Concentration Activities

The chapter on concentration activities from Professor James Sagner's book Cashflow Reengineering

Constructing an E-Supply Chain at Eastman Chemical Company

Craig Knight, Asia-Pacific Digital Business and Customer Services Manager of Eastman Chemical Company, was given a mandate to sell Eastman’s philosophy for an integrated electronic supply chain, otherwise known as the Integrated System Solution (ISS), to its business partners in the region, and to encourage adoption. Having invested in a state-of-the-art technical architecture that would support interconnectivity with all parties along the supply chain, Eastman was keen to realize the full benefits to be gained from an integrated e-supply chain on a global scale. Following numerous rounds of discussion with key business partners in the Asia- Pacific region, some progress had been made. Nagase & Co., Ltd. of Japan had agreed to adopt ISS connections with Eastman, but had some reservations regarding the extent of integration. Although the benefits of integration were proven, suppliers, customers, distributors, and other interested parties were faced with numerous limitations and considerations that would have significant implications on their established business processes and even the shaping of their corporate strategy. Adoption was not a simple choice. Craig understood these shortcomings and was making every effort to ease the adoption process by identifying the longer-term benefits to Nagase and other business partners of applying XML technology to their businesses

Developing a methodology for integration of Whole Life Costs into BIM processes to assist design decision making

A growing body of evidence suggests that the most common barrier to achieving design intent is the absence of comprehensive information during design development, leading to poor decision-making which impacts on actual building performance, and thus Whole Life Cost (WLC). Building Information Modeling (BIM) has the potential to facilitate a more comprehensive and accurate design approach from the early stages. A detailed model can allow designers and clients to understand the wider impacts of design changes, and to track this information through construction stages. However, dependencies between design decisions and WLC have yet to be understood. This paper is based on a project that focuses on the Private Rental Sector (PRS), which is the fastest growing new sector in the UK housing market. The study adopts a mixed method approach for the development and validation of a structured standardised process for timely WLC estimation through BIM. As a result, the main problems in WLC BIM management are identified, and coordinated into a reverse-engineered systematic process that uses the Integrated DEFinition (IDEF) 3 structured diagramming modeling technique. The research outputs aim to enhance BIM lifecycle management through a smart decision-making approach that is integral to the natural design development process

Performance Evaluation for the Sustainable Supply Chain Management

Supply chain SC activities transform natural resources, raw materials, and components into various finished products that are delivered to end customers. A high efficient SC would bring great benefits to an enterprise such as integrated resources, reduced logistics costs, improved logistics efficiency, and high quality of overall level of services. In contrast, an inefficient SC will bring additional transaction costs, information management costs, and resource waste, reduce the production capacity of all enterprises on the chain, and unsatisfactory customer relationships. So the evaluation of a SC is important for an enterprise to survive in a competitive market in a globalized business environment. Therefore, it is important to research the various methods, performance indicator systems, and technology for evaluating, monitoring, predicting, and optimizing the performance of a SC. A typical procedure of the performance evaluation (PE) of a SC is to use the established evaluation performance indicators, employ an analytical method, follow a given procedure, to carry out quantitatively or qualitatively comparative analysis to provide the objective and accurate evaluation of a SC performance in a selected operation period. Various research works have been carried out in proposing the performance indicator systems and methods for SC performance evaluations. But there are no widely accepted indicator systems that can be applied in practical SC performance evaluations due to the fact that the indicators in different systems have been defined without a common understanding of the meanings and the relationships between them, and they are nonlinear and very complicated

Software Development Outsourcing Decision Support Tool with Neural Network Learning

The Air Force (AF) needs an evolving software tool for guiding decision makers through the complexities of software outsourcing. Previous research identified specific outsourcing strategies and linked them to goals and consequences through a variety of relationship rules. These strategies and relationship rules were inserted into a decision support tool. Since that time, more historical data and outsourcing literature has been collected thus necessitating an update to such a tool. As the number of software outsourcing projects are completed, the AF must capture the outsourcing decision experiences which guided the projects and their outcomes. In order to efficiently incorporate this new experience, the decision tool must be redesigned to allow the additional knowledge to be added in such a way that the decision rule base is automatically updated. With this new feature, the tool would increase its precision of predicting software outsourcing success as the software outsourcing knowledge evolves. Capturing software outsourcing as knowledge instead of raw information will help guide decision makers down paths proven to succeed staying clear of risks that historically plagued software outsourcing projects of the past. Software outsourcing decision makers desire not only a characterization of past experiences and predictions of future outcomes, but also reasons to help them make informed decisions

Quality Assurance in Corporate Financial Planning - A Process- and Data-Driven Perspective

This thesis addresses process and data related challenges and contains two parts: the first process-driven part evaluates the effect of corporate financial planning redesign based on a business process redesign model for multinational enterprises. The second data-driven research part comes up with new quality metrics for financial planning data and their benchmarking against the quality dimension accuracy. Both research parts are investigated through evaluation studies based on empirical data