Assessing the Effects of Enhanced Supply Chain Visibility Through RFID

The majority of RFID implementations can be traced back either to mandates issued by companies or institutions with significant market power like Wal-Mart or the U.S. Department of Defense, or to the replacement of existing Auto-ID technologies like barcodes. Only sporadically is RFID being used to derive superior information about current processes in order to create supply chain visibility. In this contribution, we examine the visibility potentials of RFID technology within the context of SCM and we propose a four-step approach to assessing the results that can be achieved through visibility

MapperMania: A Framework for Native Multi-Tenancy Business Object Mapping to a Persistent Data Source

The Software-as-a-Service delivery model bears new challenges for application developers. Especially in the context of enterprise resource planning software targeting the SME market, new problems arise. Most of them agglomerate around the occurrence of multi-tenancy. This paper describes the framework MapperMania which aims to establish an abstraction layer between the persistence layer and the domain model. Leveraging MapperMania, the domain model is able to abstract from multi-tenancy and changes in the underlying infrastructure

How to Juggle Columns: An Entropy-Based Approach for Table Compression

Many relational databases exhibit complex dependencies between data attributes, caused either by the nature of the underlying data or by explicitly denormalized schemas. In data warehouse scenarios, calculated key figures may be materialized or hierarchy levels may be held within a single dimension table. Such column correlations and the resulting data redundancy may result in additional storage requirements. They may also result in bad query performance if inappropriate independence assumptions are made during query compilation. In this paper, we tackle the specific problem of detecting functional dependencies between columns to improve the compression rate for column-based database systems, which both reduces main memory consumption and improves query performance. Although a huge variety of algorithms have been proposed for detecting column dependencies in databases, we maintain that increased data volumes and recent developments in hardware architectures demand novel algorithms with much lower runtime overhead and smaller memory footprint. Our novel approach is based on entropy estimations and exploits a combination of sampling and multiple heuristics to render it applicable for a wide range of use cases. We demonstrate the quality of our approach by means of an implementation within the SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse Accelerator. Our experiments indicate that our approach scales well with the number of columns and produces reliable dependence structure information. This both reduces memory consumption and improves performance for nontrivial queries

A Simulation of the Pharmaceutical Supply Chain to Provide Realistic Test

Abstrac

Clinical Relevance of HLA Antibodies in Kidney Transplantation: Recent Data from the Heidelberg Transplant Center and the Collaborative Transplant Study

Herein, we summarize our recent findings from the international Collaborative Transplant Study (CTS) and Heidelberg Transplant Center regarding the role of HLA antibodies in kidney transplantation and their application into the clinical routine. Based on the antibody findings from the CTS serum study, an algorithm was developed in 2006 for the transplantation of high-risk sensitized patients at the Heidelberg Transplant Center which includes seven different pre-and posttransplant measures. Using this algorithm, the number of transplantations could be increased in high-risk presensitized patients and the previously existing impact of antibodies on graft survival could greatly be diminished but not totally eliminated. More recent findings led to the hypothesis that T cell help from a preactivated immune system supports the harmful effects of pretransplant donor-specific HLA antibodies that otherwise disappear in many cases after transplantation without any consequence