The impact of lean practices on inventory turnover

Lean manufacturing (LM) is currently enjoying its second heyday. Companies in several industries are implementing leanpractices to keep pace with the competition and achieve better results. In this article, we will concentrate on how companies can improve their inventoryturnover performance through the use ofleanpractices. According to our main proposition, firms that widely apply leanpractices have higher inventoryturnover than those that do not rely on LM. However, there may be significant differences in inventoryturnover even among lean manufacturers depending on their contingencies. Therefore, we also investigate how various contingency factors (production systems, order types, product types) influence theinventoryturnoveroflean manufacturers. We use cluster and correlation analysis to separate manufacturers based onthe extent of their leanness and to examine the effect of contingencies. We acquired the data from the International Manufacturing Strategy Survey (IMSS) in ISIC sectors 28–35

RT-Bench, Improved Understanding of Application Performance with Memory Storage

By implementing efficient and smart schedulers in our software systems with multiple threads we can make applications run faster and much more efficiently. There is however a lot of caution when adopting and implementing scheduling algorithms, like limited preemptive scheduling or PD2, due to the uncertainty they may cause on advanced and complex systems. In fact, most algorithms are tested to produce advantages in specific situations. This is one of the reasons why there is a gap between the theoretical scheduling development and the actual schedulers implemented in real operating systems. One way to close the gap is to derive precise guarantees for the implementation of scheduling algorithms, which is the purpose of rt-bench. Rt-bench calculates characteristic values for a specified scheduling algorithm and a specific task set, mainly in form of supply bound functions based on the execution of the task set on a Linux-based hardware platform. The characteristics can vary depending on the system and the setup, therefore these are used to compare complete execution platforms rather than single algorithms. This thesis focuses on extending rt-bench to increase the realistic behaviour of the simulation of the application behaviour. Before this thesis, rt-bench could simulate computations but not memory handling. Simulating memory management is necessary to create realistic models and the purpose of this thesis is to introduce this memory usage in rt-bench. The results show a clear performance drop before the model reaches a memory level equal to the cache size, due to other processes also using the cache memory. This behaviour is what was expected and confirms that the implementation is sufficient for measuring and evaluating performance offered by different platforms

The impact of external market factors on operational practices and performance of companies

The links between operational practices and performance are well studied in the literature, both theoretically and empirically. However, mostly internal factors are inspected more closely as the basis of operational performance, even if the impact of external, environmental factors is often emphasized. Our research fills a part of this existing gap in the literature. We examine how two environmental factors, market dynamism and competition impact the use of some operational practices (such as quality improvement, product development, automation, etc.) and the resulting operations and business performance. The method of path analysis is used. Data were acquired through an international survey (IMSS – International Manufacturing Strategy Survey), which was executed in 2005, in 23 participating countries in so called "innovative" industries (ISIC 28-35) with a sample of 711 firms. Results show that both market dynamism and competition have large impact on business performance, but the indirect effects, through operations practices are rather weak compared to direct ones. The most influential practices are from the area of process and control, and quality management

Centrumok és perifériák a Monarchia szétesése után - az új határok racionalitásának vizsgálata gravitációs modellek alapján

The authors aim to investigate the racionality of the new borders based on 4 different and independent methods applied to examine whether the successor states fulfill the requirements of ideal state in geographical terms or not, comparing the results with the situation in 1850 and 1910. Apart from the area/perimeter ratio mainly social geographical methods, like the shift of the center of gravity (weighted by the role of geographical barriers, like mountains), the shift of equipotencial lines (in case of attraction zones), the applicability of the Chrystaller model were used to evaluate the results. The limits of the attraction zones tended to match the Hungarian border in north and south within the whole era, and the strange shape of Vienna’s attraction zone also equaled with Greater Austria (without Hungary) and Bosnia. Romania’s attraction zone remained nearly constant, including the eaternmost part of Transylvania Belgrade’s sphere of influence did not reach even Nis in 1850, but by 1940 Timisoara also became the part of its zone of attraction. A neutral zone belonging to nobody could be assigned to the Novi Sad-Timisoara-Cluj line

Survey of the seasonal dependency of Eimeria oocysts and Passalurus ambiguus infections in industrial rabbit farms

[EN] A major problem of large-scale rabbit farming is digestive diseases. Relatively few data on parasitic diseases of industrial rabbit populations are available. The aim of the study was to evaluate the seasonaldependent incidence of Eimeria spp. and Passalurus ambiguus infections at large-scale rabbit farms. The survey was carried out between 2018 and 2022 at 29 Hungarian and 2 Slovakian rabbit farms. Altogether, 7612 faecal samples were examined. Eimeria oocysts and P. ambiguus eggs were detected on all rabbit farms examined, although only a relatively small portion of faecal samples was found positive. Eimeria oocysts and P. ambiguus eggs were found in 32 and 6% of the samples, respectively. Our findings for the seasonal-dependent evaluation of collected data showed that the highest proportion of Eimeria positive samples occurred during the summer (35.3%) and autumn (36.2%) periods. In winter, a significantly lower infection rate was found (29.5 %; P<0.05). The most favourable results were observed in spring (25.1%; P<0.05). As for P. ambiguus, the highest rate of infection was measured in spring (8.4%) and the lowest in summer (4.5%; P<0.01). The autumn and winter periods showed intermediate results (6.7 and 5.5 %, respectively).Demeter, C.; Matics, Z.; Demeter-Jeremiás, A.; Sándor, F.; Gerencsér, Z.; Német, Z. (2023). Survey of the seasonal dependency of Eimeria oocysts and Passalurus ambiguus infections in industrial rabbit farms. World Rabbit Science. 31(4):277-283. https://doi.org/10.4995/wrs.2023.1939627728331

Környezeti tényezők és adottságok hatása a vállalati legjobb gyakorlatok és a teljesítmény kapcsolatára = The effect of contingencies on the relation of best practices and performance

A kutatás fókuszában a vállalati reálműködésben használt legjobb gyakorlatok kontingencia tényezők (pl. vállalatméret, versenyintenzitás, piaci dinamika) általi meghatározottsága állt. Azt vizsgáltuk, hogy vajon bizonyos külső feltételek és vállalati adottságok milyen mértékben befolyásolják a legjobb gyakorlatok használatát és azok eredményességét. A kutatás három fő fókusz köré épült: 1) A lean menedzsment eredményességét befolyásoló tényezők vizsgálata, 2) a nemzeti szintű versenyképesség hatása a szolgálatosodásra és a vállalati szintű globalizációra, 3) a legjobb gyakorlatok és az üzleti eredményesség kapcsolata bizonyos kontingencia tényezők befolyása alatt. A kutatás fő eredménye, hogy a kontingencia tényezők döntő mértékben befolyásolják nemcsak az egyes gyakorlatok használatát, de a használat eredményességét is. | The goal of our research was to discover a) how and to what extent contingencies (for example market dynamics, competition intensity, company size or strategic focus) affect what kind of best practices companies implement, and b) how successful it is to implement best practices under various contingencies. The research focused on three issues 1) contingencies of lean management success, 2) the impact of country competitiveness on servitization and levels of company globalization, 3) the relationship of best practices and business performance under some contingency factors. The main result of the survey is that contingency factors have crucial impact on both the use of best practices and on the performance achieved by using them