A Methodology for Developing an Integrated Supply Chain Management System

Integrated Supply Chain Management (ISCM) involves the linking of suppliers and customers with the internal supply processes of an organisation. ISCM solutions allow organisations to automate workflows concerning the execution and analysis of planning, sourcing, making, delivering, returns handling and maintenance. Many of today’s ISCM systems use primarily web technology as the supporting infrastructure. Undoubtedly, the electronic (Internet-based) ISCM systems deliver the enterprises with a competitive advantage by opening up opportunities to streamline processes, reduce costs, increased customer patronage and more thorough planning abilities. However, there has been significant customer backlash concerning the inability of software vendors to deliver easy integration and promised functionality. Although various researchers have suggested strategies to overcome some of the failures in operating ISCM systems, there was a lack of architectural investigation in the analysis stage. The methodology proposed seeks to resolve these gaps and provides a fundamental framework in analysing ISCM systems

Managing Changes in E-Transformation

In today’s digital economy and business, firms especially the SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) are facing competitive challenges from anywhere around the globe. Transforming the traditional business processes and activities into electronic capable (e-capable) format has become the essential tasks for companies to not only sustain in the competitive environment but flourish in the companies’ perpetual operations. During the e-transformation process, organisations normally face changes in various aspects. To success in the transformation, companies need to manage the changes effectively. The change management tasks should be developed systematically through the identification of areas where changes may occur, and the research and development of solutions that will accommodate the changes. This study proposes a conceptual model for managing changes in e-transformation, which provide SMEs with a methodological framework in identifying and managing organisational changes

The Critical Success Factors and Integrated Model for Implementing E-business in Taiwan’s SMEs

Purpose - To date, identifying barriers and critical success factors (CSFs) and integrating business model in implementing e-business for SMEs have not been systematically investigated. Few existing studies have derived their CSFs and business model from large companies\u27 perspectives and have not considered the needs of integration for smaller businesses. This paper is aimed to bridge this gap. Design/methodology/approach - Existing studies on CSFs and e-business model were reviewed and their limitations were identified. By integrating insights drawn from these studies as well as adding some new factors, the author proposed a set of 18 CSFs which is believed to be more useful for SMEs. The importance of the proposed CSFs was theoretically discussed and justified. In addition, a case study was conducted to evaluate the extent of success of this proposition. Findings - The overall results from the case study assessment were positive, thus reflecting the appropriateness of the proposed CSFs and integrated model. Practical implications - The set of CSFs and integrated model can act as a list of items and an easy to follow model for SMEs to address when adopting e-business. This helps to ensure that the essential issues and factors are covered during implementation. For academics, it provides a common language for them to discuss and study the factors crucial for the success of e-business in SMEs. Originality/value - This study is probably the first to provide an integrative perspective of CSFs and integrated model for implementing e-business in the SME sector. It gives valuable information, which hopefully will help this business sector to accomplish e-business visions

Semi-classical predictions of cosmological wave-packets from ridge-lines

We introduce a concept of ridge-lines to investigate the semi-classical prediction from wave-packets with arbitrary width in conventional quantum mechanics and the Wheeler--DeWitt quantum cosmology. Two primary approaches are applied to the exact calculation of the ridge-lines, namely the contour and the stream approach. Moreover, aspects of these are discussed and compared to other scenarios and approaches, i.e. the narrow WKB wave-packets and the first-derivative test. As the main result, we show that the semi-classical predictions in toy models have more abundant solutions than in the classical theory, and most interestingly they may deviate from classical solutions due to the quantum corrections.Comment: 44 pages, 14 figures, 3 table

Integrable Minisuperspace Models with Liouville Field: Energy Density Self-Adjointness and Semiclassical Wave Packets

The homogeneous cosmological models with a Liouville scalar field are investigated in classical and quantum context of Wheeler-DeWitt geometrodynamics. In the quantum case of quintessence field with potential unbounded from below and phantom field, the energy density operators are not essentially self-adjoint and self-adjoint extensions contain ambiguities. Therefore the same classical actions correspond to a family of distinct quantum models. For the phantom field the energy spectrum happens to be discrete. The probability conservation and appropriate classical limit can be achieved with a certain restriction of the functional class. The appropriately localized wave packets are studied numerically using the Schrodinger's norm and a conserved Mostafazadeh's norm introduced from techniques of pseudo-Hermitian quantum mechanics. These norms give a similar packet evolution that is confronted with analytical classical solutions.Comment: Main points emphasized, less important material shortened; 24 pages, 13 figure

NaNa and MiGu: Semantic Data Augmentation Techniques to Enhance Protein Classification in Graph Neural Networks

Protein classification tasks are essential in drug discovery. Real-world protein structures are dynamic, which will determine the properties of proteins. However, the existing machine learning methods, like ProNet (Wang et al., 2022a), only access limited conformational characteristics and protein side-chain features, leading to impractical protein structure and inaccuracy of protein classes in their predictions. In this paper, we propose novel semantic data augmentation methods, Novel Augmentation of New Node Attributes (NaNa), and Molecular Interactions and Geometric Upgrading (MiGu) to incorporate backbone chemical and side-chain biophysical information into protein classification tasks and a co-embedding residual learning framework. Specifically, we leverage molecular biophysical, secondary structure, chemical bonds, and ionic features of proteins to facilitate protein classification tasks. Furthermore, our semantic augmentation methods and the co-embedding residual learning framework can improve the performance of GIN (Xu et al., 2019) on EC and Fold datasets (Bairoch, 2000; Andreeva et al., 2007) by 16.41% and 11.33% respectively. Our code is available at https://github.com/r08b46009/Code_for_MIGU_NANA/tree/main

Exploring doctors' willingness to provide online counseling services : the roles of motivations and costs

With the impetus of information communication technology (ICT), emerging eHealth has attracted increasing number of doctors’ participation in online health platforms, which provide various potential benefits to doctors. However, previous studies on eHealth have seldom distinguished different service modes provided by doctors. In addition, the bulk of the literature has considered doctors’ motivations based solely on online environments. To fill this gap, this study combines expectancy theory and the Bagozzi, Dholakia, and Basuroy (BDB) model to examine the relationships between anticipated outcomes, performance expectations, and effort intentions from online and offline perspectives. Doctors’ behavioral intentions are further divided into two categories: the willingness to offer free services and paid services. Using SmartPLS, this study conducts structural equation modeling (SEM) to analyze 311 sample data. The results show that extrinsic motivations (i.e., extrinsic rewards, expected relationships, and image) and intrinsic motivation (i.e., a sense of self-worth) significantly influence the desire to serve patients well, which in turn positively affects the willingness to offer free services and the willingness to offer paid services. Moreover, counseling time is confirmed as the main cost, which negatively moderates the relationships between desire and behavioral intentions. The findings provide theoretical insights for eHealth and provide practical suggestions to develop marketing strategies for online health platform providers

Modelling the Effects of Intangible Capabilities on ERP Implementation

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) system is well recognised as a key technological infrastructure that facilitates business operations and growth in a dynamic business environment. Implementation of ERP system however is mirrored by numerous problems, a fact well cited in many academic studies. Research addressing the reasons for ERP implementation problems has identified a plethora of success factors. Following a similar research direction, we leveraged on the resource based view (RBV) to investigate the effects of firms’ capacity to deploy intangible resources with valuable and inimitable characteristics (termed as intangible capabilities) on successful ERP implementation. Three intangible capabilities were assessed, i.e. governance, knowledge and relationships. Using data collected from a survey with service firms in Malaysia, we found evidence that relationships capability effect towards successful ERP implementation was direct and significant. Further analysis revealed that governance capability reinforces the effects of knowledge and relationship capabilities toward successful ERP implementation. The empirical findings suggest that successful ERP implementation lie at the firms’ capacity to deploy and reconfigure their intangible capabilities of valuable and inimitable characteristics to create reinforcing superseding effects. We conclude that governance capability plays the antecedent platform role to strengthen the effects of knowledge and relationships capabilities on ERP project’s success