through Reference Models

Food supply chains complexity present a real challenge to perform economic evaluation of food traceability systems and their innovation/upgrades. In order to perform a supply chain wide economic evaluation a conceptual framework is developed using food traceability reference models. Reference models allow interaction with chain members’ requirements that come from legal and/or customer sources. The paper demonstrates how the requirements will have a definite effect on the costs and design of food traceability systems through the resources they demand. Even though this is a first step into addressing the challenge, more investigation is needed to clarify the boundaries of the two requirements and their economic effects on food traceability systems and their innovations/upgrades.Food traceability, Food traceability systems, Reference models, Economic evaluation., Agribusiness, Agricultural and Food Policy, Farm Management, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Industrial Organization,

SkelCL - A Portable Skeleton Library for High-Level GPU Programming

While CUDA and OpenCL made general-purpose programming for Graphics Processing Units (GPU) popular, using these programming approaches remains complex and error-prone because they lack high-level abstractions. The especially challenging systems with multiple GPU are not addressed at all by these low-level programming models. We propose SkelCL – a library providing so-called algorithmic skeletons that capture recurring patterns of parallel computation and communication, together with an abstract vector data type and constructs for specifying data distribution. We demonstrate that SkelCL greatly simplifies programming GPU systems. We report the competitive performance results of SkelCL using both a simple Mandelbrot set computation and an industrial-strength medical imaging application. Because the library is implemented using OpenCL, it is portable across GPU hardware of different vendors

Addressing business agility challenges with enterprise systems

It is clear that systems agility (i.e., having a responsive IT infrastructure that can be changed quickly to meet changing business needs) has become a critical component of organizational agility. However, skeptics continue to suggest that, despite the benefits enterprise system packages provide, they are constraining choices for firms faced with agility challenges. The reason for this skepticism is that the tight integration between different parts of the business that enables many enterprise systems\u27 benefits also increases the systems\u27 complexity, and this increased complexity, say the skeptics, increases the difficulty of changing systems when business needs change. These persistent concerns motivated us to conduct a series of interviews with business and IT managers in 15 firms to identify how they addressed, in total, 57 different business agility challenges. Our analysis suggests that when the challenges involved an enterprise system, firms were able to address a high percentage of their challenges with four options that avoid the difficulties associated with changing the complex core system: capabilities already built-in to the package but not previously used, leveraging globally consistent integrated data already available, using add-on systems available on the market that easily interfaced with the existing enterprise system, and vendor provided patches that automatically updated the code. These findings have important implications for organizations with and without enterprise system architectures