Analysis of Toyota’s Marketing Strategy in the UK Market

This is a study on Toyota automobile industry, especially on Toyota GB Plc. The work mainly focuses on the strengths and weaknesses as well as the company’s way of keeping competitive advantage. The purpose of the study is to explore the marketing strategy of Toyota GB Plc. in UK market. It is an explorative study in nature. Both primary and secondary data are used to get the insights about the market. The study concludes with the understanding and recommendation of how Toyota’s marketing mix is contributing to obtain a substantial market share and brand image for its innovative technology. Key words: customer, marketing mix, strategy, innovatio

Analysis of Toyota’s marketing strategy in the UK market

Vol.5, No.20, 2013

Social Network-Aware Disk Management

Disk access patterns of social networking applications are different from those of traditional applications. However, today's disk layout techniques are not adapted to social networking workloads and thus suffer in performance. In this paper, we first present disk layout techniques that leverage community structure in the social graph to make placement decisions. Second, we build a layout manager called the Bondhu system that incorporates our techniques. We integrate Bondhu into the popular Neo4j graph database engine. Our trace driven experimental results show that the Bondhu system improves the median response time by as much as 48%. While taking the community structure into account yields clear benefits, our results indicate that models with more complexity beyond the social graph may yield low additional benefit.unpublishedis peer reviewe

Buyer–Supplier Role in Improving Ergonomics in Garment Supplier Factories: Empirical Evidence from the Garment Industry of Bangladesh

Ergonomics is a key concern of garment suppliers to improve their workers’ well-being and efficiency. However, suppliers’ isolated initiatives are not sufficient to improve ergonomics conditions. Thus, buyers’ cooperation and collaboration with suppliers are necessary to make the ergonomic initiatives successful and sustainable. The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of buyer-assisted ergonomics intervention on suppliers’ performance and the role of buyers’ assistance and suppliers’ initiatives for improving ergonomics conditions in garment supplier factories. Following a qualitative research approach and multiple embedded case study method, this study intervened in supplier factories and collected qualitative and quantitative data from one Danish buyer and their four key suppliers on ergonomics and the role of buyers and suppliers in improving ergonomics conditions. Collected data were analysed by employing both quantitative and qualitative data analysis techniques. This study demonstrates that buyer-assisted ergonomics intervention on the shop floor can improve ergonomics conditions in garment supplier factories. This study also shows that improving ergonomics in supplier factories need joint efforts of buyers and suppliers. The findings of this study will enrich the literature on ergonomics, sustainability, and buyer–supplier relationships by demonstrating how garment suppliers in developing countries can improve ergonomics to meet the expectations of lead buyers and their workers. This is a unique research attempt to understand ergonomics from a buyer–supplier relationship perspective and its impact on the social sustainability of garment suppliers

Storage and processing systems for power-law graphs

Large graphs abound around us - online social networks, Web graphs, the Internet, citation networks, protein interaction networks, telephone call graphs, peer-to-peer overlay networks, electric power grid networks, etc. Many real- life graphs are power-law graphs. A fundamental challenge in today’s Big Data world is storage and processing of these large-scale power-law graphs. In this thesis, we show that graph processing can be made faster and graph storage can be made more efficient by using techniques that leverage the structure of the underlying power-law graphs. To this end, we present two systems. First, we present LFGraph, which is a fast, distributed, in- memory graph analytics platform. LFGraph leverages the structure and characteristics of power-law graphs in order to reduce communication overhead, and to balance communication and computation load. This makes analytics faster on power-law graphs. Next, we present Bondhu, which is a disk layout manager for graph databases. Bondhu exploits the fact that most real-life power-law graphs are also small-world and these exhibit strong com- munity structure. Bondhu utilizes this community structure in order to make layout decisions. This improves the query response time of graph databases. Our systems are evaluated on real clusters using real-world graphs