Impact of RFID and EPCglobal on Critical Processes of the Pharmaceutical Supply Chain

The need to implement and guarantee effective item-level tracing systems is becoming more and more important for a wide range of business applications, such as manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, and anti-counterfeiting. Among these, the pharmaceutical supply chain, with millions of medicines moving around the world and needing to be traced at item level, represents a very interesting reference scenario. Furthermore, the growing counterfeiting problem raises a significant threat within the supply chain system. Recently, several international institutions (e.g. Food and Drug Administration, European Medicines Agency, European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations, GS1) are encouraging the use of innovative solutions in healthcare and in the pharmaceutical supply chain, to improve patient safety and enhance the efficiency of the pharmaceutical supply chain, with better worldwide drug traceability

A portal of educational resources: providing evidence for matching pedagogy with technology

The TPACK (Technology, Pedagogy and Content Knowledge) model presents the three types of knowledge that are necessary to implement a successful technology-based educational activity. It highlights how the intersections between TPK (Technological Pedagogical Knowledge), PCK (Pedagogical Content Knowledge) and TCK (Technological Content Knowledge) are not a sheer sum up of their components but new types of knowledge. This paper focuses on TPK, the intersection between technology knowledge and pedagogy knowledge – a crucial field of investigation. Actually, technology in education is not just an add-on but is literally reshaping teaching/learning paradigms. Technology modifies pedagogy and pedagogy dictates requirements to technology. In order to pursue this research, an empirical approach was taken, building a repository (back-end) and a portal (front-end) of about 300 real-life educational experiences run at school. Educational portals are not new, but they generally emphasise content. Instead, in our portal, technology and pedagogy take centre stage. Experiences are classified according to more than 30 categories (‘facets’) and more than 200 facet values, all revolving around the pedagogical implementation and the technology used. The portal (an innovative piece of technology) supports sophisticated ‘exploratory’ sessions of use, targeted at researchers (investigating the TPK intersection), teachers (looking for inspiration in their daily jobs) and decision makers (making decisions about the introduction of technology into schools)

Fast Prototyping of Learning Experiences: An Attempt of Modelling

There are already several examples of Enhanced Learning Management System (ELMS) that use 3D Virtual Worlds as a novel visual metaphor to catch the young student’s attention, to convey concepts and to develop their competences in a learning-by-doing and collaborative fashion. However, their main weak point is the lack of flexibility in the design of the virtual environment and in the customization of the learning experience. Moreover, the number of users potentially involved in each learning session, the variety of learning strategies and the amount of learning objects already available, require the ability of fast prototyping each virtual learning experience, generating, sometimes hundreds, of customized sessions starting from the same “general format”. The need to simplify the customization, open also to non-technical skilled people like teachers, have led us to focus the attention on the simplification of the authoring process of the learning experience and to develop OpenWebTalk, a general-purpose, flexible framework for the fast prototyping of collaborative 3D learning experiences that represents also a first approach to the structured modelling a learning session

Supply Chain Management meets Auto-ID Management: A Structured Approach

Nowadays, firms need to support e-business through solutions that guarantee, on the one hand, the supply chain management (SCM) and, on the other, products’ identification and traceability (ID automation). These two aspects have been faced, up until now, in a separate manner and adhered to the definition of established standards. Thus, we propose an approach that allows the integration of SCM and ID-automation software architectures and, at the same time, guarantees the separation of concerns. In this paper, we also present an implementation that uses two systems: the data interchange system based on the ebXML standard and the traceability system based on the EPCglobal standard. According to this approach, we propose a preliminary implementation experience for the pharmaceutical sector

A conceptual framework for business driven integration

The interoperability among companies and the Business to Business (B2B) message exchange are key aspects for the growth of the business: companies can efficiently interact each other over the web and so can improve its own business capability. The use of the B2B messages modify the way of operate of a company and, of course, the internal business process. The problems that may arise in the B2B message exchange are of two types: one is more methodological, aimed at choosing guidelines oriented to the integration between the business process and the definition of business messages; the other is more technological, aimed at choosing an infrastructural solution more suitable for development of message exchange. In this paper, we propose a conceptual framework to solve the two types of problem. The conceptual framework wants to help companies to define a proper B2B system for message exchange through a business integration solution. It is based on three layers (conceptual, logical and technological) and it covers two separate aspects (methodological and technological) and uses the semantic web idea to link together the three different layers

Collaborative Learning through Flexible Web CVE: The Experience of WebTalk

This chapter describes the technological platform of the authors’ learning experiences and its evolution through the years, providing insights into the reasons that led to significant design choices and offering guidelines on how to deal with technological issues

B2B Interoperability using Business-Driven Integration: Conceptual Framework and Case Study

The interoperability among companies and the business-to-business (B2B) message exchange are key aspects of the growth of businesses: in the next years the companies that are able to cooperate with each other will be winners. The use of B2B messages modifies a company’s method of operation and, of course, its internal business process. In this paper, we propose a conceptual framework to solve the two types of problems that arise in the B2B field: one is more methodological, aimed at choosing guidelines oriented to the integration of business processes and the definition of business messages; the other is more technological, aimed at choosing an infrastructural solution more suitable for the development of message exchanges. The paper also defines a case study in order to show the feasibility of the conceptual framework. Using a specific case study, the paper will show the methodological and technological choices and how ontologies are the glue for different standards and notations involved in business-driven integration problems. Using BPMN notation, we design in this paper a business process that involves different business messages. The paper also presents a REST implementation of the business message exchange

Collaborative Process Management for the Networked Enterprise: A Case Study

The ability to quickly identify and rapidly apply effective business practices makes the difference between companies that manage to remain competitive even in crisis situations and companies that suffer from short-term market changes. To seize the opportunity to adapt their business practices according to emerging organizational forms (Extended Enterprise, Virtual Enterprise) and to improve the workspace of knowledge workers who are central to an organization's success, however, companies are required to face several challenges. This paper presents a case study to support the activities of knowledge workers, increasing their productivity and their ability to find the information they need, and enabling collaboration with colleagues without changing their habits. The paper presents a set of design patterns useful in resolving emerging organizational issues. Also it briefly describes a software prototype that enables companies to introduce the business patterns in the networked workplace, integrating existing information management tools in an overall Enterprise 2.0 environment

Information Systems for Knowledge Workers: The Kpeople Enterprise 2.0 Tool

Every day companies deal with internal problems to manage human resources during the execution of knowledge processes. In these situations, the ability to quickly identify and rapidly apply effective business practices for recurring problems becomes crucial in order to improve the efficiency of the organization. To address this problem, we demonstrate the Kpeople tool that enables organizations configuring a set of process patterns to codify business practices. Kpeople allows tracking unstructured knowledge, improving knowledge management and fostering collaboration

Modeling collaboration processes through design patterns

Enterprise 2.0 has been introduced in the SME (Small Medium Enterprise) modifying common organizational and operative practices. This brings the 'knowledge workers' to change their working practices through the use of web 2.0 communication tools. Unfortunately, these tools do not allow intercepting and tracing the exchanged data, which can produce a loss of information. This is an important problem in an enterprise context because knowledge of the exchanged information can increase the efficiency and competitiveness of the company. In this article we demonstrate that it is possible to extract this knowledge by an abstraction process of the new operative practices, named collaboration processes, thanks to the use of design patterns. Therefore, we propose design patterns for the collaboration processes useful for modelling typical Enterprise 2.0 activities, having the goal of making more flexible and traceable the use of emerging operative practices