Renu Khator oral history interview by Mark I. Greenberg, February 20, 2004

Renu Khator, USF Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs, discusses growing up in India and her career at USF, including the transition to American life

Supporting working capital decisions through fuzzy analysis

Paper presented at the First International Conference of Industrial Engineering (ENEGEP/95), Sao Carlos, Brazil.Working Capital Management is concerned with the short term decisions regarding current assets and current liabilities. Although being related with the short term, the decisions must take into account the overall strategy of the firm and how effectively they are implemented at the operational level. The satisfaction of the goals and the measurement of the risks associated with these decisions are subjective and changeable depending on the situation. In this paper we propose the use of the Fuzzy Scenario Analysis to support the decisions at the operational level of a firm modeling the subjectivity of the process. The module we chose to illustrate the approach is related to purchase decisions. The method consists of modeling the satisfaction of an strategic goal (inventory conversion period) and the risk associated (of estimating sales) using fuzzy sets. We present an example where once these fuzzy sets are defined, the system suggests purchase decisions meeting the firm’s constraints regarding the amount of purchase and the associated benefits

Object oriented analysis and programming for a working capital management system

Paper presented at the IEEE/IAFE 1995 computational intelligence for financial engineering, CIFEr, New York, NY.The main purpose of this paper is to present an Object Oriented Analysis (OOA) of a firm and its accounting and financial environments for the implementation of a working capital management system. The object oriented analysis has been designed so that it can be used by different types and sizes of companies, (e.g., industrial, commercial or service). This versatility is a consequence of an important feature of the object oriented paradigm: the reusability of code. This OOA includes firm’s regular operations as well as tools and reports used in the management of working capital such as cash flows and estimated balance sheets. In order to demonstrate the functionality of the OOA, we discuss parts of the analysis that we have implemented successfully in the C++ object oriented programming language

Renu Khator

Renu Khator, USF Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs, discusses growing up in India and her career at USF, including the transition to American life

ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY IN INDIA: SYMBOLISM IN ISSUES AND POLICIES

During the last two decades, the environmental protection issue has acquired political agenda status in both developing and developed countries. This is somewhat surprising because of (1) its novelty, (2) its suddenness, and (3) its universality. On the basis of various theoretical frameworks available in social science literature, several factors can be identified for emergence of environmental issue in a given political system. The factors identified in environmental policy area include: physical factors (the intensity of the problem), environmental factors (policy diffusion at international level), socioeconomic factors (subordination of policy process to elite interests), and political-bureaucratic factors (competitive political system and bureaucratic specialization). Although not mutually exclusive, these explanations taken together present a broad array of variables influencing the issue-creation process. However, this literature is based on the experience of developed countries where issue status is presumed to have genuine consequences. This study is an attempt to demonstrate that these variables are of limited power in the context of a developing country. Through an analysis of India\u27s environmental policy, it is shown that the environmental issue is essentially symbolic rather substantive. The characteristics of an underdeveloped system--non-competitiveness, concentration of power, weak channels of communication, low level of political participation--are found to be significant in initiating an issue, on one hand, and limiting it scope on the other hand. This study argues that the politicians content themselves with symbolic outputs because more tangible outcomes offer no positive political return. An analysis of India\u27s environmental policy, including major steps taken by the government during last two decades, documents this conclusion. Content analysis of Indian newspaper, opinion poll survey, and quantitative study of policy efforts by Indian states undertaken for this study have provided support to the thesis. In brief, this study demonstrates that all analyses of issue-creation vary with the nature of the issue: Symbolic vs. Substantive. Because developing systems have fewer controls upon elites, there is a strong likelihood that non-distributive issues will be decided on symbolic grounds leaving the political landscape essentially unchanged

Renu Khator

Renu Khator, USF Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs, discusses growing up in India and her career at USF, including the transition to American life

A LOADING METHODOLOGY FOR JOB SHOPS HAVING CONVENTIONAL AND NC MACHINE TOOLS.

Abstract not availabl