Managing Supplier Involvement in New Product Development: A Multiple-Case Study

Existing studies of supplier involvement in new product development have mainly focused on project-related short-term processes and success-factors. This study validates and extends an existing exploratory framework, which comprises both long-term strategic processes and short-term operational processes that are related to supplier involvement. The empirical validation is based on a multiple-case study of supplier collaborations at a manufacturer in the copier and printer industry. The analysis of eight cases of supplier involvement reveals that the results of supplier-manufacturer collaborations and the associated issues and problems can best be explained by the patterns in the extent to which the manufacturer manages supplier involvement in the short-term ànd the long-term. We find that our initial framework is helpful in understanding why certain collaborations are not effectively managed, yet conclude that the existing analytical distinction between four different management areas does not sufficiently reflect empirical reality. This leads us to reconceptualize and further detail the framework. Instead of four managerial areas, we propose to distinguish between the Strategic Management arena and the Operational Management arena. The Strategic Management arena contains processes that together provide long-term, strategic direction and operational support for project teams adopting supplier involvement. These processes also contribute to building up a supplier base that can meet current and future technology and capability needs. The Operational Management arena contains processes that are aimed at planning, managing and evaluating the actual collaborations in a specific development project. The results of this study suggest that success of involving suppliers in product development is reflected by the firm’s ability to capture both short-term and long-term benefits. If companies spend most of their time on operational management in development projects, they will fail to use the ‘leverage’ effect of planning and preparing such involvement through strategic management activities. Also, they will not be sufficiently able to capture possible long-term technology and learning benefits that may spin off from individual projects. Long-term collaboration benefits can only be captured if a company can build long-term relationships with key suppliers, where it builds learning routines and ensures that the capability sets of both parties are aligned and remain useful for future joint projects.Purchasing;Innovation;New Product Development;R&D Management;Supplier Relations

An interdisciplinary review of energy storage for communities: challenges and perspectives

Given the increasing penetration of renewable energy technologies as distributed generation embedded in the consumption centres, there is growing interest in energy storage systems located very close to consumers. These systems allow to increase the amount of renewable energy generation consumed locally, they provide opportunities for demand-side management and help to decarbonise the electricity, heating and transport sectors. In this paper, the authors present an interdisciplinary review of community energy storage (CES) with a focus on its potential role and challenges as a key element within the wider energy system. The discussion includes: the whole spectrum of applications and technologies with a strong emphasis on end user applications; techno-economic, environmental and social assessments of CES; and an outlook on CES from the customer, utility company and policy-maker perspectives. Currently, in general only traditional thermal storage with water tanks is economically viable. However, CES is expected to offer new opportunities for the energy transition since the community scale introduces several advantages for electrochemical technologies such as batteries. Technical and economic benefits over energy storage in single dwellings are driven by enhanced performance due to less spiky community demand profile and economies of scale respectively. In addition, CES brings new opportunities for citizen participation within communities and helps to increase awareness of energy consumption and environmental impacts

FairSISA: Ensemble Post-Processing to Improve Fairness of Unlearning in LLMs

Training large language models (LLMs) is a costly endeavour in terms of time and computational resources. The large amount of training data used during the unsupervised pre-training phase makes it difficult to verify all data and, unfortunately, undesirable data may be ingested during training. Re-training from scratch is impractical and has led to the creation of the 'unlearning' discipline where models are modified to "unlearn" undesirable information without retraining. However, any modification can alter the behaviour of LLMs, especially on key dimensions such as fairness. This is the first work that examines this interplay between unlearning and fairness for LLMs. In particular, we focus on a popular unlearning framework known as SISA [Bourtoule et al., 2021], which creates an ensemble of models trained on disjoint shards. We evaluate the performance-fairness trade-off for SISA, and empirically demsontrate that SISA can indeed reduce fairness in LLMs. To remedy this, we propose post-processing bias mitigation techniques for ensemble models produced by SISA. We adapt the post-processing fairness improvement technique from [Hardt et al., 2016] to design three methods that can handle model ensembles, and prove that one of the methods is an optimal fair predictor for ensemble of models. Through experimental results, we demonstrate the efficacy of our post-processing framework called 'FairSISA'.Comment: Accepted in NeurIPS 2023 Workshop on Socially Responsible Language Modelling Research (SoLaR

An overview of grid-edge control with the digital transformation

Distribution networks are evolving to become more responsive with increasing integration of distributed energy resources (DERs) and digital transformation at the grid edges. This evolution imposes many challenges to the operation of the network, which then calls for new control and operation paradigms. Among others, a so-called grid-edge control is emerging to harmonise the coexistence of the grid control system and DER’s autonomous control. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the grid-edge control with various control architectures, layers, and strategies. The challenges and opportunities for such an approach at the grid edge with the integration of DERs and digital transformation are summarised. The potential solutions to support the network operation by using the inherent controllability of DER and the availability of the digital transformation at the grid edges are discussed

An improved closed loop hybrid phase shift controller for dual active bridge converter

In this paper, a new closed loop hybrid phase shift control is proposed for dual active bridge (DAB) converter with variable input voltage. The extended phase shift (EPS) control is applied when load gets heavy enough and the secondary side phase shift angle decreases to zero. When this modified DAB converter operates at light loads, the triple phase shift (TPS) modulation method is applied, and the added control freedom is the secondary phase shift angle between the two-secondary side switching legs. The hybrid phase shift control (HPS) scheme is a combination of EPS and TPS modulations, and it provides a very simple closed form implementation for the primary and secondary side phase shift angles. Depending on the application by changing the phase shift angles we can achieve Buck or Boost operation. A characteristic table feedback control method has been used for closed loop operation. By using 1D look up table the proposed DAB converter provides constant 400V for any given input voltage

Challenges for the Goal of 100% Renewable Energy Sources to Fit the Green Transition

The increasing penetration of Renewable Energy (RE) into the electrical market is desirable in terms of sustainability. Nevertheless, it is a challenge that all the interested actors shall address from both the technical and economical points of view. This paper provides an overview of the main challenges and solutions towards the technological transition to an electrical system with 100% renewable energy sources in terms of innovations and operative limits of the traditional systems. These innovative paradigms will also address the social impact and government policies

AUTOMATED SOFTWARE METRICS, REPOSITORY EVALUATION AND SOFTWARE ASSET MANAGEMENT: NEW TOOLS AND PERSPECTIVES FOR MANAGING INTEGRATED COMPUTER AIDED SOFTWARE ENGINEERING (I-CASE)

Automated collection of software metrics in computer aided software engineering (CASE) environments opens up new avenues for improving the management of software development operations, as well as shifting the focus of management's control efforts from "software projectâ to "software assets" stored in a centralized repository. Repository evaluation, a new direction for software metrics research in the 1990s, promises a fresh view of software development performance for a range of responsibility levels. We discuss the automation of function point and code reuse analysis in the context of an integrated CASE (I-CASE) environment deployed at a large investment bank in New York City. The development of an automated code reuse analysis tool prompted us to re-think how to measure and interpret code reuse in the I-CASE environment. The metrics we propose describe three dimensions of code reuse -- leverage, value and classification -- and we examine the value of applying them on a project and a repository-wide basis.Information Systems Working Papers Serie