This book describes how manufacturing enterprises, by reinforcing their existing monitoring and control of manufacturing processes, can successfully face the ever-increasing pressure from internal and external environments to maintain their competitive advantage. Numerous performance measurement systems have been elaborated to satisfy these requirements, stressing the importance of financial and operational metrics. It also highlights the fact that research on generating and linking financial and operational metrics, especially in real-time, has not garnered sufficient attention to date. The book follows an approach that integrates enterprises across different levels and departments. By computing and linking the financial and operational metrics in real-time, the book demonstrates how to provide a comprehensive view of an entire enterprise.
"Vivek Kale has written a great book on performance management that focuses on decision-making; on continuous, incremental improvement; and on identifying common patterns in becoming a more intelligent organization." —James Taylor, CEO of Decision Management Solutions and author of Real-World Decision Modeling with DMN "Introducing the concepts of decision patterns and performance intelligence, Vivek Kale has written another important book on the issues faced by contemporary organizations."—Gary Cokins, author of Predictive Business Analytics and Performance Management: Integrating Strategy Execution, Methodologies, Risk, and Analytics Enterprise Performance Intelligence and Decision Patterns unravels the mystery of enterprise performance intelligence (EPI) and explains how it can transform the operating context of business enterprises. It provides a clear understanding of what EPI means, what it can do, and application areas where it is practical to use. The need to be responsive to evolving customer needs and desires creates organizational structures where business intelligence (BI) and decision making is pushed out to operating units that are closest to the scene of the action. Closed-loop decision making resulting from a combination of on-going performance management with on-going BI can lead to an effective responsive enterprise; hence, the need for performance intelligence (PI). This pragmatic book: Introduces the technologies such as data warehousing, data mining, analytics, and business intelligence systems that are a first step toward enabling data-driven enterprises. Details decision patterns and performance decision patterns that pave the road for performance intelligence applications. Introduces the concepts, principles, and technologies related to performance measurement systems. Describes the concepts and principles related to balance scorecard systems (BCS). Introduces aspects of performance intelligence for the real-time enterprises. Enterprise Performance Intelligence and Decision Patterns shows how a company can design and implement instruments ranging from decision patterns to PI systems that can enable continuous correction of business unit behavior so companies can enhance levels of productivity and profitability.
The refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Reliable Software Technologies, Ada-Europe 2003, held in Toulouse, France in June 2003. The 29 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on Ravenscar, language issues, static analysis, distributed information systems, software metrics, software components, formal specification, real-time kernel, software testing, and real-time systems design.
This book covers supply chain and logistics, production and manufacturing systems as well as human factors. Topics such as applications to procurements from suppliers, suppliers developments and relationships with suppliers are reported. The techniques and tools applied to production processes, such as, machinery maintenance and quick changeover, are described in detail. The book also presents human factors as the main component in the industrial engineering field, reporting some successful teamwork organizations for improvements and applied ergonomics, among others.
Progress in collaborative networks continues showing a growing number of manifestations and has led to the acceptance of Collaborative Networks (CN) as a new scientific discipline. Contributions to CN coming from multiple reference disciplines has been extensively investigated. In fact developments in CN have benefited from contributions of multiple areas, namely computer science, computer engineering, communications and networking, management, economy, social sciences, law and ethics, etc. Furthermore, some theories and paradigms defined elsewhere have been suggested by several research groups as promising tools to help define and characterize emerging collaborative organizational forms. Although still at the beginning of a long way to go, there is a growing awareness in the research and academic world, for the need to establish a stronger theoretical foundation for this new discipline and a number of recent works are contributing to this goal. From a utilitarian perspective, agility has been pointed out as one of the most appealing characteristics of collaborative networks to face the challenges of a fast changing socio-economic context. However, during the last years it became more evident that finding the right partners and establishing the necessary preconditions for starting an effective collaboration process are both costly and time consuming activities, and therefore an inhibitor of the aimed agility. Among others, obstacles include lack of information (e.g. non-availability of catalogs with normalized profiles of organizations) and lack of preparedness of organizations to join the collaborative process. Overcoming the mismatches resulting from the heterogeneity of potential partners (e.g. differences in infrastructures, corporate culture, methods of work, and business practices) requires considerable investment. Building trust, a pre-requisite for any effective collaboration, is not straight forward and requires time. Therefore the effective creation of truly dynamic collaborative networks requires a proper context in which potential members are prepared to rapidly get engaged in collaborative processes. The concept of breeding environment has thus emerged as an important facilitator for wider dissemination of collaborative networks and their practical materialization. The PRO-VE'05 held in Valencia, Spain, continues the 6th event in a series of successful working conferences on virtual enterprises. This book includes selected papers from that conference and should become a valuable tool to all of those interested in the advances and challenges of collaborative networks.
