Process Orientation to Business Students – Enabling Role of Enterprise Systems in Curriculum

Developing process orientation skills is now essential for the effective workplace performance of business graduates. This paper reports on one ongoing curriculum development project that extended the deployment of SAP, an enterprise system software solution, into two discipline-based courses offered by different disciplines – human resources and accounting – within a broad undergraduate business curriculum, and analyses the pedagogical effectiveness of the project. Employing a questionnaire survey and self-assessment of the knowledge and skills gained, this paper reports on the effectiveness of the curriculum design and delivery. This study demonstrates the powerful role played by the enterprise system software in developing conceptual understanding of process focus and integration, and the effect of enterprise systems on work environment to business student. Even though it is difficult to impart process orientation to students just with the help of ES software solution, this study asserts that it is possible to create and improve understanding of the concepts of process and integration, and the effect of ES on work environment with the deployment of ES software into business curriculum.

Understanding The Role Of Social Capital In Expertise Coordination In Information Systems Development (isd) Teams

Information system development (ISD) project is a knowledge-intensive teamwork process which requires members to coordinate their expertise to generate the final outcome. Breakdown or coordination and insufficient knowledge integration have been reported as critical factors which lead to ISD project failure. Most existing coordination literature focus on the effect of administrative coordination mechanisms toward project performance which hints that more efforts are needed to understand expertise coordination and explore ways to improve it. Addressing the above issues, two studies in this dissertation attempt to understand expertise coordination within the IS development team based on social capital perspective. The first study, based on intention-behavior literature, knowledge management research, and Gerwin\u27s (2004) coordination model, investigates relationships among willingness, competence, and actual expertise coordination. The relationships between expertise coordination and teamwork outcomes are also examined. The second study incorporates social capital theory and examines (1) dependencies among three dimensions of social capital and (2) linkage between social capital and expertise coordination. Data collected from more than five hundred information systems project team members was used to test the proposed hypotheses. The analysis results confirmed most of the hypotheses. This dissertation contributes to coordination, project management, and team mental model research through many perspectives. In each study, directions for management practice and future research are discussed

Towards a decision-support framework for reducing ramp-up effort in plug-and-produce systems

Nowadays, shorter and more flexible production cycles are vital to meet the increasing customized product demand. As any delays and downtimes in the production towards time-to-market means a substantial financial loss, manufacturers take an interest in getting the production system to full utilization as quickly as possible. The concept of plug-and-produce manufacturing systems facilitates an easy integration process through embedded intelligence in the devices. However, a human still needs to validate the functionality of the system and more importantly must ensure that the required quality and performance is delivered. This is done during the ramp-up phase, where the system is assembled and tested first-time. System adaptations and a lack of standard procedures make the ramp-up process still largely dependent on the operator’s experience level. A major problem that currently occurs during ramp-up, is a loss of knowledge and information due to a lack of means to capture the human’s experience. Capturing this information can be used to facilitate future ramp-up cases as additional insights about change actions and their effect on the system could be revealed. Hence, this paper proposes a decision-support framework for plugand-produce assembly systems that will help to reduce the ramp-up effort and ultimately shorten ramp-up time. As an illustrative example, a gluing station developed for the European project openMOS is considered

Development of a new connection for precast concrete walls subjected to cyclic loading

The Industrialized Building System (IBS) was recently introduced to minimize the time and cost of project construction. Accordingly, ensuring the integration of the connection of precast components in IBS structures is an important factor that ensures stability of buildings subjected to dynamic loads from earthquakes, vehicles, and machineries. However, structural engineers still lack knowledge on the proper connection and detailed joints of IBS structure construction. Therefore, this study proposes a special precast concrete wall-to-wall connection system for dynamic loads that resists multidirectional imposed loads and reduces vibration effects (PI2014701723). This system is designed to connect two adjacent precast wall panels by using two steel U-shaped channels (i.e., male and female joints). During casting, each joint is adapted for incorporation into a respective wall panel after considering the following conditions: one side of the steel channel opens into the thickness face of the panel; a U-shaped rubber is implemented between the two channels to dissipate the vibration effect; and bolts and nuts are used to create an extension between the two U-shaped male and female steel channels. The developed finite element model of the precast wall is subjected to cyclic loads to evaluate the performance of the proposed connection during an imposed dynamic load. Connection performance is then compared with conventional connections based on the energy dissipation, stress, deformation, and concrete damage in the plastic range. The proposed precast connection is capable of exceeding the energy absorption of precast walls subjected to dynamic load, thereby improving its resistance behavior in all principal directions

Urban typologies and heat energy demand. A case-study in the Italian context.

Nowadays, large parts of the world population (50-60%) are living in urban areas, which represent the most energy consuming systems (Buckley et al., 2009). Local governments are therefore asked to take new responsibilities in terms of energy management, adopting the urban scale as level of action, developing new methods and strategies to bring energy sustainability (saving/producing) and environmental quality into the cities. The development of a new energetic and environmental planning approach that can set energy as primary key – leading to a high level of urban efficiency and having a broad effect on other urban areas – is hence highly important. Different studies have pointed out the fundamental energetic role of urban morphology and typology (Ratti et al., 2004). Recognizing the key role of planning and design, and the contribution of modeling, some questions are arising: is it possible to analyze the performances of the built environment in a georeferenced way, considering the effect of urban design/form aspects, in order to achieve a better knowledge of those city characteristics that influence energy demand? Which is the role played by typologies in (re)orienting the energy analyses/model? Which targets can be achieved in reducing cost and energy? The project explore different factors involved in the energy performance of the city, in particular using an innovative evaluation model of heat energy demand, which has urban typologies as starting and key point of the analyses. A dynamic and georeferenced method has been specifically developed, allowing the estimation of the energy behavior of the “real†city. The empirical study is applied at the City of Gorgonzola - Italy, which holds potential both for the dimension of the built environment and the variety of urban typologies, which allow a comparison between them. Purpose of the paper is thus to analyze the results coming from the estimation, that can lead to a strong integration between energy, urban design and planning system.

The effect of organizational culture on CRM success

Copyright @ 2013 EMCIS.The aim of this paper is to develop a theoretical framework exemplifying the effect of organizational culture on the success of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems' implementation. This is deemed significant as yet little research has investigated the role of organizational culture as a critical success factor to CRM implementation. The proposed theoretical framework is developed based on the notion that nurturing an organizational culture that promotes adaptive learning leads to better management of customer information that in turn improves the quality of customer information, which is considered a key contributor to successful implementation of CRM initiatives. The Competing Values Framework (CVF) is used to measure "Organizational Culture" since it has proven its validity in examining the effect of organizational culture on organizational effectiveness and performance

Integration of decision support systems to improve decision support performance

Decision support system (DSS) is a well-established research and development area. Traditional isolated, stand-alone DSS has been recently facing new challenges. In order to improve the performance of DSS to meet the challenges, research has been actively carried out to develop integrated decision support systems (IDSS). This paper reviews the current research efforts with regard to the development of IDSS. The focus of the paper is on the integration aspect for IDSS through multiple perspectives, and the technologies that support this integration. More than 100 papers and software systems are discussed. Current research efforts and the development status of IDSS are explained, compared and classified. In addition, future trends and challenges in integration are outlined. The paper concludes that by addressing integration, better support will be provided to decision makers, with the expectation of both better decisions and improved decision making processes

Specification of vertical semantic consistency rules of UML class diagram refinement using logical approach

Unified Modelling Language (UML) is the most popular modelling language use for software design in software development industries with a class diagram being the most frequently use diagram. Despite the popularity of UML, it is being affected by inconsistency problems of its diagrams at the same or different abstraction levels. Inconsistency in UML is mostly caused by existence of various views on the same system and sometimes leads to potentially conflicting system specifications. In general, syntactic consistency can be automatically checked and therefore is supported by current UML Computer-aided Software Engineering (CASE) tools. Semantic consistency problems, unlike syntactic consistency problems, there exists no specific method for specifying semantic consistency rules and constraints. Therefore, this research has specified twenty-four abstraction rules of class‟s relation semantic among any three related classes of a refined class diagram to semantically equivalent relations of two of the classes using a logical approach. This research has also formalized three vertical semantic consistency rules of a class diagram refinement identified by previous researchers using a logical approach and a set of formalized abstraction rules. The results were successfully evaluated using hotel management system and passenger list system case studies and were found to be reliable and efficient

Team to Market (T2M): Creating High Performance Teams in the Digital Age

1. Teams are the essential means of product or service delivery and the fundamental building blocks of modern organisations. An effective team can produce results far outperforming a collection of even the most talented individuals when team members coalesce and jell into a single, well-functioning, fully-aligned organism. This report advances the notion of “Team to Market” (T2M) to help business leaders and knowledge workers understand, create and lead high performance teams in the digital age

Collaborative improvement as an inspiration for supply chain collaboration

The battlefield of competition is today moving from the level of\ud individual firms to the one of the extended enterprises, that is, networks of customers and their suppliers. This paper discusses how learning and continuous improvement today take place in processes based on daily collaboration at intercompany level, i.e. Extended Manufacturing Enterprises (EMEs). The purpose of the paper is to present a preliminary theory on Collaborative Improvement (CoI), i.e. continuous improvement at the EME level. Based on a literature review on Supply Networks, and Continuous Improvement and on evidence from two explorative case studies, the paper proposes a model for Collaborative Improvement in EMEs and discusses a research approach based on Action Research and Action Learning to further develop preliminary theory and actionable knowledge on how to foster and sustain CoI in EMEs