Executive MBA’s Accounting Skill Acquisition: An Accounting Boot-Camp Approach

Executive MBA programs have grown in popularity in the United States as well as in many other countries. These programs accept students from a broad range of professional backgrounds: corporate executives, entrepreneurs, physicians, nurses, accountants and engineers to name a few. These individuals also come from many sectors and organizations: the public sector, the private sector, for profit organizations, non-profit organizations, and more. Given the diversity of backgrounds and work experience of these individuals, it is a difficult task ensuring minimum business skill levels necessary to be successful in an EMBA program. This paper will examine the results of using an “Accounting Boot-camp” to ensure a minimum level of financial accounting proficiency in an EMBA program

A predictive and adaptive control strategy to optimize the management of integrated energy systems in buildings

The management of integrated energy systems in buildings is a challenging task that classical control approaches usually fail to address. The present paper analyzes the effect of the implementation of a reinforcement learning-based control strategy in an office building characterized by integrated energy systems with on-site electricity generation and storage technologies. The objective of the proposed controller is to minimize the operational cost to meet the cooling demand exploiting thermal energy storage and battery system considering a time-of-use electricity price schedule and local PV production. Two control solutions, a Soft-Actor-Critic agent coupled with a rule-based controller, and a fully rule-based control strategy, used as a baseline, are tested and compared considering various configurations of battery energy storage system capacities, and thermal energy storage sizes. Results show that the proposed control strategy leads to a reduction of operational energy costs respect to the fully rule-based control ranging from 39.5% and 84.3% among different configurations. Moreover the advanced control strategy improves the on-site PV utilization leading to an average increasing of self-sufficiency and self-consumption of 40% among different scenarios. The baseline control strategy results more sensitive to the size of storage whereas the proposed control achieves high savings also when smaller capacities of battery energy storage systems and sizes of thermal energy storage are implemented. The outcomes of the work prove the impact of implementation of advanced control as a way to optimize energy costs with a comprehensive view of the whole integrated energy system considering both thermal and electrical energy storage operation

Expectations of Executive MBAs

Currently there are over 200 EMBA programs worldwide. These programs have grown in popularity and have increased by over a third in the last three years. Overall, schools are aggressively marketing their EMBA programs, and, as a consequence, prospective EMBA participants have numerous options for EMBA program enrollment. To successfully compete in the current environment, EMBA programs must understand and market to the expectations of prospective EMBAs. This paper explores the suitability of using the Teaching Goals Inventory (TGI) developed by Angelo and Cross (1993) as an instrument to analyze the expectations of EMBA candidates in the United States and describes the results of a survey of 262 EMBA participants using the TGI

Analyzing E.M.B.A. Student Feedback

The results of an executive Masters of Business Administration (MBA) program assessment are analyzed and interpreted against the backdrop of increasing competition between universities to attract and retain qualified students. The public education environment is currently in a turbulent state. This turbulence is in part caused by such factors as: reductions in public funding for higher education due to constrained state budgets, student expectations, requirements imposed by accrediting bodies, and other outside constituencies requesting more accountability. The pressure to hold education institutions accountable is increasing at a rapid rate. To provide a measure of accountability and quantify program quality, education institutions have placed a great deal of emphasis on program assessment. Informational results from program assessments influence a myriad of decisions made by many that ultimately impact student enrollment, program support and program funding. Despite questionable psychometric properties and potentially conflicting outcomes, student evaluations of teaching faculty continue to be a primary source of information used in program assessments. This burdens educators and administrators with the task of interpreting and utilizing incomplete and perhaps inaccurate information. Results indicate that student response rates decline with increased numbers of evaluations and influences on teaching quality assessments may be unrelated to content and presentation

An e-Commerce Systems Integration Framework

The success of e-commerce activity is directly affected by system integration efforts associated with traditional back office and web-based systems. The potential benefits of enterprise-wide e-commerce activities to an organization emphasize the need for system integration beyond individual sales transactions. Unfortunately, many organizations are not capitalizing on the synergistic advantages of integrated systems. Despite the apparent lack of integration, some organizations are attempting to coordinate such customer activities. Planning for and integrating e-commerce technologies are essential to an organization\u27s survival

An E-Commerce Systems Integration Framework

Ernest A. Capozzoli is assistant professor of management information systems and accounting, Sorrell College of Business, Troy State University, Troy, AL 36082. Sheb L. True is associate professor of marketing, Michael J. Coles College of Business, Kennesaw State University, Atlanta, GA 30144

Analyzing E.M.B.A. Student Feedback

The results of an executive Masters of Business Administration (MBA) program assessment are analyzed and interpreted against the backdrop of increasing competition between universities to attract and retain qualified students. The public education environment is currently in a turbulent state. This turbulence is in part caused by such factors as: reductions in public funding for higher education due to constrained state budgets, student expectations, requirements imposed by accrediting bodies, and other outside constituencies requesting more accountability. The pressure to hold education institutions accountable is increasing at a rapid rate. To provide a measure of accountability and quantify program quality, education institutions have placed a great deal of emphasis on program assessment. Informational results from program assessments influence a myriad of decisions made by many that ultimately impact student enrollment, program support and program funding. Despite questionable psychometric properties and potentially conflicting outcomes, student evaluations of teaching faculty continue to be a primary source of information used in program assessments. This burdens educators and administrators with the task of interpreting and utilizing incomplete and perhaps inaccurate information. Results indicate that student response rates decline with increased numbers of evaluations and influences on teaching quality assessments may be unrelated to content and presentation

Expectations of Executive MBAs

Currently there are over 200 EMBA programs worldwide. These programs have grown in popularity and have increased by over a third in the last three years. Overall, schools are aggressively marketing their EMBA programs, and, as a consequence, prospective EMBA participants have numerous options for EMBA program enrollment. To successfully compete in the current environment, EMBA programs must understand and market to the expectations of prospective EMBAs. This paper explores the suitability of using the Teaching Goals Inventory (TGI) developed by Angelo and Cross (1993) as an instrument to analyze the expectations of EMBA candidates in the United States and describes the results of a survey of 262 EMBA participants using the TGI

The effect of different materials joint in Vacuum Insulation Panels

During recent years the use of Vacuum Insulation Panels in buildings applications has been improved, because of their both higher performances and lower thickness compared to traditional insulation materials. These performances are due to the interior vacuum degree, which represent also the main problem connected with the applications of this technological solution in buildings constructions: to maintain the vacuum condition the panels are enclosed in an envelope layer, characterized by an higher thermal conductivity. Moreover they have to be assembled to each other or to additional different joint materials in practical building application, generating a thermal bridging effect. The aim of present work is to analyse the critical aspects related to this insulation technology for building application. An experimental campaign through heat flow meter apparatus was carried out with the purpose of assessing the decrease of performance due to the thermal bridges effects considering different joint materials in VIPs assemblies

A data analytics-based energy information system (EIS) tool to perform meter-level anomaly detection and diagnosis in buildings

Recently, the spread of smart metering infrastructures has enabled the easier collection of building-related data. It has been proven that a proper analysis of such data can bring significant benefits for the characterization of building performance and spotting valuable saving opportunities. More and more researchers worldwide are focused on the development of more robust frameworks of analysis capable of extracting from meter-level data useful information to enhance the process of energy management in buildings, for instance, by detecting inefficiencies or anomalous energy behavior during operation. This paper proposes an innovative anomaly detection and diagnosis (ADD) methodology to automatically detect at whole-building meter level anomalous energy consumption and then perform a diagnosis on the sub-loads responsible for anomalous patterns. The process consists of multiple steps combining data analytics techniques. A set of evolutionary classification trees is developed to discover frequent and infrequent aggregated energy patterns, properly transformed through an adaptive symbolic aggregate approximation (aSAX) process. Then a post-mining analysis based on association rule mining (ARM) is performed to discover the main sub-loads which mostly affect the anomaly detected at the whole-building level. The methodology is developed and tested on monitored data of a medium voltage/low voltage (MV/LV) transformation cabin of a university campus