Research on internal service based CTS team performance management

JEL: M54; O15Along with the economy globalizing, the fierce competition between enterprises is sparking in international markets. As a sharp and strong tool to obtain competitive advantage, the performance management thoughts and system have been highlighted in theory and practice circles (like what mentioned in Build to Last, Taking People with You). Meanwhile, the internal services, as a new theory, havebeen a new turning point to promote the performance of enterprises. However, the existing managerial theory on performance management combined with the internal services is quite few. Considering the existing situations and based on the researches had been done within China and oversea, the internal services and performance management of a team had been systematically studied with theatrically and practically in this dissertation. The main contents are summarized as following: First, in order to study the effect of internalservices in the performance management of STX CTS team in China, build up a cubic 3-dimension performance management model. The three dimensions are "Sales sense, Factory operation sense, and Customer sense”. Secondly, deploy an action research method to analyze the internal services effects on the performance management and set up a model of performance management process for STX CTS team in China, which is in consist of4 steps: plan, align and develop, control and improvement, and reward (namely incentive). And analyze the different traits and effects of internal services in the differentperformance management process. The empirical study is conducted by utilizing the model within STX China CTS team. The result of the cubic 3-dimension model for team performance improvement is positive, which means the mechanism works well and can beleveraged in Hard Disk Drive firms as well as other IT firms. In the end, the dissertation summarizes the limitations, and proposes the direction for further study.A globalização da economia tem conduzido, cada vez mais, a uma forte competição entre as empresas nos mercados internacionais. Os sistemas de gestão de desempenho têm vindo a ser propostos, quer ao nível teórico quer empírico, como ferramentas relevantes para as empresas obterem vantagens competitiva nos mercados (tal como foi mencionado no Build to Last, Taking People with You). No mesmo sentido, os serviços internos podem ser relevantes para promover o desempenho das empresas. Contudo, as propostas teóricas que combinam a gestão do desempenho organizacional com os serviços internos são ainda reduzidas. Tendo como ponto de partida a situação exsitente e a investigação conduzida na China e internacionalmente, procurou-se neste trabalhoestudar de forma sistemática os serviços internos e a gestão do desempenho de uma equipa específica. Apresenta-se de seguinda as principais etapas e conclusões deste trabalho: Em primeiro lugar, com o objectivo de estudar os efeitos dos serviços internos na gestão do desempenho da equipa CTS da STX na China, foi elaborado um modelo cúbico de 3 dimensões de gestão do desempenho. As três dimensões são: Sentido de Vendas, Sentido de Operações na Fábrica e Sentido no Cliente. Em segundo lugar, foi utilizado o método de pesquisa-ação para analisar os efeitos dos serviços internos na gestão do desempenho e desenvolver um modelo de processo de gestão de desempenho para a equipa CTS da STX na China, que consiste em quatro etapas: planear, alinhar e desenvolver, controlar e melhorar e recompensar (nomeadamente incentivos). Foram ainda analisados os efeitos das diferentes características dos serviços internos nas diferentes etapas do processo de gestão de desempenho. O estudo empírico teve por base a utilizaçãodo modelo descrito na equipa de apoio técnico ao cliente (CTS) da STX. O modelo cúbico das 3 dimensões para a melhoria do desempenho mostrou-se adequado, o que significa que os mecanismos funcionaram de acordo com o previsto e podem utilizados em empresas que produzem unidades de disco rígidos ou outras empresas de TI. No final da dissertação, são apresentadas asprincipais limitações deste trabalho e propõe-se direcções para estudos futuros

GFF: Gated Fully Fusion for Semantic Segmentation

Semantic segmentation generates comprehensive understanding of scenes through densely predicting the category for each pixel. High-level features from Deep Convolutional Neural Networks already demonstrate their effectiveness in semantic segmentation tasks, however the coarse resolution of high-level features often leads to inferior results for small/thin objects where detailed information is important. It is natural to consider importing low level features to compensate for the lost detailed information in high-level features.Unfortunately, simply combining multi-level features suffers from the semantic gap among them. In this paper, we propose a new architecture, named Gated Fully Fusion (GFF), to selectively fuse features from multiple levels using gates in a fully connected way. Specifically, features at each level are enhanced by higher-level features with stronger semantics and lower-level features with more details, and gates are used to control the propagation of useful information which significantly reduces the noises during fusion. We achieve the state of the art results on four challenging scene parsing datasets including Cityscapes, Pascal Context, COCO-stuff and ADE20K.Comment: accepted by AAAI-2020(oral

Bamboo Wear and Its Application in Friction Material

Sliding wear behaviour of bamboo (Phyllostachys pubescens) was investigated in the cases of dry friction. The wear volume of bamboo was a function of the sliding velocity, the normal load and the relative orientation of bamboo fibres with respect to the friction surface. And tribological properties of the Bamboo Fiber Reinforced Friction Materials (BFRFMs) were tested on a constant speed friction tester. The results showed that the wear volume increased with the increase of sliding velocity and normal load. The normal-oriented specimens (N-type) showed sound wear resistance in comparison to the parallel-oriented ones (PS- and PI-type), and the outside surface layer (PS-type) showed sound resistance in comparison to the inner later (PI-typ). The friction coefficient of BFRFMs (reinforced with 3 wt.%, 6 wt.% and 9 wt.% bamboo fibers) were higher than those of the non-bamboo fiber reinforced friction material with identical ingredients mixed with and process conditions during the temperature-increasing procedure. The friction coefficients of the specimens containing 3 wt.% bamboo fibers were higher than that of other specimens. The wear rate of BFRFMs increased with the increasing of test temperature, and the wear rates of specimens containing 3 wt.% bamboo fibers were lower than that of others specimens

Identification of second-order kernels in aerodynamics

Volterra series is one of the powerful system identification methods for representing the nonlinear dynamic system behavior. The methods of step response and impulse response are commonly applied to a discrete aerodynamic Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) to identify the first- and second-order Volterra kernels. A critical problem, however, is the difficulty of identifying the second-order Volterra kernels correctly in CFD-based method. In this paper the second-order Volterra kernel function is expanded in terms of Chebyshev functions to reduce the size of the problem and the accuracy of the identification is also improved based on a third-order reduced model of Volterra series