Cognitive Factors and Risk Management of Concurrent Product Realisation

In projects of development and industrialization of new products or to improvement of the existing ones not only quality and costs but also the time of product entering the market and delivery time to the client are important. This can be achieved by efficient project management, where classic methods of project management need to be upgraded by elements of concurrent engineering. In this chapter, a method for risk management in cyclically recurrent projects is demonstrated, in which conventional models of risk management based on an assessment of probability of risk event occurrence and an assessment of their consequences are supplemented by a third parameter—assessment of frequency of recurrence of risk events. An important advantage of the suggested solution lies in that a project manager and team members take into account cognitive factors, when managing recurrence of risk events which are usually due to poorly organized business processes of a company. A template was created in the Microsoft Project environment, by means of which the project team tested the suggested methodology on an example of concurrent realization of a pedal assembly of a car

Report from the research: "The factory of culture – paid and voluntary work at cultural festivals"

The research material is based on in-depth, partially structured interviews. However, the scope of topics was very wide and conversations mostly referred to: problems that the employees encountered at work, their motivation, expectations towards current work, as well as their future prospects. Answers that gradually appeared in the interviews have been then confronted with the analysis of data and documents that the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage made available. Budgets of particular festivals and general data on their financial support have also been confronted with the interviews. Such an analysis gave us a stronger, structural base for conclusions made over the interpretation of interviews. One question that surprised us, but also showed us the benefits of the grounded theory, was the fact that data obtained from interviews mirrored the data from the documents. In total there were 48 interviews with the employees, co-workers and volunteers who worked at 12 festivals financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage located in 6 different cities in Poland

Assessment of the Sustainability of Community-owned (non-financial) Business Associations

The community-owned non-financial business associations are playing an important role in the economy of Hungary and in shaping the social and political mood of our country. The main reason for this is that companies (e.g. health, transport, energy supply, district heating, water utilities, etc.) are in state or local governmental property, which have strategic importance, and can fundamentally influence the public mood by the quality, reliability and pricing of their services. Therefore, the efficiency of their operation, their financial position, their employability, their productivity, and the short and long term sustainability of their capital ratio have an impact on the social well-being. This social sensibility imposes an increased responsibility on the one hand on the maintainers of community-owned companies, and on the other hand on the management of organizations. Therefore, it does matter how and under what conditions these organizations can be maintained. In their study, the authors (after justifying the choice of topic) seek the answer for the following questions: How can be defined the sustainable community company? What are the indicators and how can be measured the sustainability of community companies? What conclusions can be drawn from the indicators, sub-indices and of the index change

Milk Run Design: Definitions, Concepts and Solution Approaches

Efficient inbound networks in the European automotive industry rely on a set of different transport concepts including milk runs - understood as regularly scheduled pickup tours. The complexity of designing such a mixed network makes decision support necessary: In this thesis we provide definitions, mathematical models and a solution method for the Milk Run Design problem and introduce indicators assessing the performance of established milk runs in relation to alternative transport concepts

The linguistic construction of business reasoning: Towards a language-based model of decision-making in undergraduate business

This thesis reports on research whose aim is to arrive at a linguistically theorised understanding of the process of decision-making in undergraduate business studies. The use of ‘real-life’ tasks such as country reports – the major assessment task of the interdisciplinary unit Business in the Global Environment at a metropolitan Australian university – is intended to prepare students for the skills of ‘problem-solving’, ‘decision-making’ and professional report writing in international business environments. However, as indicated by the large number of students failing this task, few students possess the sophisticated linguistic resources necessary to build the generic complexity and persuasive rhetoric this high-stakes task demands. This study is concerned with identifying the linguistic demands of demonstrating decision-making in country reports. Current modelling of ‘big texts’ in SFL (Martin, 1994, 1995) is insufficient for understanding longer texts stretching across the many pages tertiary students are generally required to write. This thesis will show through fine-grained linguistic analyses of High Distinction student assignments that not all ‘big texts’ are macrogenres made up of elemental genre complexes and illustrate that embedded genres play a fundamental role in enabling texts of the length of business country reports to grow bigger than a page. Drawing on discourse semantics (Martin, 1992; Martin & Rose, 2007; Martin & White, 2005), this thesis also will also show how business reasoning is construed in undergraduate business reports through different types of grammatical structures and how successful student writers construct cause-effect relations and three major types of rhetorical moves in these texts. By making visible the academically valued meanings by which skillful writers demonstrate the process of decision-making in undergraduate business country reports, this research has pedagogical implications for academic literacy interventions aimed at making explicit the basis of achievement in business studies. It is hoped that this study will open up future research directions for the continued study of knowledge-building in undergraduate business studies

enterprise place relationship and value co creation advance in research

This paper is part of a bigger research path and, in its actual form, it presents the concept of value co-creation in the places as a result of a concerted action between enterprises and places themselves. This action doesn't have an "activating" element, although it is the outcome of the proper application of skills and knowledge of each actor in interpreting the changes occurred in the environment and in the activation of their value-creating initiatives. The methodology used involves the analysis of a single case study (Yin, 1994; Dubois e Gadde, 2002), suitable technique to develop theories about phenomena still little known in the context in which they take place. The use of cases also has the advantage of allowing the study of issues related to the "how" and "why" of recent and contemporary events over which the researcher has little control (Sturman, 1998; Cecconi, 2002; Yin, 2003). The analysis was conducted collecting data about the positive performance of the company (analysis of financial statements, reading specialized journals, website) and the proactive role of place and local government bodies (website of the town, visiting the places, analysis of urban renewal, key performance indicators of QSV). The entrepreneurial experience and the dynamics active on place allow to highlight how the process of value co-creation in those enterprise-territory relationships is the result of a contextual conditions system, stimulated by important and stable project-related osmosis processes, organizing the accrual of a strategic path shared by enterprise and place over time, increasing the territorial social capital, designing a rooted model of local skills able to compete globally. The originality of the paper lies in the development potential of value co-creation through the enhancement of knowledge and sensitivity towards the environmental and contextual dynamics. Innovation and knowledge are not unique prerogatives of the enterprises; they should also arise in and from places to generate a mutual exchange of traditional values, while co-producing knowledge and continuous innovation

Milk Run Design: Definitions, Concepts and Solution Approaches

Efficient inbound networks in the European automotive industry rely on a set of different transport concepts including milk runs - understood as regularly scheduled pickup tours. The complexity of designing such a mixed network makes decision support necessary: In this book we provide definitions, mathematical models and a solution method for the Milk Run Design problem and introduce indicators assessing the performance of established milk runs in relation to alternative transport concepts