A simplified and scalable should-cost tool in the oilfield services industry

Thesis (M. Eng. in Logistics)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, 2013.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 55-57).Third party spend accounts for a significant amount of a business' costs. When procuring unique, highly-engineered components, this cost is often negotiated with suppliers during the procurement process. Due to the limited understanding of the suppliers' true production cost, various techniques and models for determining how much a procured product should cost have been tried. One such approach is known as "should-cost modeling," where estimates for the cost of a product or service are made based on product architecture and/or firm financials. Both these approaches to should-cost modeling require extensive data collection and are time consuming. In this thesis, we expand an approach that uses aggregate industry-specific financial data to develop a simple, scalable tool to estimate a product's should-cost. One major challenge in building this tool is unifying the simple aggregate data available into an estimated price for a complex product. This is a major challenge of developing a should-cost estimate using existing methods. We develop an approach to simplifying a complex product, construct our model, and create a ready-to-use tool. We demonstrate the working of the model and the tool using the case of a semi-complex product (the fluid end of a pump) representative of a company's procured products. We then compare the price estimated by our model with that currently negotiated with our sponsor company's supplier and solicit qualitative feedback from procurement professionals regarding the should-cost tool's accuracy. The price estimated by our tool is within 9% of the actual negotiated price and required significantly less time to compute compared to the current approach based on product architecture. The company's sourcing and procurement executive strongly endorses the benefits of our approach. This tool can remove the reliance on supplier-supplied quotes and strengthen the purchasing company's negotiating position. The tool developed in this thesis is shown to provide a more accurate estimate of product cost, with significantly less estimation effort.by Clayton M. Mealer and Sung Hwan Park.M.Eng.in Logistic

Particulate counter electrode system for enhanced light harvesting in dye-sensitized solar cells

A particulate counter electrode with photo scattering and redox catalytic properties is applied to dye sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) in order to improve photo conversion efficiency and simplify the assembly process. Our particulate counter electrode acts as both a photo reflecting layer and a catalyst for reduction of electrolyte. The reflective and catalytic properties of the electrode are investigated through optical and electrochemical analysis, respectively. A short circuit current density enhancement is observed in the DSSCs without the need to add an additional reflecting layer to the electrode. This leads to a simplified assembly process. (C) 2013 Optical Society of Americ

KOREA OUTBOUND TOURISM TO SEVEN COUNTRIES: VAR MODEL AND GRANGER CAUSALITY TEST

This paper investigates the causal relationship among Korean outbound tourism demand for seven countries such as United States, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand. Since there are no long-run relationships among Korean outbound tourism demand for those international destinations the vector autoregressive (VAR) model is used for testing such causality. From the causality results, we found United States is leading country for Korean outbound tourism demand. When Korean tourism demands for United States increase, those for the other countries get a raise. Also, tourism demand for Thailand is influenced by tourism demands for three countries such as Hong Kong, Singapore and United States. Our results imply that government and managerial implications are recognized based on the empirical findings