40,314 research outputs found
ADOPTION OF ECR PRACTICES IN MINNESOTA GROCERY STORES
Efficient Consumer Response (ECR) is an industry-wide, collaborative initiative to re-engineer the grocery supply chain. This report presents findings from a study of ECR adoption in Minnesota grocery stores. Data were collected through interviews with managers of forty stores that are broadly distributed over store sizes, locations, and organizational forms. The interviews focused on business practices and technologies related to inventory management and ordering, shelf-space allocation and product assortment decisions, and product pricing and promotions. Findings are presented from three distinct perspectives: (1) stores grouped by location (metro and out- state), (2) stores grouped by organizational form (corporate chain, independent chain, and single store), and (3) stores grouped by levels of an ECR "readiness index" that indicates the level of adoption for key business practices and technologies that support ECR initiatives. The following general conclusions can be drawn from the detailed results presented in this report. 1. Location in the Twin Cities metropolitan area makes an important difference in implementing some components of the ECR initiative. On average, metro and out-state stores differ little with respect to store size or the adoption of technologies that support ECR. Metro stores are much more likely than out-state stores, however, to coordinate shelf space and product assortment decisions and pricing and promotion activities with outside trading partners. 2. On average, stores that are part of a chain, especially a large corporate chain, are making faster progress toward implementation of ECR initiatives than are single stores. However, three independently owned single stores were also among the most innovative of those we visited. In these stores, it appears that a visionary, energetic owner/manager is able to quickly respond to new opportunities. 3. ECR adoption and superior performance are closely associated. Stores with a high ECR "readiness index" have much higher sales per labor hour, sales per square foot, and annual inventory turns. We cannot determine whether ECR readiness leads to better performance or better performance makes it easier to adopt business practices and technologies that support ECR. We can conclude, however, that competitive forces will almost certainly drive more stores toward adoption of a wider range of technologies and business practices that support the ECR initiative. In summary, ECR is changing the way Minnesota grocers do business, and adopting ECR practices goes hand-in-hand with better financial performance. Findings from this study suggest that stores of any size and organizational form that are willing and able to adopt new technologies, to develop cooperative relationships with their trading partners, and to respond to the unique needs of their customers will increase their chance of success in this competitive market.Agribusiness, Industrial Organization, Land Economics/Use,
Dark Matter in the USSM
We discuss the neutralino dark matter within classes of extended
supersymmetric models, referred to as the USSM, containing one additional SM
singlet Higgs plus an extra Z', together with their superpartners the singlino
and bino'.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figs. Talk given at LCWS08, Chicago, IL, USA,
11/16-20/200
LHC Signatures of the Constrained Exceptional Supersymmetric Standard Model
We discuss two striking Large Hadron Collider (LHC) signatures of the
constrained version of the exceptional supersymmetric standard model (cE6SSM),
based on a universal high energy soft scalar mass m_0, soft trilinear coupling
A_0 and soft gaugino mass M_{1/2}. The first signature we discuss is that of
light exotic colour triplet charge 1/3 fermions, which we refer to as
D-fermions. We calculate the LHC production cross section of D-fermions, and
discuss their decay patterns. Secondly we discuss the E6 type U(1)_N spin-1 Z'
gauge boson and show how it may decay into exotic states, increasing its width
and modifying the line shape of the dilepton final state. We illustrate these
features using two representative cE6SSM benchmark points, including an "early
LHC discovery" point, giving the Feynman rules and numerical values for the
relevant couplings in order to facilitate further studies.Comment: 30 pages, 5 figures, corrections to figure caption
E6SSM vs MSSM gluino phenomenology
The E6SSM is a promising model based on the group E6, assumed to be broken at
the GUT scale, leading to the group SU(3)\times SU(2)\times U(1)\times U(1)' at
the TeV scale. It gives a solution to the MSSM {\mu}-problem without
introducing massless axions, gauge anomalies or cosmological domain walls. The
model contains three families of complete 27s of E6, giving a richer
phenomenology than the MSSM. The E6SSM generically predicts gluino cascade
decay chains which are about 2 steps longer than the MSSM's due to the presence
of several light neutralino states. This implies less missing (and more
visible) transverse momentum in collider experiments and kinematical
distributions such as M_eff are different. Scans of parameter space and MC
analysis suggest that current SUSY search strategies and exclusion limits have
to be reconsidered.Comment: Presented at the 2011 Hadron Collider Physics symposium (HCP-2011),
Paris, France, November 14-18 2011, 3 pages, 7 figure
Leptogenesis in the two right-handed neutrino model revisited
We revisit leptogenesis in the minimal non-supersymmetric type I see-saw
mechanism with two right-handed (RH) neutrinos, including flavour effects and
allowing both RH neutrinos N_1 and N_2 to contribute, rather than just the
lightest RH neutrino N_1 that has hitherto been considered. By performing scans
over parameter space in terms of the single complex angle z of the orthogonal
matrix R, for a range of PMNS parameters, we find that in regions around z \sim
\pm \pi/2, for the case of a normal mass hierarchy, the N_2 contribution can
dominate the contribution to leptogenesis, allowing the lightest RH neutrino
mass to be decreased by about an order of magnitude in these regions, down to
M_1 \sim 1.3*10^11 GeV for vanishing initial N_2-abundance, with the numerical
results supported by analytic estimates. We show that the regions around z \sim
\pm \pi /2 correspond to light sequential dominance, so the new results in this
paper may be relevant to unified model building.Comment: 41 pages, 10 figures; v2 matches published version in PR
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