Managing inventory in the small and medium entreprises food and beverage industry

Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) has been recognized as a platform in the economic development in Malaysia where it contributes to more than one-third of the Malaysian economy. SMEs industry help to fulfil the market demand and create more job opportunity. However, many SMEs companies faced a common challenge on their business which disrupted their performance and business continuity. Disruption in maintaining the efficiency of inventory management contribute to significant loss to business performance. Therefore, this research has observed some inventory problems faced by purchasing department at Rasa ABC Enterprise, proposed a solution and evaluated the usefulness/ease of use by using project management steps of initiation, planning, evaluation and analysis. This research has also identified the main issue at Rasa ABC Enterprise using the Ishikawa Diagram and found that the root cause is lack of efficiency in inventory management system. Thus this paper has proposed a solution to use a simple interface, user-friendly, convenient, and cost-effective software. Based on the questionnaires that has been distributed, the workers find the software as useful and easy to be used

Dynamic Service Level Agreement Management for Efficient Operation of Elastic Information Systems

The growing awareness that effective Information Systems (IS), which contribute to sustainable business processes, secure a long-lasting competitive advantage has increasingly focused corporate transformation efforts on the efficient usage of Information Technology (IT). In this context, we provide a new perspective on the management of enterprise information systems and introduce a novel framework that harmonizes economic and operational goals. Concretely, we target elastic n-tier applications with dynamic on-demand cloud resource provisioning. We design and implement a novel integrated management model for information systems that induces economic influence factors into the operation strategy to adapt the performance goals of an enterprise information system dynamically (i.e., online at runtime). Our framework forecasts future user behavior based on historic data, analyzes the impact of workload on system performance based on a non-linear performance model, analyzes the economic impact of different provisioning strategies, and derives an optimal operation strategy. The evaluation of our prototype, based on a real production system workload trace, is carried out in a custom test infrastructure (i.e., cloud testbed, n-tier benchmark application, distributed monitors, and control framework), which allows us to evaluate our approach in depth, in terms of efficiency along the entire SLA lifetime. Based on our thorough evaluation, we are able to make concise recommendations on how to use our framework effectively in further research and practice

The Reform of Employee Compensation in China’s Industrial Enterprises

Although employee compensation reform in Chinese industrial sector has been discussed in the literature, the real changes in compensation system and pay practices have received insufficient attention and warrant further examination. This paper briefly reviews the pre- and post-reform compensation system, and reports the results of a survey of pay practices in the four major types of industrial enterprises in China. The research findings indicate that the type of enterprise ownership has little influence on general compensation practices, adoption of profit-sharing plans, and subsidy and allowance packages. In general, pay is linked more to individual performance and has become an important incentive to Chinese employees. However, differences are found across the enterprise types with regard to performance-related pay. Current pay practices are positively correlated to overall effectiveness of the enterprise

Decision-focussed resource modelling for design decision support

Resource management including resource allocation, levelling, configuration and monitoring has been recognised as critical to design decision making. It has received increasing research interests in recent years. Different definitions, models and systems have been developed and published in literature. One common issue with existing research is that the resource modelling has focussed on the information view of resources. A few acknowledged the importance of resource capability to design management, but none has addressed the evaluation analysis of resource fitness to effectively support design decisions. This paper proposes a decision-focused resource model framework that addresses the combination of resource evaluation with resource information from multiple perspectives. A resource management system constructed on the resource model framework can provide functions for design engineers to efficiently search and retrieve the best fit resources (based on the evaluation results) to meet decision requirements. Thus, the system has the potential to provide improved decision making performance compared with existing resource management systems