Finding the path(s) towards profitable e-commerce

Relying on a unique and arguably representative sample of transaction e-commerce companies, this paper takes a closer look at whether and how companies could be profitable on-line. This analysis clearly demonstrates that a non-trivial set of winners are emerging, which combine both strong operational excellence as well as fine-tuned to about 3 generic strategic postures. --E-tailing,Strategic Clusters,Post entry performance

Finding the path(s) towards profitable e-commerce

Relying on a unique and arguably representative sample of transaction e-commerce companies, this paper takes a closer look at whether and how companies could be profitable on-line. This analysis clearly demonstrates that a non-trivial set of winners are emerging, which combine both strong operational excellence as well as fine-tuned to about 3 generic strategic postures

Development of the Energy-smart Production Management system (e-ProMan): A Big Data driven approach, analysis and optimisation

Given the challenges in increasing energy prices and environmental issues, energy efficiency is becoming a major concern in manufacturing industries. To reduce energy consumption, manufacturing operations need to develop energy efficient techniques. This development will also help reduce GHG emissions and production costs. The aim of this research is to create a simulation methodology and investigate the modelling of thermal and energy management (called e-ProMan) across the manufacturing site. By using simulations, the “e-ProMan” system generates a real-time, virtual, user-friendly factory model. A “Big Data” approach is taken in which a large set of data is acquired from both inside and outside the factory in order to analyse the correlation between work flow, data flow and energy flow to provide real-time decision making. In particular, five data sources are gathered including weather forecast, temperature and humidity sensors, machine energy consumption and production process and scheduling. The “e-ProMan” system is specifically designed to suit manufacturing operations of small and medium sizes to complement limited budget and lower resources especially in data gathering infrastructures

Automatic improvement of apache spark queries using semantics-preserving program reduction

© 2016 ACM. Apache Spark is a popular framework for large-scale data analytics. Unfortunately, Spark's performance can be difficult to optimise, since queries freely expressed in source code are not amenable to traditional optimisation techniques. This article describes Hylas, a tool for automatically optimising Spark queries embedded in source code via the application of semantics-preserving transformations. The transformation method is inspired by functional programming techniques of "deforestation", which eliminate intermediate data structures from a computation. This contrasts with approaches defined entirely within structured query formats such as Spark SQL. Hylas can identify certain computationally expensive operations and ensure that performing them creates no superfluous data structures. This optimisation leads to significant improvements in execution time, with over 10,000 times improvement observed in some cases

Enterprise social network success: Evidences from a multinational corporation

In a globalized world, where companies operate across different locations and work becomes increasingly complex, collaboration in a diversity of ways is required among employees to perform tasks more effectively. Following a case study methodology that involved six interviews across three different country locations, this research addresses the phenomenon of Enterprise Social Networks (ESN) in a multinational corporation with a focus on the assessment of ESN success. The findings show that the company, while trying to assess the success of Yammer, the freemium social networking service at use, has mainly relied on analytics tools to measure usage through indicators such as the total number of users. However, the extent to which ESN is used does not provide a complete picture of ESN success. Business value from that ESN usage is another dimension to be considered to assess success. Therefore, the study of specific ESN usage scenarios that are perceived to have a trackable impact on business results can be used to assess ESN business value on top of ESN usage to fully understand ESN success.COMPETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043 and FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the Project Scope: UID/CEC/00319/2013info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Enhancing organisational competitiveness via social media - a strategy as practice perspective

The affordances, popularity and pervasive use of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have made these platforms attractive to organisations for enhancing their competitiveness and creating business value. Despite this apparent significance of social media for businesses, they are struggling with the development of a social media strategy as well as understanding the implications of social media on practice within their organisations. This paper explores how social media has become a tool for competitiveness and its influence on organisational strategy and practice. Using the 'strategy as practice' lens and guided by the interpretivist philosophy, this paper uses the empirical case of a telecom organisation in Tanzania. The findings show that social media is influencing competitiveness through imitation and product development. Also, the findings indicate how social media affects the practices within an organisation, consequently making the social media strategy an emergent phenomenon

The Digital Journey: Reflected Learnings and Emerging Challenges

This paper provides a literature-based examination of the four stages of marketing’s digital journey to date and the key milestones or points of interest along the way. In reflecting on the path taken, intriguing insights emerge which pose ongoing challenges for businesses and for the marketing discipline. Arguably failure to heed the resulting warnings will impede marketing’s ability to harness the benefits of digital and to effectively counteract the associated negative consequences of a digitally-enabled marketplace. The implications of marketing’s digital journey are explored here along with their most pressing consequences. This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Quinton, S & Simkin, L 2016, 'The Digital Journey: Reflected Learnings and Emerging Challenges' International Journal of Management Reviews, vol In press. DOI: 10.1111/ijmr.12104, which has been published in final form at https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/ijmr.12104 This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving

Distance-Based and Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

A wireless sensor network (WSN) comprises small sensor nodes with limited energy capabilities. The power constraints of WSNs necessitate efficient energy utilization to extend the overall network lifetime of these networks. We propose a distance-based and low-energy adaptive clustering (DISCPLN) protocol to streamline the green issue of efficient energy utilization in WSNs. We also enhance our proposed protocol into the multi-hop-DISCPLN protocol to increase the lifetime of the network in terms of high throughput with minimum delay time and packet loss. We also propose the mobile-DISCPLN protocol to maintain the stability of the network. The modelling and comparison of these protocols with their corresponding benchmarks exhibit promising results