Risk Management

Every business and decision involves a certain amount of risk. Risk might cause a loss to a company. This does not mean, however, that businesses cannot take risks. As disengagement and risk aversion may result in missed business opportunities, which will lead to slower growth and reduced prosperity of a company. In today's increasingly complex and diverse environment, it is crucial to find the right balance between risk aversion and risk taking. To do this it is essential to understand the complex, out of the whole range of economic, technical, operational, environmental and social risks associated with the company's activities. However, risk management is about much more than merely avoiding or successfully deriving benefit from opportunities. Risk management is the identification, assessment, and prioritization of risks. Lastly, risk management helps a company to handle the risks associated with a rapidly changing business environment

A survey on context awareness in big data analytics for business applications

The concept of context awareness has been in existence since the 1990s. Though initially applied exclusively in computer science, over time it has increasingly been adopted by many different application domains such as business, health and military. Contexts change continuously because of objective reasons, such as economic situation, political matter and social issues. The adoption of big data analytics by businesses is facilitating such change at an even faster rate in much complicated ways. The potential benefits of embedding contextual information into an application are already evidenced by the improved outcomes of the existing context-aware methods in those applications. Since big data is growing very rapidly, context awareness in big data analytics has become more important and timely because of its proven efficiency in big data understanding and preparation, contributing to extracting the more and accurate value of big data. Many surveys have been published on context-based methods such as context modelling and reasoning, workflow adaptations, computational intelligence techniques and mobile ubiquitous systems. However, to our knowledge, no survey of context-aware methods on big data analytics for business applications supported by enterprise level software has been published to date. To bridge this research gap, in this paper first, we present a definition of context, its modelling and evaluation techniques, and highlight the importance of contextual information for big data analytics. Second, the works in three key business application areas that are context-aware and/or exploit big data analytics have been thoroughly reviewed. Finally, the paper concludes by highlighting a number of contemporary research challenges, including issues concerning modelling, managing and applying business contexts to big data analytics. © 2020, Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature

Decision Support Systems

Decision support systems (DSS) have evolved over the past four decades from theoretical concepts into real world computerized applications. DSS architecture contains three key components: knowledge base, computerized model, and user interface. DSS simulate cognitive decision-making functions of humans based on artificial intelligence methodologies (including expert systems, data mining, machine learning, connectionism, logistical reasoning, etc.) in order to perform decision support functions. The applications of DSS cover many domains, ranging from aviation monitoring, transportation safety, clinical diagnosis, weather forecast, business management to internet search strategy. By combining knowledge bases with inference rules, DSS are able to provide suggestions to end users to improve decisions and outcomes. This book is written as a textbook so that it can be used in formal courses examining decision support systems. It may be used by both undergraduate and graduate students from diverse computer-related fields. It will also be of value to established professionals as a text for self-study or for reference

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Design of an information system that connects retail banks and customers

The Swedish company Skyforge Financial Solutions AB (www.skyforge.se) is working on the new product MyBudget that will be part of an internet banking solution. The current version of the software extracts the spending information from the bank's transactions and then organize it graphically. My work is aimed to design a new concept the next major vision of MyBudget. It will be analyzed the stream of information between banks and customers, it will be evaluated if it is possible to have a deeper analysis of the available information about the customers so that the banks can improve their business, and then there will be some comments about the implication of the usage of this prototype by the customers in their way of spending money. The policy of research agreed with the company is to nd a "win-win" solution between banks and customers. Both of them should receive more information and then more advantages. MyBudget will have the technology that will make this possible. Sweden and nordic countries will be the rst reference market. The best practices of money management will be borrowed from companies processes to design solutions to improve the banks' customers spending behavior. This thesis is based on the work done in my whole university career but, mostly in the following courses taken in Lund University: - Strategic Management and Information Systems - Decision Support Systems - Design of Business Rules Systems - Business Intelligence and Securit

Operations Management

Global competition has caused fundamental changes in the competitive environment of the manufacturing and service industries. Firms should develop strategic objectives that, upon achievement, result in a competitive advantage in the market place. The forces of globalization on one hand and rapidly growing marketing opportunities overseas, especially in emerging economies on the other, have led to the expansion of operations on a global scale. The book aims to cover the main topics characterizing operations management including both strategic issues and practical applications. A global environmental business including both manufacturing and services is analyzed. The book contains original research and application chapters from different perspectives. It is enriched through the analyses of case studies

ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks: a literature review

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation is a complex and vibrant process, one that involves a combination of technological and organizational interactions. Often an ERP implementation project is the single largest IT project that an organization has ever launched and requires a mutual fit of system and organization. Also the concept of an ERP implementation supporting business processes across many different departments is not a generic, rigid and uniform concept and depends on variety of factors. As a result, the issues addressing the ERP implementation process have been one of the major concerns in industry. Therefore ERP implementation receives attention from practitioners and scholars and both, business as well as academic literature is abundant and not always very conclusive or coherent. However, research on ERP systems so far has been mainly focused on diffusion, use and impact issues. Less attention has been given to the methods used during the configuration and the implementation of ERP systems, even though they are commonly used in practice, they still remain largely unexplored and undocumented in Information Systems research. So, the academic relevance of this research is the contribution to the existing body of scientific knowledge. An annotated brief literature review is done in order to evaluate the current state of the existing academic literature. The purpose is to present a systematic overview of relevant ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks as a desire for achieving a better taxonomy of ERP implementation methodologies. This paper is useful to researchers who are interested in ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks. Results will serve as an input for a classification of the existing ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks. Also, this paper aims also at the professional ERP community involved in the process of ERP implementation by promoting a better understanding of ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks, its variety and history

Factors Influencing Customer Satisfaction towards E-shopping in Malaysia

Online shopping or e-shopping has changed the world of business and quite a few people have decided to work with these features. What their primary concerns precisely and the responses from the globalisation are the competency of incorporation while doing their businesses. E-shopping has also increased substantially in Malaysia in recent years. The rapid increase in the e-commerce industry in Malaysia has created the demand to emphasize on how to increase customer satisfaction while operating in the e-retailing environment. It is very important that customers are satisfied with the website, or else, they would not return. Therefore, a crucial fact to look into is that companies must ensure that their customers are satisfied with their purchases that are really essential from the ecommerce’s point of view. With is in mind, this study aimed at investigating customer satisfaction towards e-shopping in Malaysia. A total of 400 questionnaires were distributed among students randomly selected from various public and private universities located within Klang valley area. Total 369 questionnaires were returned, out of which 341 questionnaires were found usable for further analysis. Finally, SEM was employed to test the hypotheses. This study found that customer satisfaction towards e-shopping in Malaysia is to a great extent influenced by ease of use, trust, design of the website, online security and e-service quality. Finally, recommendations and future study direction is provided. Keywords: E-shopping, Customer satisfaction, Trust, Online security, E-service quality, Malaysia

An empirical analysis on the credit scoring and the intermediary role of financing guarantee institutions of China's car loans

By the end of 2018, China's car ownership has reached 240 million, an increase of 10.51% over 2017, which leads to the increase of automobile financial services and hence the associated automobile credit risks. In order to transfer risks, financial institutions increasingly are choosing to issue auto loans through financing guarantee companies. Therefore, the industry pays more attention to the credit scoring, as it acts as the main risk control measure of auto financing guarantee companies. This leads to the study of the role the financing guarantee company plays and how effective the credit rating is as a risk control mechanism. The purpose is to investigate whether the auto financing guarantee company plays a mediating role by providing credit score. The empirical approach is as follows: a two-stage regression method is used to control or eliminate the influence of personal characteristics and other third-party credit ratings. Through which, we firstly test whether the credit score of an auto financing guarantee company contains additional information besides personal characteristics and third-party credit scores. Second, we test whether additional information of auto financing guarantee company can significantly explain the post-loan performance of whether default or non-default. The conclusions show that even after controlling the third-party credit score and personal characteristics, the credit scoring system of auto financing guarantee companies still has a significant explanation on the performance of post-loan default. In other words, it plays an intermediary role by providing credit evaluation services, which has a direct decision reference for the financial institutions that ultimately provide credit. Based on this, this study puts forward corresponding management enhancement and loan risk management suggestions.No final de 2018, a propriedade automóvel na China atingiu 240 milhões, um aumento de 10.51% sobre 2017, o que leva ao aumento dos serviços financeiros automóvel e, portanto, dos riscos de crédito automóvel associados. Para mitigar riscos, as instituições financeiras optam, cada vez mais, por conceder empréstimos automóvel através de empresas de garantia. Por conseguinte, a indústria presta mais atenção à pontuação do crédito, uma vez que esta atua como a principal medida de controlo do risco das empresas de garantia de financiamento-automóvel. Isto conduz ao estudo do papel desempenhado pela empresa de garantia de financiamento e da eficácia da sua notação de crédito como mecanismo de controlo dos riscos. Com base no sistema de notação de crédito da T’s e num total de 119.798 registos de empréstimos, este estudo examina o poder explicativo da notação de crédito das empresas de garantia de financiamento automóvel no incumprimento dos mutuários e as funções mediadoras destas empresas. Utiliza-se um método de regressão em dois estágios para controlar ou eliminar a influência de características pessoais e outros ratings, testando primeiro se a notação de crédito de uma empresa de garantia contém informações adicionais e testando, depois, se as informações adicionais da empresa de garantia podem explicar significativamente o desempenho do mutuário pós-empréstimo, As conclusões mostram que, mesmo após controlar a notação de crédito de terceiros e as características pessoais, o sistema de notação de crédito das empresas de garantia tem uma explicação significativa no desempenho do mutuário pós-empréstimo. Ou seja, ele desempenha um papel mediador, fornecendo serviços de avaliação de crédito que têm influência direta na decisão das instituições financeiras que, finalmente, fornecem crédito. Correspondentemente, esta investigação apresenta sugestões de melhoramento da gestão do risco de crédito