An Empirical Study of Operational Performance Parity Following Enterprise System Deployment

This paper presents an empirical investigation into whether the implementation of packaged Enterprise Systems (ES) leads to parity in operational performance. Performance change and parity in operational performance are investigated in three geographically defined operating regions of a single firm. Order lead time, the elapsed time between receipt of an order and shipment to a customer, is used as a measure of operational performance. A single ES installation was deployed across all regions of the subject firm\u27s operations.Findings illustrate parity as an immediate consequence of ES deployment. However, differences in rates of performance improvement following deployment eventually result in significant (albeit smaller than pre-deployment) performance differences. An additional consequence of deployment seems to be an increased synchronization of performance across the formerly independent regions

Towards an integrated perspective on fleet asset management: engineering and governance considerations

The traditional engineering perspective on asset management concentrates on the operational performance the assets. This perspective aims at managing assets through their life-cycle, from technical specification, to acquisition, operation including maintenance, and disposal. However, the engineering perspective often takes for granted organizational-level factors. For example, a focus on performance at the asset level may lead to ignore performance measures at the business unit level. The governance perspective on asset management usually concentrates on organizational factors, and measures performance in financial terms. In doing so, the governance perspective tends to ignore the engineering considerations required for optimal asset performance. These two perspectives often take each other for granted. However experience demonstrates that an exclusive focus on one or the other may lead to sub-optimal performance. For example, the two perspectives have different time frames: engineering considers the long term asset life-cycle whereas the organizational time frame is based on a yearly financial calendar. Asset fleets provide a relevant and important context to investigate the interaction between engineering and governance views on asset management as fleets have distributed system characteristics. In this project we investigate how engineering and governance perspectives can be reconciled and integrated to enable optimal asset and organizational performance in the context of asset fleets

Sustainable Marketing: Philosophies, Economies and Strategies for a New Consumer Metabolism

Sustainable marketing is a subset of the sustainable development field recently formed in 1992. Both fields are complex and development elusive, but diverse bodies of knowledge are involved including, philosophy, economics, social sciences, business strategy, marketing, and environmental. The concern is about our ravenous, consumer demands or metabolism, with the world population increasing by 50% in the next forty-five years. This necessitates change in our economic structures, consumer pricing and goods, social responsibility and long-term business viability. In short, sustainable marketing stands to become an imperative for businesses seeking to have or maintain their competitive advantage

A Holistic Approach for E-Business Engineering

In the recent years, the broader application of web-based technologies caused radical changes and a consequent rapid development within the entrepreneurial environment. In order to exploit first-mover advantages, enterprises often preferred a quick-paced introduction of E-Business solutions, hence neglecting more holistic and integrated approaches. This fact implied that E-Business solutions were usually simply and hastily embedded into the existing business processes and organizational structures. As a result, E-Business projects often did not reach the striven targets or even failed, with the consequently growing lack of trust towards the above-mentioned business approach. Hence, there is a clear need for action in the field of methodical development, deployment and integration of E-Business solutions into the entrepreneurial structure. We present an integrated framework for the engineering of E-Business, which is the result of a 3 year experience at FIR

Operations Management Curricula: Literature Review and Analysis

A review and analysis of studies on the interface between Operations Management (OM) academicians and industry practitioners indicate the existence of a persistent gap between what is being taught and what is relevant to practitioners in their daily jobs. The majority of practitioner studies have been directed at upper management levels, yet academia typically educates students for entry level or management trainee (undergraduate) and mid-management (MBA) positions. A recurring finding was that academicians prefer to teach quantitative techniques while practitioners favor qualitative concepts. The OM curricula literature shows some disagreements between academicians concerning subject matter, and a wide variety of teaching opinions. This paper provides an extensive analytical review of OM curricula literature along with their respective authors’ conclusions. From this analysis we suggest a customer-focused business plan to close the gap between industry and academia. This plan can be modified to account for faculty teaching and research interests, local industry requirements and institution specific factors such as class sizes and resources