Supply chain implications of sustainable design strategies for electronics products

Increasing legislative and consumer pressures on manufacturers to improve sustainability necessitates that manufacturers consider the overall life cycle and not be scope restricted in creating products. Product strategies to improve sustainability have design implications as many of the decisions made during the design stage will then determine the environmental performance of the final product. Coordination across the supply chain is potentially beneficial as products with improved energy efficiency can be better realised. This paper examines traditional product provision and proposes a sustainable product design process using life cycle assessment (LCA) at key points, as these decision points can provide opportunities for environmental improvements of products. Case studies of consumer and industry products in the electronics sector are examined in terms of improving sustainability by reviewing product architecture and technology solutions. This paper proposes methods and analytical models to better understand sustainable design strategies for manufacturing firms and thus aid manufacturers during the earliest stages of product planning to consider alternative product development approaches which are more sustainable

Agent oriented modeling of business information systems

Enterprise modeling is an abstract definition of processes running in enterprise using process, value, data and resource models. There are two perspectives of business modeling: process perspective and value chain perspective. Both have some advantages and disadvantages. This paper proposes a combination of both perspectives into one generic model. The model takes also social part or the enterprise system into consideration and pays attention to disturbances influencing the enterprise system. Due to heterogeneous nature of the enterprise processes the outline proposed is oriented on the modeling using agents. Several types of agents are defined for the simulation model. The agents are structured into several layers. Well known JADE platform is proposed as the modeling framework. Further research directions are summed up in conclusionprocess model, value chain model, business pattern, agent, control loop, feedback, JADE platform.

Developing methods for strategic evaluation in agricultural research and production

We analyze instruments to evaluate investment strategies as new options for co-operatives within the wheat production chain. Using a value-based management the extension of our concept, a “cooperative balanced scorecard” is discussed as we propose the further differentiation of the scorecard’s financial perspective. This is a market development-driven approach as cooperatives may be regarded as commodity-price-intermediators for their members. Proposing this approach we use a simple model of conjoint-hedging in intermediating firms within agribusiness.Agribusiness, Wheat Production, Cooperatives, Intermediation, Value-based Management, Commodity Markets., Agricultural and Food Policy,

Global supply chains of high value low volume products

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Improve OR-schedule to reduce number of required beds

After surgery most of the surgical patients have to be admitted in a ward in the hospital. Due to financial reasons and an decreasing number of available nurses in the Netherlands over the years, it is important to reduce the bed usage as much as possible. One possible way to achieve this is to create an operating room (OR) schedule that spreads the usage of beds nicely over time, and thereby minimizes the number of required beds. An OR-schedule is given by an assignment of OR-blocks to specific days in the planning horizon and has to fulfill several resource constraints. Due to the stochastic nature of the length of stay of patients, the analytic calculation of the number of required beds for a given OR-schedule is a complex task involving the convolution of discrete distributions. In this paper, two approaches to deal with this complexity are presented. First, a heuristic approach based on local search is given, which takes into account the detailed formulation of the objective. A second approach reduces the complexity by simplifying the objective function. This allows modeling and solving the resulting problem as an ILP. Both approaches are tested on data provided by Hagaziekenhuis in the Netherlands. Furthermore, several what-if scenarios are evaluated. The computational results show that the approach that uses the simplified objective function provides better solutions to the original problem. By using this approach, the number of required beds for the considered instance of HagaZiekenhuis can be reduced by almost 20%

The Logistic Principles for Fast Flexible Strategy Design of the Company in Crisis Time

The article deals with design of the logistic principles enabling an enterprise to create a strategy flexible in terms of business and marketing and stable and steady in terms of manufacturing. In order to create a strategy model the following principles can be applied: shortening the period of capacity planning combined with flexible planning, SYNCRO – MRP (Material Required Planning) principle, the application of forecasting in capacity planning, creation with partners of one of the cooperation forms such as supply chain, demand chain, lean supply chain, agile supply chain, leagile supply chain, and using the DBR (Drum Buffer Rope), APS (Advanced Planning System) and SCP (Supply Chain Planning) systems. The article describes application of this principle for model design of the flexible strategy for Chemosvit fólie a. s. company, and the results of this application in the crisis time 2009–2011.SYANCRO-MRP, capacity planning, forecasting, supply chain, demand chain

Two-phased knowledge formalisation for hydrometallurgical gold ore process recommendation and validation

This paper describes an approach to externalising and formalising expert knowledge involved in the design and evaluation of hydrometallurgical process chains for gold ore treatment. The objective was to create a case-based reasoning application for recommending and validating a treatment process of gold ores. We describe a twofold approach. Formalising human expert knowledge about gold mining situations enables the retrieval of similar mining contexts and respective process chains, based on prospection data gathered from a potential gold mining site. Secondly, empirical knowledge on hydrometallurgical treatments is formalised. This enabled us to evaluate and, where needed, redesign the process chain that was recommended by the first aspect of our approach. The main problems with formalisation of knowledge in the domain of gold ore refinement are the diversity and the amount of parameters used in literature and by experts to describe a mining context. We demonstrate how similarity knowledge was used to formalise literature knowledge. The evaluation of data gathered from experiments with an initial prototype workflow recommender, Auric Adviser, provides promising results