Differences in IT effectiveness among firms: An empirical investigation

Information is a critical asset and an important source for gaining competitive advantage in firms. The effective maintenance of IT becomes an important task. In order to better understand the determinants of IT effectiveness, this study employs the Industrial Organization (I/O) and Resource Based View (RBV) theories and investigates the industry effect and several major firmspecific factors in relation to their impact on firms’ IT effectiveness. The data consist of a panel data of ten-year observations of firms whose IT excellence had been recognized by the CIO Magazine. The non-profit organizations were deliberately excluded, as explained later. The results showed that the effectiveness of IT management varied significantly across industries. Industry also moderated the effects of firm demographic factors such as size and age on IT effectiveness. Surprisingly, R & D investment intensity had negative correlation to IT effectiveness. For managers and practitioners, this study offers some insights for evaluation criteria and expectation for IT project success. Finally, the empirical results indicate that the sustainability of IT effectiveness appears to be short in duration

The ABC130 barrel module prototyping programme for the ATLAS strip tracker

For the Phase-II Upgrade of the ATLAS Detector, its Inner Detector, consisting of silicon pixel, silicon strip and transition radiation sub-detectors, will be replaced with an all new 100 % silicon tracker, composed of a pixel tracker at inner radii and a strip tracker at outer radii. The future ATLAS strip tracker will include 11,000 silicon sensor modules in the central region (barrel) and 7,000 modules in the forward region (end-caps), which are foreseen to be constructed over a period of 3.5 years. The construction of each module consists of a series of assembly and quality control steps, which were engineered to be identical for all production sites. In order to develop the tooling and procedures for assembly and testing of these modules, two series of major prototyping programs were conducted: an early program using readout chips designed using a 250 nm fabrication process (ABCN-25) and a subsequent program using a follow-up chip set made using 130 nm processing (ABC130 and HCC130 chips). This second generation of readout chips was used for an extensive prototyping program that produced around 100 barrel-type modules and contributed significantly to the development of the final module layout. This paper gives an overview of the components used in ABC130 barrel modules, their assembly procedure and findings resulting from their tests.Comment: 82 pages, 66 figure

Determination of Optimal Safety Stock Policies

Setting safety stock policies are especially important in the management of retail and wholesale inventories, as well as stores, spare parts, supply items, and in certain areas of production planning. From a practical perspective, determining the optimal safety stock policy and the optimal service level requires specifying the demand distribution. This paper develops optimal safety stock policies under several commonly used statistical demand distributions; normal, exponential, andpoisson. In those situations where a manager has limited information on the shape of the demand distribution, Chebychev's Inequality Theorem is exploited to determine the optimal policies. The suggested computational approach enables the order quantity and the number of standard deviations that specifies the service level to be jointly determined by minimizing total relevant cost. A numerical example is also given to illustrate the computational process

Supply Chain Planning Practical Frameworks for Superior Performance

In today’s competitive global economy, a firm’s market position and bottom-line financial performance is closely linked to its supply chain performance. All too often considerable managerial resources are directed toward planning activities and processes with little in the way of tangible results and outcomes. What supply chain executives require is the know-how to efficiently and effectively direct their planning activities so that the results lead to better business decisions from the long-term down to day-to-day operations. In this book, the authors present proven, practical management frameworks and techniques to support supply chain operations management and planning in private industry. These frameworks describe supply chain strategic planning and project selection techniques, integrated manufacturing–distribution planning and scheduling approaches, performance measurement and balanced scorecard methodologies, customer logistics and inventory deployment decision support systems, and other well-tested management frameworks