Fueling Impact: A Fresh Look at Business Model Innovation and New Revenue Sources

Do you want to know how community foundations are finding innovative new sources of support, and diversifying their revenue base? How new revenue sources strengthen each community foundation's differentiation and sustainability?Difficult economic times in 2008-2010 have been an important wake-up call -- a reminder that diversifying revenue sources is an essential component of a strong business model

Assessing the Efficiency of Mass Transit Systems in the United States

Frustrated with increased parking problems, unstable gasoline prices, and stifling traffic congestion, a growing number of metropolitan city dwellers consider utilizing the mass transit system. Reflecting this sentiment, a ridership of the mass transit system across the United States has been on the rise for the past several years. A growing demand for the mass transit system, however, necessitates the expansion of service offerings, the improvement of basic infrastructure/routes, and the additional employment of mass transit workers, including drivers and maintenance crews. Such a need requires the optimal allocation of financial and human resources to the mass transit system in times of shrinking budgets and government downsizing. Thus, the public transit authority is faced with the dilemma of “doing more with less.” That is to say, the public transit authority needs to develop a “lean” strategy which can maximize transit services with the minimum expenses. To help the public transit authority develop such a lean strategy, this report identifies the best-in-class practices in the U.S. transit service sector and proposes transit policy guidelines that can best exploit lean principles built upon best-in-class practices

Can six sigma be effectively implemented in SMEs?

Six Sigma is a well-established approach that seeks to identify and eliminate defects, mistakes or failures in business processes or systems by focusing on those process performance characteristics that are of critical importance to customers. With more than two decades of successful implementation of Six Sigma methodologies at major corporations, the benefits of Six Sigma are well documented. Although Six Sigma has been implemented with success in many large corporations, there is still less documented evidence of its implementation in smaller organisations. Moreover, in the author's experience as a researcher and quality management consultant, SMEs are still not convinced that Six Sigma can be effectively implemented within SMEs. This article attempts to address this issue – can Six Sigma can be effectively implemented in SMEs? One of the common myths of Six Sigma that has emerged over the last few years is that it is just applicable to large corporations with immense resources and budget. The purpose of this article is to test this myth and to show that a Six Sigma-based business strategy is applicable to all kinds of businesses irrespective of the size and type of industry; manufacturing or service

Cloud Benchmarking for Performance

How can applications be deployed on the cloud to achieve maximum performance? This question has become significant and challenging with the availability of a wide variety of Virtual Machines (VMs) with different performance capabilities in the cloud. The above question is addressed by proposing a six step benchmarking methodology in which a user provides a set of four weights that indicate how important each of the following groups: memory, processor, computation and storage are to the application that needs to be executed on the cloud. The weights along with cloud benchmarking data are used to generate a ranking of VMs that can maximise performance of the application. The rankings are validated through an empirical analysis using two case study applications; the first is a financial risk application and the second is a molecular dynamics simulation, which are both representative of workloads that can benefit from execution on the cloud. Both case studies validate the feasibility of the methodology and highlight that maximum performance can be achieved on the cloud by selecting the top ranked VMs produced by the methodology.Comment: 6 pages, 6th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science (IEEE CloudCom) 2014, Singapor

Lusíadas dental field lab: launching a new brand in dental care - conceiving a short-term expansion plan

Following the proposed scope of the project, goals and deliverables were set under three distinct dimensions, comprising an analysis of both the market and the company, the creation of a winning Value Proposition, and the conceiving of recommendations for an expansion strategy. An Internal Analysis was conducted to assess Lusíadas Dental’s current capabilities and key figures, supporting the evaluation with an examination of the Consumer Decision Journey to better understand the existent efforts within the distinct stages of the process: Awareness, Consideration, Purchase and Loyalty. With the intuit to comprehend the trends shaping the industry, tendencies of supply and demand were studied along with the thorough examination of the national competitors’ key figures and positioning strategies. In addition, both the market’s best practices and failing companies were analyzed to better understand the success path that the brand should follow. The understanding of consumers’ preferences was critical to create the hypothesis surrounding both the Value Proposition and the Expansion Plan. Following this rationale, an in-depth survey was conducted to better acknowledge clients’ motivations and needs regarding Dental Care services. The Value Proposition’s recommendations were organized into three different spheres that together comprise the critical elements for the implementation of the Lusíadas Dental brand in the market. Across the dimensions —Clinical, Operational and Infrastructure —several recommendations were considered, representing the key takeaways of each element for the efficient execution of the brand. Distinct solutions were considered in what regards the expansion plan of the group, contemplating hypotheses such as capacity expansion within units, units’ expansion with the creation of clinics and the promotion of strategic alliances with other existing Dental Care players

MOBILITY AS A SERVICE.Four Case Studies

Human mobility has consistently been an essential segment in human development. Megaatrends such as Social change, urbanization and globalization, services and sharing economy, scarcity of resources, and technological advances are affecting society and economy in several ways. Over past several decades, public investments have been made to expand and improve mobility service across the urban areas. Over the next few years, the transportation sector gets ready for rapid changes, moving towards an advanced mobility supported by strong technology stream and the convergence of superior megatrends that are increasing the massive wave of conversion. Despite the changes happening in mobility, experts argue the challenge for transit agencies is attracting people out of their cars and use public transport, however, due to several difficulties public transport creates for private car users, they still prefer to use their own car. There are several reasons behind this but accessibility and convenience can be identified as two major factors for choosing private car rather than public transport. One of the concepts currently is developing in several countries to address public transport challenges is Mobility as a Service. MaaS is a service model that frames the mobility based on customer preferences and priorities in which users major commuting needs are fulfilled and offered by a single mobility provider. Up until now, research focus has been more on the theoretical and technical aspects of the phenomenon and there is a lack of studies about current available MaaS providers in respect of their offering to real-world users. The objective of this study is to focus on the B2C value proposition that is being offered by a selected number of MaaS providers to determine how they differ in respect of their offering for target users and how they fit into the framework of an ideal mobility provider. Four cases including Whim, Moovel, Go La, and Moovit were selected to conduct the benchmark. The result of the benchmark indicates although it is difficult to name a service as the best among the others, Whim service in Finland fits better into the MaaS concept. It is the only service that offers several mobility modes as a monthly subscription to the user in addition to providing a seamless user experience for moving from point A to B. MaaS has a great potential to be implemented into daily commuting. From the user's point of view, it can address several difficulties of using public transport service, However, there are several areas of MaaS that are unclear and makes it difficult to define a concrete approach for its implementation. One of the main unclarified aspects of the concept is its business model and B2B offering. The future of MaaS depends heavily on the B2B side of the phenomena. Defining a concrete business model for MaaS to provide a clear idea of how it benefits the stakeholders competing each other, makes it easier for those businesses involving in MaaS to decide on implementing it into their services and thus, enables MaaS growth as of the solutions addressing mobility and daily commuting of travellers

The state of SQL-on-Hadoop in the cloud

Managed Hadoop in the cloud, especially SQL-on-Hadoop, has been gaining attention recently. On Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), analytical services like Hive and Spark come preconfigured for general-purpose and ready to use. Thus, giving companies a quick entry and on-demand deployment of ready SQL-like solutions for their big data needs. This study evaluates cloud services from an end-user perspective, comparing providers including: Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Rackspace. The study focuses on performance, readiness, scalability, and cost-effectiveness of the different solutions at entry/test level clusters sizes. Results are based on over 15,000 Hive queries derived from the industry standard TPC-H benchmark. The study is framed within the ALOJA research project, which features an open source benchmarking and analysis platform that has been recently extended to support SQL-on-Hadoop engines. The ALOJA Project aims to lower the total cost of ownership (TCO) of big data deployments and study their performance characteristics for optimization. The study benchmarks cloud providers across a diverse range instance types, and uses input data scales from 1GB to 1TB, in order to survey the popular entry-level PaaS SQL-on-Hadoop solutions, thereby establishing a common results-base upon which subsequent research can be carried out by the project. Initial results already show the main performance trends to both hardware and software configuration, pricing, similarities and architectural differences of the evaluated PaaS solutions. Whereas some providers focus on decoupling storage and computing resources while offering network-based elastic storage, others choose to keep the local processing model from Hadoop for high performance, but reducing flexibility. Results also show the importance of application-level tuning and how keeping up-to-date hardware and software stacks can influence performance even more than replicating the on-premises model in the cloud.This work is partially supported by the Microsoft Azure for Research program, the European Research Council (ERC) under the EUs Horizon 2020 programme (GA 639595), the Spanish Ministry of Education (TIN2015-65316-P), and the Generalitat de Catalunya (2014-SGR-1051).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft