Adoption of standard ERP solution in health care sector: is SAP ERP all-in-one capable to meet specific requirements?

Objective of this experience report is to address specific issues regarding standard SAP ERP implementation in a medical institution. Target Company is a state owned health care institution from Bosnia and Herzegovina. Report will treat selected issues which could trouble standard SAP ERP implementation trough predefined ERP implementation methodology for SAP ERP. This report presents observations/ remarks based on experience of authors in particular SAP ERP implementation project in health care institution. Author’s goal is to provide useful insight into “real life” standard ERP implementation and problems that arise. Also, it should provide useful information for all stakeholders involved in the process of ERP implementation in public health care sector

ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks: a literature review

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation is a complex and vibrant process, one that involves a combination of technological and organizational interactions. Often an ERP implementation project is the single largest IT project that an organization has ever launched and requires a mutual fit of system and organization. Also the concept of an ERP implementation supporting business processes across many different departments is not a generic, rigid and uniform concept and depends on variety of factors. As a result, the issues addressing the ERP implementation process have been one of the major concerns in industry. Therefore ERP implementation receives attention from practitioners and scholars and both, business as well as academic literature is abundant and not always very conclusive or coherent. However, research on ERP systems so far has been mainly focused on diffusion, use and impact issues. Less attention has been given to the methods used during the configuration and the implementation of ERP systems, even though they are commonly used in practice, they still remain largely unexplored and undocumented in Information Systems research. So, the academic relevance of this research is the contribution to the existing body of scientific knowledge. An annotated brief literature review is done in order to evaluate the current state of the existing academic literature. The purpose is to present a systematic overview of relevant ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks as a desire for achieving a better taxonomy of ERP implementation methodologies. This paper is useful to researchers who are interested in ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks. Results will serve as an input for a classification of the existing ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks. Also, this paper aims also at the professional ERP community involved in the process of ERP implementation by promoting a better understanding of ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks, its variety and history

How rare is the Bullet Cluster (in a Λ\LambdaCDM universe)?

The Bullet Cluster (1E0657-56) is well-known as providing visual evidence of dark matter but it is potentially incompatible with the standard $\Lambda$CDM cosmology due to the high relative velocity of the two colliding clusters. Previous studies have focussed on the probability of such a high relative velocity amongst selected candidate systems. This notion of `probability' is however difficult to interpret and can lead to paradoxical results. Instead, we consider the expected number of Bullet-like systems on the sky up to a specified redshift, which allows for direct comparison with observations. Using a Hubble volume N-body simulation with high resolution we investigate how the number of such systems depends on the masses of the halo pairs, their separation, and collisional angle. This enables us to extract an approximate formula for the expected number of halo-halo collisions given specific collisional parameters. We use extreme value statistics to analyse the tail of the pairwise velocity distribution and demonstrate that it is fatter than the previously assumed Gaussian form. We estimate that the number of dark matter halo pairs as or more extreme than 1E0657-56 in mass, separation and relative velocity is $1.3^{+2.0}_{-0.6}$ up to redshift $z=0.3$. However requiring the halos to have collided and passed through each other as is observed decreases this number to only 0.1. The discovery of more such systems would thus indeed present a challenge to the standard cosmology.Comment: v2, 14 pages, 10 figures. Revised in response to Referee's queries - in particular the expected number of Bullet-like systems drops by an order of magnitude when the halos are required to have collided and passed through each other. Accepted by JCA

Star formation laws and thresholds from ISM structure and turbulence

We present an analytical model of the relation between the surface density of gas and star formation rate in galaxies and clouds, as a function of the presence of supersonic turbulence and the associated structure of the interstellar medium. The model predicts a power-law relation of index 3/2, flattened under the effects of stellar feedback at high densities or in very turbulent media, and a break at low surface densities when ISM turbulence becomes too weak to induce strong compression. This model explains the diversity of star formation laws and thresholds observed in nearby spirals and their resolved regions, the Small Magellanic Cloud, high-redshift disks and starbursting mergers, as well as Galactic molecular clouds. While other models have proposed interstellar dust content and molecule formation to be key ingredients to the observed variations of the star formation efficiency, we demonstrate instead that these variations can be explained by interstellar medium turbulence and structure in various types of galaxies.Comment: 6 pages, re-submitted to ApJL after referee repor

Inflationary Potentials from the Exact Renormalisation Group

We show that an inflationary slow-roll potential can be derived as an IR limit of the non-perturbative exact renormalisation group equation for a scalar field within the mean-field approximation. The result follows without having to specify a Lagrangian for the UV theory at the Planck scale. We assume that the theory contains a scalar mode with suppressed coupling to other UV fields, and that higher derivative couplings are suppressed. The resulting effective potential gives rise to slow-roll inflation, which is fully consistent with the recent observations. As an example of how the proposed renormalisation group procedure works, we perform an explicit calculation in the $\phi^4$ theory.Comment: V3: 11 pages, 4 figures. Text matches the published versio

The Croatian section of the Communist Party of the United States and the “United Front”: 1934 - 1939

This article explores the attempt to implement "United Front" in the framework of the Croatian-American community. The Author describes the development of socialist and communist organizations in the community during the mid-1930s, and discusses the significant changes that have led to the foundation of the Croatian Section of the Communist Party USA and the relations that the Department collaborated with each other, not communist Croatian-American groups in their efforts to create a "united front". While the Croatian-American Communists were not as present in the Communist Party USA in the 1930\u27s, during the second half of the decade they have played a significant role within the Croatian community

Business process modelling in ERP implementation literature review

Business processes are the backbone of any Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation. Business process modelling (BPM) has become essential for modern, process driven enterprises due to the vibrant business environments. As a consequence enterprises are dealing with a substantial rate of organizational and business processes change. Business process modelling enables a common understanding and analysis of the business processes, which is the first step in every ERP implementation methodology (blueprint phase). In order to represent enterprise processes models in an accurate manner, it is paramount to choose a right business process modeling technique and tool. The problem of many ERP projects rated as unsuccessful is directly connected to a lack of use of business process models and notations during the blueprint phase. Also, blueprint implementation phase is crucial in order to fit planned processes in an organization with processes implemented in the solution. However, business analysts and ERP implementation professionals have substantial difficulties to navigate through a large number of theoretical models and representational notations that have been proposed for business process modeling (BPM). As the availability of different business process modeling references is huge, it is time consuming to make review and classification of all modeling techniques. Therefor, in reality majority of ERP implementations blueprint documents have no business process modeling included in generating blueprint documents. Choosing the right model comprise the purpose of the analysis and acquaintance of the available process modelling techniques and tools. The number of references on business modelling is quit large, so it is very hard to make a decision which modeling notation or technique to use. The main purpose of this paper is to make a review of business process modelling literature and describe the key process modelling techniques. The focus will be on all business process modeling that could be used in ERP implementations, specifically during the blueprint phase of the implementation process. Detailed review of BPM (Business process modeling) theoretical models and representational notations, should assist decision makers and ERP integrators in comparatively evaluating and selecting suitable modeling approaches