Search results for: Companies’ performances

Authors: Zainal Abidin Akasah, Maizam Alias, Azuin Ramli

Abstract:

The safety and health performances aspects of a building are the most challenging aspect of facility management. It requires a deep understanding by the building managers on the factors that contribute to health and safety performances. This study attempted to develop an explanatory architectural safety performance model for stratified low-cost housing in Malaysia. The proposed Building Safety and Health Performance (BSHP) model was tested empirically through a survey on 308 construction practitioners using partial least squares (PLS) and structural equation modelling (SEM) tool. Statistical analysis results supports the conclusion that architecture, building services, external environment, management approaches and maintenance management have positive influence on safety and health performance of stratified low-cost housing in Malaysia. The findings provide valuable insights for construction industry to introduce BSHP model in the future where the model could be used as a guideline for training purposes of managers and better planning and implementation of building management.

Keywords: Building management, stratified low-cost housing, Safety and health model

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 2147

Authors: Xinyuan Jiang, Genan Li, Zhiping Wu

Abstract:

Calcium magnesium acetate (CMA) is environmentally benign deicing chemicals that can replace sodium chloride that is widely used on roads and highways at present for snow and ice control to provide safe driving conditions during winter. The price of CMA from petroleum-derived acetic acid is quite expensive. The bamboo vinegar is the by-product from bamboo charcoal production. The bamboo vinegar was used to prepare calcium acetate as raw materials, and its deicing and corrosive performances were studied in this paper. The results show that the freezing temperature of calcium acetate is lower than that of sodium chloride when they have same molar concentration, the deicing performance of calcium acetate is better than that of sodium chloride when they have same moles, while the deicing performance of sodium chloride is better than that of calcium acetate. The corrosion of sodium chloride on iron-nail and steel-nail is larger than that of calcium acetate whether they have same mass concentration or same molar concentration, and the corrosion of sodium chloride and calcium acetate on iron-nail is larger than that on steel-nail, and calcium acetate almost hasn't corrosion on steel-nail.

Keywords: bamboo vinegar, calcium acetate, corrosion, deicer, deicing performance

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 2526

Authors: A. Bencsik, 1V. Lıre, 2, I. Marosi

Abstract:

Intensive changes of environment and strong market competition have raised management of information and knowledge to the strategic level of companies. In a knowledge based economy only those organizations are capable of living which have up-to-date, special knowledge and they are able to exploit and develop it. Companies have to know what knowledge they have by taking a survey of organizational knowledge and they have to fix actual and additional knowledge in organizational memory. The question is how to identify, acquire, fix and use knowledge effectively. The paper will show that over and above the tools of information technology supporting acquisition, storage and use of information and organizational learning as well as knowledge coming into being as a result of it, fixing and storage of knowledge in the memory of a company play an important role in the intelligence of organizations and competitiveness of a company.

Keywords: Individual memory, organizational memory, knowledge management, organizational intelligence.

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1604

Authors: M. R. Gholizadeh, N. Bhuiyan, M. Salari

Abstract:

In the near future, companies will be increasingly forced to shift their activities along a new road in order to decrease the harmful effects of their design, production and after-life on our environment. Products must meet environmental standards to not only prevent penalties but to consider the sustainability for future generations. However, the most important factor that companies will face is selecting a reasonable strategy to maximize their profit. Thus, companies need to have precise forecast from their profit after design stage through Trade-off analysis. This paper is an attempt to introduce a mathematical model that considers effective factors that impact the total profit when products are designed for resource and energy efficiency or recyclability. The modification is according to different strategies based on a Cost-Volume-Profit model. Here, the cost structure consists of Recycling cost, Development cost, Ramp-up cost, Production cost, and Pollution cost. Also, the model shows the effect of implementation of design for recyclable on revenue structure through revenue of used parts and revenue of recycled materials. A numerical example is used to evaluate the proposed model. Results show that fulfillment of Green Product Development not only can reduce the environmental impact of products but also it will increase profit of company in long term.

Keywords: Green Product, Design for Environment, C-V-P Model, Trade-off analysis.

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 2037

Authors: Hu-Hsiao Hsu, Po-Ren Chung, Ming-Chin Ho, Chieh-Feng Tsai, Che-Ming Chiang, Shin-Ku Lee

Abstract:

Lighting upgrades involve relatively lower costs which allow the benefits to be spread more widely than is possible with any other energy efficiency measure. In order to popularize the adoption of CFL in Taiwan, the authority proposes to implement a new energy efficient lamp comparative label system. The current study was accordingly undertaken to investigate the factors affecting the performance and the deviation of actual and labeled performance of commercially available integrated CFLs. In this paper, standard test methods to determine the electrical and photometric performances of CFL were developed based on CIE 84-1989 and CIE 60901-1987, then 55 selected CFLs from market were tested. The results show that with higher color temperature of CFLs lower efficacy are achieved. It was noticed that the most packaging of CFL often lack the information of Color Rendering Index. Also, there was no correlation between price and performance of the CFLs was indicated in this work. The results of this paper might help consumers to make more informed CFL-purchasing decisions.

Keywords: Compact fluorescent lamp (CFL), Efficacy, Color Rendering Index (CRI), Energy saving.

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1470

Authors: Martin Macion

Abstract:

The request for a sustainable development challenges both managers and consumers to rethink habitual practices and activities. While consumers are challenged to develop sustainable consumption patterns, companies are asked to establish managerial systems and structures considering economical, ecological, and social issues. As this is in particular true for housing associations, this paper aims first, at providing an understanding of sustainability strategy in residential trade and industry (RTI) by identifying relevant facets of this construct and second, at conceptually analyzing the impact of sustainability strategy in RTI on operational efficiency and performance of municipal housing companies. The author develops a model of sustainability strategy in RTI and its effects and further, sheds light in priorities for future research.

Keywords: firm performance, sustainability strategy, residentialtrade and industry

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1485

Authors: Peerapong Uthansakul, Sakkarin Chaokuntod, Monthippa Uthansakul

Abstract:

In literatures, many researches proposed various methods to reduce PAPR (Peak to Average Power Ratio). Among those, DSI (Dummy Sequence Insertion) is one of the most attractive methods for WiMAX systems because it does not require side information transmitted along with user data. However, the conventional DSI methods find dummy sequence by performing an iterative procedure until achieving PAPR under a desired threshold. This causes a significant delay on finding dummy sequence and also effects to the overall performances in WiMAX systems. In this paper, the new method based on DSI is proposed by finding dummy sequence without the need of iterative procedure. The fast DSI method can reduce PAPR without either delays or required side information. The simulation results confirm that the proposed method is able to carry out PAPR performances as similar to the other methods without any delays. In addition, the simulations of WiMAX system with adaptive modulations are also investigated to realize the use of proposed methods on various fading schemes. The results suggest the WiMAX designers to modify a new Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) criteria for adaptation.

Keywords: WiMAX, OFDM, PAPR, Dummy SequenceInsertion method.

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1516

Authors: Pisit Boonsrimuang, Arjin Numsomran, Tawil Paungma, Hideo Kobayashi

Abstract:

One of the disadvantages of using OFDM is the larger peak to averaged power ratio (PAPR) in its time domain signal. The larger PAPR signal would course the fatal degradation of bit error rate performance (BER) due to the inter-modulation noise in the nonlinear channel. This paper proposes an improved DSI (Dummy Sequence Insertion) method, which can achieve the better PAPR and BER performances. The feature of proposed method is to optimize the phase of each dummy sub-carrier so as to reduce the PAPR performance by changing all predetermined phase coefficients in the time domain signal, which is calculated for data sub-carriers and dummy sub-carriers separately. To achieve the better PAPR performance, this paper also proposes to employ the time-frequency domain swapping algorithm for fine adjustment of phase coefficient of the dummy subcarriers, which can achieve the less complexity of processing and achieves the better PAPR and BER performances than those for the conventional DSI method. This paper presents various computer simulation results to verify the effectiveness of proposed method as comparing with the conventional methods in the non-linear channel.

Keywords: OFDM, PAPR, dummy sub-carriers, non-linear

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1512

Authors: Vasilii V. Ananev

Abstract:

Oil-and-gas potential of Cuba is found through the discoveries among which there are the most large-scale deposits, such as the Boca de Jaruco and Varadero fields of heavy oils. Currently, the petroleum and petroleum products needs of the island state are satisfied by own sources by less than a half. The prospects of the hydrocarbon resource base development are connected with the adjacent water area of the Gulf of Mexico where foreign companies had been granted license blocks for geological study and further development since 2001. Two Russian companies - JSC Gazprom Neft and OJSC Zarubezhneft, among others, took part in the development of the Cuban part of the Gulf of Mexico. Since 2004, five oil wells have been drilled by various companies in the deep waters of the exclusive economic zone of Cuba. Commercial oil-and-gas bearing prospects have been established in neither of them for both geological and technological reasons. However, only a small part of the water area has been covered by drilling and the productivity of the drill core has been tested at the depth of Cretaceous sediments only. In our opinion, oil-and-gas bearing prospects of the exclusive economic zone of the Republic of Cuba in the Gulf of Mexico remain undervalued and the mentioned water area needs additional geological exploration. The planning of exploration work in this poorly explored region shall be carried out systematically and it shall be based on the results of the regional scientific research.

Keywords: Cuba, Catoche, geology, exploration.

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1342

Authors: Sorore Benabid

Abstract:

The Q-enhanced LC filters are the most used architecture in the Bandpass (BP) Continuous-Time (CT) Delta-Sigma (ΣΔ) modulators, due to their: high frequencies operation, high linearity than the active filters and a high quality factor obtained by Q-enhanced technique. This technique consists of the use of a negative resistance that compensate the ohmic losses in the on-chip inductor. However, this technique introduces a zero in the filter transfer function which will affect the modulator performances in term of Dynamic Range (DR), stability and in-band noise (Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR)). In this paper, we study the effect of this zero and we demonstrate that a calibration of the excess loop delay (ELD) is required to ensure the best performances of the modulator. System level simulations are done for a 2ndorder BP CT (ΣΔ) modulator at a center frequency of 300MHz. Simulation results indicate that the optimal ELD should be reduced by 13% to achieve the maximum SNR and DR compared to the ideal LC-based ΣΔ modulator.

Keywords: Continuous-time bandpass delta-sigma modulators, excess loop delay, on-chip inductor, Q-enhanced LC filter.

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 714

Authors: Ana Paula Monte, Christiane Fontenete

Abstract:

As current business environment is demanding a constant adaptation of companies, the planning and strategic management should be an ongoing and natural process in all kind of organizations. The use of management and monitoring strategic performance tools such as the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) have been popular; even to Small and Medium-sized Enterprises. This paper aims to investigate whether the BSC is being used in monitoring the performance of small businesses, particularly in small fuel retailers companies, which are competing in co-branding; and if not, it aims to identify its strategic orientation in order to recommend a possible strategy map for those managers that are willing to adopt this model as an alternative to traditional ones for organizational performance evaluation, which often focus only on evaluation of the organizational financial performance.

Keywords: Balanced Scorecard, Performance Management and Evaluation, SMEs, Strategy Maps

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 4134

Authors: D. Kreutzer, S. Müller-Abdelrazeq, I. Isenhardt

Abstract:

Resource scarcity, energy transition and the planned climate neutrality pose enormous challenges for manufacturing companies. In order to achieve these goals and a holistic sustainable development, the European Union has listed the circular economy as part of the Circular Economy Action Plan. In addition to a reduction in resource consumption, reduced emissions of greenhouse gases and a reduced volume of waste, the principles of the circular economy also offer enormous economic potential for companies, such as the generation of new circular business models. However, many manufacturing companies, especially small and medium-sized enterprises, do not have the necessary capacity to plan their transformation. They need support and strategies on the path to circular transformation because this change affects not only production but also the entire company. Maturity models offer an approach to determine the current status of companies’ transformation processes. In addition, companies can use the models to identify transformation strategies and thus promote the transformation process. While maturity models are established in other areas, e.g., IT or project management, only a few circular economy maturity models can be found in the scientific literature. The aim of this paper is to analyze the identified maturity models of the circular economy through a systematic literature review (SLR) and, besides other aspects, to check their completeness as well as their quality. For this purpose, circular economy maturity models at the company's (micro) level were identified from the literature, compared, and analyzed with regard to their theoretical and methodological structure. A specific focus was placed, on the one hand, on the analysis of the business units considered in the respective models and, on the other hand, on the underlying metrics and indicators in order to determine the individual maturity level of the entire company. The results of the literature review show, for instance, a significant difference in the number and types of indicators as well as their metrics. For example, most models use subjective indicators and very few objective indicators in their surveys. It was also found that there are rarely well-founded thresholds between the levels. Based on the generated results, concrete ideas and proposals for a research agenda in the field of circular economy maturity models are made.

Keywords: Circular economy, maturity model, maturity assessment, systematic literature review.

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 152

Authors: Guenther Schuh, Christina Koenig, Nico Schoen, Markus Wellensiek

Abstract:

Identification and selection of appropriate product and manufacturing technologies are key factors for competitiveness and market success of technology-based companies. Therefore, many companies perform technology intelligence (TI) activities to ensure the identification of evolving technologies at the right time. Technology monitoring is one of the three base activities of TI, besides scanning and scouting. As the technological progress is accelerating, more and more technologies are being developed. Against the background of limited resources it is therefore necessary to focus TI activities. In this paper we propose a concept for defining appropriate search fields for technology monitoring. This limitation of search space leads to more concentrated monitoring activities. The concept will be introduced and demonstrated through an anonymized case study conducted within an industry project at the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Technology IPT. The described concept provides a customized monitoring approach, which is suitable for use in technology-oriented companies. It is shown in this paper that the definition of search fields and search tasks are suitable methods to define topics of interest and thus to align monitoring activities. Current as well as planned product, production and material technologies and existing skills, capabilities and resources form the basis for derivation of relevant search areas. To further improve the concept of technology monitoring the proposed concept should be extended during future research e.g. by the definition of relevant monitoring parameters.

Keywords: Monitoring radar, search field, technology intelligence, technology monitoring.

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 3211

Authors: Ondřej Nowak

Abstract:

This paper presents an exploration into the structure of the corporate governance network and interlocking directorates in the Czech Republic. First a literature overview and a basic terminology of the network theory is presented. Further in the text, statistics and other calculations relevant to corporate governance networks are presented. For this purpose an empirical data set consisting of 2 906 joint stock companies in the Czech Republic was examined. Industries with the highest average number of interlocks per company were healthcare, and energy and utilities. There is no observable link between the financial performance of the company and the number of its interlocks. Also interlocks with financial companies are very rare.

Keywords: Corporate Governance, Interlocking Directorates, Network Theory, Czech Republic.

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1541

Authors: Ljubica Milanović Glavan

Abstract:

Because of the increasing business pressures, companies must be adaptable and flexible in order to withstand them. Inadequate business processes and low level of business process orientation, that in its core accentuates business processes as opposed to business functions and focuses on process performance and customer satisfaction, hider the ability to adapt to changing environment. It has been shown in previous studies that the companies which have reached higher business process maturity level consistently outperform those that have not reached them. The aim of this paper is to provide a basic understanding of business process orientation concept and business process maturity model. Besides that the paper presents the state of business process orientation in Croatia that has been captured with a study conducted in 2013. Based on the results some practical implications and guidelines for managers are given.

Keywords: Business process orientation, business process maturity, Croatia, maturity score.

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1634

Authors: U. Bottigli, R.Chiarucci, B. Golosio, G.L. Masala, P. Oliva, S.Stumbo, D.Cascio, F. Fauci, M. Glorioso, M. Iacomi, R. Magro, G. Raso

Abstract:

Purpose of this work is to develop an automatic classification system that could be useful for radiologists in the breast cancer investigation. The software has been designed in the framework of the MAGIC-5 collaboration. In an automatic classification system the suspicious regions with high probability to include a lesion are extracted from the image as regions of interest (ROIs). Each ROI is characterized by some features based generally on morphological lesion differences. A study in the space features representation is made and some classifiers are tested to distinguish the pathological regions from the healthy ones. The results provided in terms of sensitivity and specificity will be presented through the ROC (Receiver Operating Characteristic) curves. In particular the best performances are obtained with the Neural Networks in comparison with the K-Nearest Neighbours and the Support Vector Machine: The Radial Basis Function supply the best results with 0.89 ± 0.01 of area under ROC curve but similar results are obtained with the Probabilistic Neural Network and a Multi Layer Perceptron.

Keywords: Neural Networks, K-Nearest Neighbours, Support Vector Machine, Computer Aided Detection

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1578

Authors: A. Bencsik, - A. Sólyom

Abstract:

The role of knowledge is a determinative factor in the life of economy and society. To determine knowledge is not an easy task yet the real task is to determine the right knowledge. From this view knowledge is a sum of experience, ideas and cognitions which can help companies to remain in markets and to realize a maximum profit. At the same time changes of circumstances project in advance that contents and demands of the right knowledge are changing. In this paper we will analyse a special segment on the basis of an empirical survey. We investigated the behaviour and strategies of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in the area of knowledge-handling. This survey was realized by questionnaires and wide range statistical methods were used during processing. As a result we will show how these companies are prepared to operate in a knowledge-based economy and in which areas they have prominent deficiencies.

Keywords: education, knowledge, knowledgemanagement, strategy, SME

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1461

Authors: Malay K. Pakhira, Rajat K. De

Abstract:

In this paper, a pipelined version of genetic algorithm, called PLGA, and a corresponding hardware platform are described. The basic operations of conventional GA (CGA) are made pipelined using an appropriate selection scheme. The selection operator, used here, is stochastic in nature and is called SA-selection. This helps maintaining the basic generational nature of the proposed pipelined GA (PLGA). A number of benchmark problems are used to compare the performances of conventional roulette-wheel selection and the SA-selection. These include unimodal and multimodal functions with dimensionality varying from very small to very large. It is seen that the SA-selection scheme is giving comparable performances with respect to the classical roulette-wheel selection scheme, for all the instances, when quality of solutions and rate of convergence are considered. The speedups obtained by PLGA for different benchmarks are found to be significant. It is shown that a complete hardware pipeline can be developed using the proposed scheme, if parallel evaluation of the fitness expression is possible. In this connection a low-cost but very fast hardware evaluation unit is described. Results of simulation experiments show that in a pipelined hardware environment, PLGA will be much faster than CGA. In terms of efficiency, PLGA is found to outperform parallel GA (PGA) also.

Keywords: Hardware evaluation, Hardware pipeline, Optimization, Pipelined genetic algorithm, SA-selection.

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1413

Authors: Shafaf Ibrahim, Noor Elaiza Abdul Khalid, Mazani Manaf

Abstract:

Segmentation of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) images is the most challenging problems in medical imaging. This paper compares the performances of Seed-Based Region Growing (SBRG), Adaptive Network-Based Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) and Fuzzy c-Means (FCM) in brain abnormalities segmentation. Controlled experimental data is used, which designed in such a way that prior knowledge of the size of the abnormalities are known. This is done by cutting various sizes of abnormalities and pasting it onto normal brain tissues. The normal tissues or the background are divided into three different categories. The segmentation is done with fifty seven data of each category. The knowledge of the size of the abnormalities by the number of pixels are then compared with segmentation results of three techniques proposed. It was proven that the ANFIS returns the best segmentation performances in light abnormalities, whereas the SBRG on the other hand performed well in dark abnormalities segmentation.

Keywords: Seed-Based Region Growing (SBRG), Adaptive Network-Based Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS), Fuzzy c-Means (FCM), Brain segmentation.

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 2269

Authors: Grigoris Giannarakis, Nikolaos Litinas, Ioannis Theotokas

Abstract:

The aim of the study is to investigate a number of characteristics of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) indicators that should be adopted by CSR assessment methodologies. For the purpose of this paper, a survey among the Greek companies that belong to FTSE 20 in Athens Exchange (FTSE/Athex-20) has been conducted, as these companies are expected to pioneer in the field of CSR. The results show consensus as regards the characteristics of indicators such as the need for the adoption of general and specific sector indicators, financial and non-financial indicators, the origin and the weight rate. However, the results are contradictory concerning the appropriate number of indicators for the assessment of CSR and the unit of measurement. Finally, the company-s sector is a more important dimension of CSR than the size and the country where the company operates. The purpose of this paper is to standardize the main characteristics of CSR indicators.

Keywords: Corporate social responsibility, Greece, Indicators

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 7908

Authors: Andrea Bellucci, Martina Tofi

Abstract:

The aim of paper is to analyze business models of bancassurance in Italy for life business. The life insurance business is very developed in the Italian market and banks branches have 80% of the market share. Given its maturity, the life insurance market needs to consolidate its organizational form to allow for the development of non-life business, which nowadays collects few premiums but represents a great opportunity to enlarge the market share of bancassurance using its strength in the distribution channel while the market share of independent agents is decreasing. Starting with the main business model of bancassurance for life business, this paper will analyze the performances of life companies in the Italian market by balance sheet indicators and by main discriminant variables of business models. The study will observe trends from 2013 to 2015 for the Italian market by exploiting a database managed by Associazione Nazionale delle Imprese di Assicurazione (ANIA). The applied approach is based on a bottom-up analysis starting with variables and indicators to define business models’ classification. The statistical classification algorithm proposed by Ward is employed to design business models’ profiles. Results from the analysis will be a representation of the main business models built by their profile related to indicators. In that way, an unsupervised analysis is developed that has the limit of its judgmental dimension based on research opinion, but it is possible to obtain a design of effective business models.

Keywords: Balance sheet indicators, Bancassurance, business models, ward algorithm.

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1227

Authors: Ahmed Mateen, Zhu Qingsheng, Ahmad Bilal

Abstract:

In the current age of technology, information is the most precious asset of a company. Today, companies have a large amount of data. As the data become larger, access to data for some particular information is becoming slower day by day. Faster data processing to shape it in the form of information is the biggest issue. The major problems in distributed databases are the efficiency of data distribution and response time of data distribution. The security of data distribution is also a big issue. For these problems, we proposed a strategy that can maximize the efficiency of data distribution and also increase its response time. This technique gives better results for secure data distribution from multiple heterogeneous sources. The newly proposed technique facilitates the companies for secure data sharing efficiently and quickly.

Keywords: ER-schema, electronic record, P2P framework, API, query formulation.

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1028

Authors: Monisha Isaac

Abstract:

Biotechnology is a discipline which explains the use of living organisms and systems to construct a product, or we can define it as an application or technology developed to use biological systems and organisms processes for a specific use. Particularly, it includes cells and its components use for new technologies and inventions. The tools developed can be further used in diverse fields such as agriculture, industry, research and hospitals etc. The 21^st century has seen a drastic development and advancement in biotechnology in India. Significant increase in Government of India’s outlays for biotechnology over the past decade has been observed. A sectoral break up of biotechnology-based companies in India shows that most of the companies are agriculture-based companies having interests ranging from tissue culture to biopesticides. Major attention has been given by the companies in health related activities and in environmental biotechnology. The biopharmaceutical, which comprises of vaccines, diagnostic, and recombinant products is the most reliable and largest segment of the Indian Biotech industry. India has developed its vaccine markets and supplies them to various countries. Then there are the bio-services, which mainly comprise of contract researches and manufacturing services. India has made noticeable developments in the field of bio industries including manufacturing of enzymes, biofuels and biopolymers. Biotechnology is also playing a crucial and significant role in the field of agriculture. Traditional methods have been replaced by new technologies that mainly focus on GM crops, marker assisted technologies and the use of biotechnological tools to improve the quality of fertilizers and soil. It may only be a small contributor but has shown to have huge potential for growth. Bioinformatics is a computational method which helps to store, manage, arrange and design tools to interpret the extensive data gathered through experimental trials, making it important in the design of drugs.

Keywords: Biotechnology, advancement, agriculture, bio-services, bio-industries, bio-pharmaceuticals.

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 2040

Authors: Jolanta Brodowska-Szewczuk

Abstract:

The article includes the results and conclusions from empirical researches that had been done. The research focuses on the impact of investments made in small and medium-sized enterprises financed from EU funds on the competitiveness of these companies. The researches includes financial results in sales revenue and net income, expenses, and many other new products/services on offer, higher quality products and services, more modern methods of production, innovation in management processes, increase in the number of customers, increase in market share, increase in profitability of production and provision of services. The main conclusions are that, companies with direct investments under this measure shall apply the modern methods of production. The consequence of this is to increase the quality of our products and services. Furthermore, both small and medium-sized enterprises have introduced new products and services. Investments were carried out, thus enabling better work organization in enterprises. Entrepreneurs would guarantee higher quality of service, which would result in better relationships with their customers, what is more, noting the rise in number of clients. More than half of the companies indicated that the investments contributed to the increase in market share. Same thing as for market reach and brand recognition of particular company. An interesting finding is that, investments in small enterprises were more effective than medium-sized enterprises.

Keywords: Competitiveness, efficiency, EU funds, small and medium-sized enterprises.

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1227

Authors: H. Nakamura

Abstract:

This study analyzes international strategic alliances in the information industry. The purpose of this study is to clarify the strategic intention of an international alliance. Secondly, it investigates the influence of differences in the target markets of partner companies on alliances. Using an international strategy theory approach to analyze the global strategies of global companies, the study compares a database business and an electronic publishing business. In particular, these cases emphasized factors attributable to "people" and "learning", reliability and communication between organizations and the evolution of the IT infrastructure. The theory evolved in this study validates the effectiveness of these strategies.

Keywords: Database business, electronic library, international strategic alliances, partner selection.

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1107

Authors: M. Amberg, M. Gepp, S. Horn

Abstract:

In today-s economy plant engineering faces many challenges. For instance the intensifying competition in this business is leading to cost competition and needs for a shorter time-to-market. To remain competitive companies need to make their businesses more profitable by implementing improvement programs such as standardization projects. But they have difficulties to tap their full economic potential for various reasons. One of them is non-holistic planning and implementation of standardization projects. This paper describes a new conceptual framework - the layer-model. The model combines and expands existing proven approaches in order to improve design, implementation and management of standardization projects. Based on a holistic approach it helps to systematically analyze the effects of standardization projects on different business layers and enables companies to better seize the opportunities offered by standardization.

Keywords: layer model, plant engineering, standardization.

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1568

Authors: Mohammed A. Kafaji

Abstract:

This paper aims to investigate the influence of quality of education and quality of research, provided by local educational institutions, on the adoption of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in managing business operations for companies in Saudi market. A model was developed and tested using data collected from 138 Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) of foreign companies in diverse business sectors. The data is analyzed and managed using multivariate approaches through standard statistical packages. The results showed that educational quality has little contribution to the ICT adoption while research quality seems to play a more prominent role. These results are analyzed in terms of business environment and market constraints and further extended to the perceived effectiveness of applied pedagogical approaches in schools and universities.

Keywords: Domestic Competition, Quality of Education, Quality of Research, ICT Adoption, Mediation.

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1738

Authors: Sandipan Chakroborty, Goutam Saha

Abstract:

A state of the art Speaker Identification (SI) system requires a robust feature extraction unit followed by a speaker modeling scheme for generalized representation of these features. Over the years, Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) modeled on the human auditory system has been used as a standard acoustic feature set for speech related applications. On a recent contribution by authors, it has been shown that the Inverted Mel- Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (IMFCC) is useful feature set for SI, which contains complementary information present in high frequency region. This paper introduces the Gaussian shaped filter (GF) while calculating MFCC and IMFCC in place of typical triangular shaped bins. The objective is to introduce a higher amount of correlation between subband outputs. The performances of both MFCC & IMFCC improve with GF over conventional triangular filter (TF) based implementation, individually as well as in combination. With GMM as speaker modeling paradigm, the performances of proposed GF based MFCC and IMFCC in individual and fused mode have been verified in two standard databases YOHO, (Microphone Speech) and POLYCOST (Telephone Speech) each of which has more than 130 speakers.

Keywords: Gaussian Filter, Triangular Filter, Subbands, Correlation, MFCC, IMFCC, GMM.

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 2398

Authors: Marcelo Dias Carvalho, Leticia Ishikawa

Abstract:

Supply Chain Risk Management refers to a set of strategies used by companies to avoid supply chain disruption caused by damage at production facilities, natural disasters, capacity issues, inventory problems, incorrect forecasts, and delays. Many companies use the techniques of the Toyota Production System, which in a way goes against a better management of supply chain risks. This paper studies key events in some multinationals to analyze the trade-off between the best supply chain risk management techniques and management policies designed to create lean enterprises. The result of a good balance of these actions is the reduction of losses, increased customer trust in the company and better preparedness to face the general risks of a supply chain.

Keywords: Supply chain disruptions, supply chain management, supply chain resilience, just-in-time production, lean manufacturing.

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 3400

Authors: M. Bortolini, E. Ferrari, F. G. Galizia, C. Mora

Abstract:

In the last decades, an increasing set of companies adopted lean philosophy to improve their productivity and efficiency promoting the so-called continuous improvement concept, reducing waste of time and cutting off no-value added activities. In parallel, increasing attention rises toward green practice and management through the spread of the green supply chain pattern, to minimise landfilled waste, drained wastewater and pollutant emissions. Starting from a review on contributions deepening lean and green principles applied to supply chain management, the most relevant drivers to measure the performance of industrial processes are pointed out. Specific attention is paid on the role of cost because it is of key importance and it crosses both lean and green principles. This analysis leads to figure out an original reference framework for integrating lean and green principles in designing and managing supply chains. The proposed framework supports the application, to the whole value chain or to parts of it, e.g. distribution network, assembly system, job-shop, storage system etc., of the lean-green integrated perspective. Evidences show that the combination of the lean and green practices lead to great results, higher than the sum of the performances from their separate application. Lean thinking has beneficial effects on green practices and, at the same time, methods allowing environmental savings generate positive effects on time reduction and process quality increase.

Keywords: Environmental sustainability, green supply chain, integrated framework, lean thinking, supply chain management.

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 2742