Decision Model for Mobile Phone ODM (Original Design Manufacture) Vendor Selection

Mobile phone has become an indispensable part of human being’s daily lives. Triggered by the first launch of iPhone since 2007, the mobile phone industry has prospered and attracted many manufactures from other electronic industries. With past strong experience in PC related ODM manufacture experience, Taiwan ODM manufacturers gain great competence to acquire large and constant ODM/EMS orders from leading mobile phone vendors. They utilize ODM vendors’ capabilities to provide emerging market with cost competitive products and wider product portfolio. Therefore, an effective ODM vendor selection model is critical to ensure the success of product launch and the quality level. The goal of this research paper is to establish a decision model for mobile phone ODM vendor selection. An Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) model was selected to design an appropriate ODM vendor performance evaluation model which allows the mobile phone branding company to choose the best suitable ODM vendor. An expert panel of 5 experienced project managers helped on the model development and scoring process for 3 selected vendors. The results showed Vendor 3 has the best performance contributed by its most outstanding performance in Production Quality Criterion. R&D Capability is the most influential factor toward the decision at Focus Area level and Pricing Criterion impacts the Focus Area most. Although this research paper had demo the effectiveness to use AHP model for ODM vendor selection, the simplified hierarchy structure and selection of expert panel composition might affect the accuracy and applicability of this methodology. A more detailed hierarchy structure and comprehensive factor elements along with a more diverse expert panel composition shall be used to examine the effectiveness of this methodology as future research

Analysis of Residential and Auto Break-in Records in Taipei City

Taipei City is the capital of Taiwan. It has population of 2.7 million living in the city area of 271 km2 (104 mi2). There are totally 12 administrative districts in this city. To maintain the safety of the city, Taipei City Police Bureau has arranged regular patrol routes with focus on the high-risk area where residential and auto break-in occurs. Due to limited police resource, resident neighborhood also organized volunteered patrol teams to enhance the security in residential area. Based on past file record history, the Bureau would like to understand the high-risk districts and time schedule to improve their patrol schedule and route accordingly. The goal of this project is to help the bureau to identify the higher risk area and schedule for such criminal incidents so that to develop better prevention plan with its limited resources

Improving the Effectiveness of Fuzzy Front End Management: Expanding Stage-Gate Methodologies Through Agile

More now than ever before, product development has become more challenging and complex with all the globalization around business today. Understanding the requirements of unfamiliar markets can be very challenging for organizations trying to speed-up their innovations. Also with the advent of globalization there is pressure on everyone to perform better and roll out new products in the market. The fuzzy front end process is very dynamic and unstructured process. By taking advantage of the key characteristics of Agile and Stage-Gate model, an Integrated Agile- Stage- Gate Hybrid model was developed which could help in improving the effectiveness of the fuzzy front end process. The goal of this research is to improve the effectiveness of Fuzzy Front End innovation process by expanding Stage-Gate methodologies through Agile. In order to do this, literature review was done to understand and review various Stage-Gate approaches, focusing on the problems of the Stage-Gate model and solutions provided by the succeeding frameworks. The key contribution of the research is an assessment of different Stage- Gate models which has been developed over the years focusing on their problems and the solutions given by Agile to resolve these problems. Recommendations are made in the end accordingly

Project Proposal: Outback Restaurant – Kitchen Process Improvement

Our goal of this project is to improve kitchen efficiency by identify the efficiency problem. Outback steakhouse sells American food with an Australian theme. We pride ourselves on serving up variety of menu choices which are made fresh to order. For our staff handling fresh ingredients gives them a newfound respect for food and an awareness of where it comes from. Besides steak, served meals also include chicken, ribs, seafood and pasta for everyone. We emphasize providing consistently high quality delicious food delivering with casual atmosphere at moderate price. The problem we are now facing is that we have too many customers, at peak times, and not enough capacity to serve them. This is causing slow process time and as a result, we are getting many complaints about long wait time for meals to be served and wait times in lobby. The success of this project will result in an increase of customer visits by 5% based on a market analysis estimation by the Outback Consultant Company (OCC). The 5% is derived from the reduction in food waste and the reduction in labor hours as a result of the process improvement. There is also a correlation in happiness of employees which results in efficiency improvement which is somewhat less quantifiable

Multicultural Conflict Resolution Strategy

This research paper studied and investigated how the multicultural environment would impact the conflict resolution strategies. From literature review, we understood the different sources and level of conflicts. We went through the evolvement of different theoretical models for conflict resolution strategy styles to explore the relationship between cultural variables and their impact on conflict resolution strategies. From several related quantitative researches, we categorized the multicultural environment into four types and identified their preference of conflict resolution strategy styles

Improving the Effectiveness of Fuzzy Front End Management: Expanding Stage-Gate Methodologies Through Agile

This project is only available to students, faculty and staff at PSU

Drone Technology and Applications

Drones, also named as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), are becoming increasingly popular around the world. The objective of this paper is to understand different type of drones and its applications. This paper focuses mainly in agricultural, transport and aerial photography sector. It explores the UAV market, challenges and future opportunities in these three sectors. Regulations play an important role in the growth of UAV. Therefore, Regulations are also explored in this paper

Hyper-Converged Infrastructure: Analysis of HPE’s Decision to Acquire SimpliVity

Team B Project Objectives: Analyze and assess HP Enterprise’s decision to acquire hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) vendor, SimpliVity - Discuss and document acquisition options available to HP - Discuss the reasoning behind why SimpliVity was chosen out of all available options - Define HCI - Consolidating IT components into a single optimized platform with centralized management enables increased utilization and lower costs - Define HCI’s importance both now and for the future of HP Enterprise - Define HP’s current technology portfolio and how it is impacted (positively or negatively) by this acquisition - Define acquisition criteri

Toy World, Inc.

Toy World, Inc. operates in the highly competitive and rapidly changing children’s plastic toy manufacturing industry. Every year Toy World had very high seasonal production levels that drop drastically over the rest of the year. This results in a very high amount of overtime, inefficiencies in production, and extra stress on production machinery. Toy World recently hired Dan Hoffman, a project manager who offered the notion of level production, where if Toy World were to spread production out throughout the entire year they would likely be able to reduce production costs and overtime compensation. The analysis within this report will focus on potentially distributing production across the year, and comparing forecast management and potential outcomes of level production with that of Toy World’s current seasonal production outlook

Optimization Model For Multiple Project Management

In any company, there are plenty of factors which can move a project past its deadline. It\u27s very common for some project tasks (Activities) to be complex than anticipated or to have turnover on the project that requires to bring new resources up to speed. Sometimes, many project activities are simply underestimated and they end up taking more time than predicted. Regardless of how it happens, most of the times managers discover that projects are trending beyond committed deadlines. If it’s still the beginning of the project, some corrective actions could be taken to bring project back on track. But, closer to project deadline, choices dwindle. In spite of such situations, project deadlines can’t be easily delayed or postponed as most of the projects in a company are interdependent in nature while sharing resources to maintain economies of scale. Changing customer demands or pressure of stiff competition in the market also force managers to get the project done before deadline.In such cases, companies prefer the option of ‘Project Crashing’ which simply means applying additional resources to the critical path or the sequence of activities that must be completed in required schedule. It\u27s always possible to just throw more resources on the critical path, but crashing also means to get the biggest schedule gain for the least amount of incremental costs. To study the issue of Project Crashing and high crashing cost related to it, we examine the case of Siemens Energy Inc. Siemens Energy Inc. is a division of a large European company Siemens AG which has operations in manufacturing and electronics worldwide. Similar to all companies, Siemens Inc. also deals with the issue of managing multiple projects in a given period of time. Management at Siemens Inc. would like to prefer developing a standardized method or model that can help managers to make informed and rational decision which can help them to accomplish all the project activities in time with the least extra cost incurred. To begin with, we reviewed past literature available on Project Management. Most of them mainly focus on approaches used for schedule compression. In addition, we also reviewed past literature on optimization methods used for project crashing. Understading the past researches and the need of a robust and widely applicable optimization model for this classic but important problem, an attempt was made to address this Project Management. Hence, a model was developed using Linear Programming and Excel Solver which aims at meeting the project deadline with minimum cost