The real SAP® Business one cost : a case study of ERP adoption in an SME

This paper reports on a UK based service management Small and Medium-sized Enterprise (SME) that invested into SAP® Business One. The action research case study highlights the real cost and difficulties faced in moving to the one single SAP system and the process that was followed in order to identify third-party vendors that can integrate or customise SAP® Business One. This paper highlights the additional costs required to ensure a ‘fit-for-purpose’ solution to close the gap between strategic needs and the existing SAP Business One solution. The gap itself is illustrated by highlighting 10 key functionalities expected by the given service management SME. The actual implementation cost of the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) was found to be approximately double the initial SAP costs. The real costs involve time for, among other things, process reengineering, strategic decision making, software add-ons, staff-training, project-management and software maintenance

Drain Voltage Scaling in Carbon Nanotube Transistors

While decreasing the oxide thickness in carbon nanotube field-effect transistors (CNFETs) improves the turn-on behavior, we demonstrate that this also requires scaling the range of the drain voltage. This scaling is needed to avoid an exponential increase in Off-current with drain voltage, due to modulation of the Schottky barriers at both the source and drain contact. We illustrate this with results for bottom-gated ambipolar CNFETs with oxides of 2 and 5 nm, and give an explicit scaling rule for the drain voltage. Above the drain voltage limit, the Off-current becomes large and has equal electron and hole contributions. This allows the recently reported light emission from appropriately biased CNFETs.Comment: 4 pages, 4 EPS figure, to appear in Appl. Phys. Lett. (issue of 15 Sept 2003

Studies on the sulfation of cellulose α-lipoate and ability of the sulfated product to stabilize colloidal suspensions of gold nanoparticles

© 2015 Elsevier Ltd. A versatile method for the synthesis of cellulose α-lipoate with a low degree of substitution (DS) has been developed using N,N-dimethylacetamide (DMA)/LiCl as a solvent and N,N′-carbonyldiimidazole (CDI) as an esterification reagent. The cellulose α-lipoate with DS of α-lipoate groups of 0.26 was converted with sulfur trioxide-pyridine complex in dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) as solvent. The sulfation is accompanied by an unexpected partial oxidation of the disulfide moiety leading to the formation of the corresponding stereoisomers of S-oxides. The resulting mixture of water-soluble cellulose α- and β-lipoate sulfate possesses a DS of sulfuric acid half ester groups of 1.78. This cellulose-α/β-lipoate sulfate derivative can be used as an effective stabilizer and solubilizer for the formation of colloidal suspensions of gold nanoparticles formed in situ in aqueous solution

Unexpected Scaling of the Performance of Carbon Nanotube Transistors

We show that carbon nanotube transistors exhibit scaling that is qualitatively different than conventional transistors. The performance depends in an unexpected way on both the thickness and the dielectric constant of the gate oxide. Experimental measurements and theoretical calculations provide a consistent understanding of the scaling, which reflects the very different device physics of a Schottky barrier transistor with a quasi-one-dimensional channel contacting a sharp edge. A simple analytic model gives explicit scaling expressions for key device parameters such as subthreshold slope, turn-on voltage, and transconductance.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure