Negotiating a turnkey system: The vendor's viewpoint

My talk today will be from the viewpoint of a business manager responsible for product development, product marketing and product service, while at the same time meeting established goals for profitability. It is not my intention to give a highly technical or legalistic presentation. First, I am not qualified to do so, and second, you are more likely to benefit from understanding the general concepts involved in contracting and leaving the legal details to counsel.published or submitted for publicatio

Quality Development and Organizational Renovation at Construction Companies

Today, companies working in construction engineering field are facing with the process of quality development. We believe that only the companies which will implement interchanges of organisational renovation or reengineering from the quality viewpoint will be able to offer holistic quality answers to the customer‘s needs and their preferences. For that reason it is important that company retains its ability of ongoing monitoring of organizational model of viewpoints of quality management in order to: Realize, how responsible the company controls and operates its relations with quality according to its competitors, Identify, which components of organisational model of quality management are more important than others are, Analyse the level of organisational efficiency of quality management from the viewpoints of business and quality criteria of funning business. All mentioned present the basic orientation of the organization in order that quality expectations will be effectively fulfilled according to the goals of our business partners and other stakeholders

Evaluation of Cognitive Architectures for Cyber-Physical Production Systems

Cyber-physical production systems (CPPS) integrate physical and computational resources due to increasingly available sensors and processing power. This enables the usage of data, to create additional benefit, such as condition monitoring or optimization. These capabilities can lead to cognition, such that the system is able to adapt independently to changing circumstances by learning from additional sensors information. Developing a reference architecture for the design of CPPS and standardization of machines and software interfaces is crucial to enable compatibility of data usage between different machine models and vendors. This paper analysis existing reference architecture regarding their cognitive abilities, based on requirements that are derived from three different use cases. The results from the evaluation of the reference architectures, which include two instances that stem from the field of cognitive science, reveal a gap in the applicability of the architectures regarding the generalizability and the level of abstraction. While reference architectures from the field of automation are suitable to address use case specific requirements, and do not address the general requirements, especially w.r.t. adaptability, the examples from the field of cognitive science are well usable to reach a high level of adaption and cognition. It is desirable to merge advantages of both classes of architectures to address challenges in the field of CPPS in Industrie 4.0

Multi-perspective requirements engineering for networked business systems: a framework for pattern composition

How business and software analysts explore, document, and negotiate requirements for enterprise systems is critical to the benefits their organizations will eventually derive. In this paper, we present a framework for analysis and redesign of networked business systems. It is based on libraries of patterns which are derived from existing Internet businesses. The framework includes three perspectives: Economic value, Business processes, and Application communication, each of which applies a goal-oriented method to compose patterns. By means of consistency relationships between perspectives, we demonstrate the usefulness of the patterns as a light-weight approach to exploration of business ideas

Goals/questions/metrics method and SAP implementation projects

During the last years some researchers have studied the critical success factors (CSFs) in ERP implementations. However, until now, no one has studied how these CSFs should be put in practice to help organizations achieve success in ERP implementations. This technical research report attempts to define the usage of Goals/Questions/Metrics (GQM) approach in the definition of a measurement system for ERP implementation projects. GQM approach is a mechanism for defining and interpreting operational, measurable goals. Lately, because of its intuitive nature the approach has gained widespread appeal. We present a metrics overview and a description of GQM approach. Then we provide an example of GQM application for monitoring sustained management support in ERP implementations. Sustained management support is the most cited critical success factor in ERP implementation projects.Postprint (published version

Organization of Multi-Agent Systems: An Overview

In complex, open, and heterogeneous environments, agents must be able to reorganize towards the most appropriate organizations to adapt unpredictable environment changes within Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). Types of reorganization can be seen from two different levels. The individual agents level (micro-level) in which an agent changes its behaviors and interactions with other agents to adapt its local environment. And the organizational level (macro-level) in which the whole system changes it structure by adding or removing agents. This chapter is dedicated to overview different aspects of what is called MAS Organization including its motivations, paradigms, models, and techniques adopted for statically or dynamically organizing agents in MAS.Comment: 12 page

Community owned trading enterprises : their uniqueness and performance : a thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Business Studies at Massey University

Community ownership of trading enterprises has not been so favoured as a concept during the latter part of the 20th century as successive New Zealand Governments pursued market forces policies. The face of the New Zealand public ownership business scene radically changed from the mid 1980's as telecommunications, railways, the ports, Coal Corp, energy ... were all restructured in pursuit of the market model. Why was the public or community ownership model apparently not supported? The empirical evidence did not unequivocally uphold privatisation and the market model as being inherently more efficient as a structure. Notably also, community ownership was much enjoyed as a concept. This research, therefore, looks at the concept of community ownership and seeks to define its uniqueness and identify its performance in operating trading enterprises. The electricity companies in New Zealand were the area selected. The results moderately support the view that social/community goals are of more importance to community owned trading enterprises than their private ownership equivalents. Notably community ownership outperformed private enterprise as measured by ROE and ROA. Thus the contention that community ownership as a concept had much to offer, and was not inherently less efficient, was not disproved by this research. Further research in other fields is worthy of pursuit