Avoiding the Pitfalls of Erp System Implementation

ERP implementation is a massive undertaking fraught with risk. This article is filled with practical advice for minimizing these risks. It looks at the technical, operational, and legal aspects of ensuring a satisfactory ERP deployment.     

From Remote Hosting to Self-Hosting of an Erp System: Lessons Learned from the City of El Paso

Abstract

This article describes how the city of El Paso, Texas, initially used an application service provider (ASP) model, allowing the city to fast track its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system implementation. After a change in the ASP arrangements led to less responsiveness to its needs, the city government moved to a self-hosted ERP system. Lessons learned in the evolution from ASP hosting to self-hosting of the city's ERP system are compared to previously published literature.     

A Multi-Level Approach for Devising Effective B2B E-Commerce Development Strategies with an Application to the Case of China

This paper introduces a framework for devising effective business-to-business (B2B) electronic commerce development strategies which is used for organizing some first data on the case of China and for drawing tentative policy conclusions. The framework is based on the assumption that B2B electronic commerce is a dynamic phenomenon involving increasing degrees of information systems externalization and thus needs to be analyzed on the level of the individual company as well as on the level of the whole industry. The aim of the framework is to identify which level forms the main bottleneck for further development at a given point in time. Albeit the framework is based on a set of established theories, notably Nolan's Stages Theory and the Industry Life Cycle theory, it needs further refinement and verification.     

From Remote Hosting to Self-Hosting of an Erp System: Lessons Learned from the City of El Paso

This article describes how the city of El Paso, Texas, initially used an application service provider (ASP) model, allowing the city to fast track its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system implementation. After a change in the ASP arrangements led to less responsiveness to its needs, the city government moved to a self-hosted ERP system. Lessons learned in the evolution from ASP hosting to self-hosting of the city's ERP system are compared to previously published literature.     

乳汁密度测量用传感器初步探讨

本文较为详细地讨论了SRMC—1型数字式乳汁密度测定仪的一次仪表和二次仪表,并给出了两种方式传感器、变送器的设计方法。由于有单片计算机测量系统的支持,从而保证了乳汁密度测量的精度和速度。     

A Methodological Approach to Parallel Simulated Annealing on an SMP System

Simulated annealing (SA) is a stochastic optimization technique which guarantees under certain conditions to converge to a global minimum. The major disadvantage of this technique is its very slow convergence: this makes it not suitable for many complex optimization problems. Different parallel versions of the algorithm have been proposed, but none of them addresses recent 2-way symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) machines. In this paper, we present a novel approach to the parallel implementation of SA on an SMP system. In addition, we offer an adaptive method to dynamically change the program execution flow at run time, as to obtain the maximum benefit from these shared memory parallel architectures. Since we only exploit time measures for this purpose, we obtain a problem independent and a general purpose implementation. The effectiveness of the method is demonstrated by extensively analyzing the traveling salesman problem (TSP) as a target case study, on a system under different workload conditions.     

分布式系统的多级信任保护方法

随着网络和分布式系统的不断发展,异地协同办公的需求不断增强.然而,现有的网络环境存在诸多不安全的因素,用户存在着对信息系统的信任危机.在国际TCG倡导的可信计算平台的基础上提出了基于信息完整性度量与验证的多级信任保护方法.从平台可信保护、进程可信保护、资源可信保护和用户可信保护4个方面阐述了该方法的相关技术,并提出了基于多级信任保护技术的多级访问控制思路.最后给出了多级信任保护方法的应用案例.     

对实现MIS中的通用查询系统的研究

查询系统是管理信息系统的重要组成部分,通过设计选择查询表名和列名、生成查询选择数据窗口、类型匹配检查和动态查询结果显示数据窗口等手段,详细介绍了基于Power Builder技术的通用查询系统的设计思想与实现方法,为开发大型数据库管理系统设计通用查询模块,提供了一个解决方案。     

Measuring Roi in E-Business: A Practical Approach

The research in this article aims to provide an overview of how to calculate the ROI for E-commerce applications so that this information, and the attached ROI Calculator Tool Template, can be used by organizations to reduce the time in preparing the ROI for a project. Although there is much written about ROI, there is not that much said about how to prepare one specifically for an E-commerce project. By reading this article and using the annexed ROI Calculator Tool, any IT group or organization that is going to deploy E-commerce applications will have a starting point for calculating ROIs.     

A UML-Based Approach to System Testing

System testing is concerned with testing an entire system based on its specifications. In the context of object-oriented, UML development, this means that system test requirements are derived from UML analysis artifacts such as use cases, their corresponding sequence and collaboration diagrams, class diagrams, and possibly Object Constraint Language (OCL) expressions across all these artifacts. Our goal here is to support the derivation of functional system test requirements, which will be transformed into test cases, test oracles, and test drivers once we have detailed design information. In this paper, we describe a methodology in a practical way and illustrate it with an example. In this context, we address testability and automation issues, as the ultimate goal is to fully support system testing activities with high-capability tools.     

A Software Fault Tree Approach to Requirements Analysis of an Intrusion Detection System

Requirements analysis for an intrusion detection system (IDS) involves deriving requirements for the IDS from analysis of the intrusion domain. When the IDS is, as here, a collection of mobile agents that detect, classify, and correlate system and network activities, the derived requirements include what activities the agent software should monitor, what intrusion characteristics the agents should correlate, where the IDS agents should be placed to feasibly detect the intrusions, and what countermeasures the software should initiate. This paper describes the use of software fault trees for requirements identification and analysis in an IDS. Intrusions are divided into seven stages (following Ruiu), and a fault subtree is developed to model each of the seven stages (reconnaissance, penetration, etc.). Two examples are provided. This approach was found to support requirements evolution (as new intrusions were identified), incremental development of the IDS, and prioritisation of countermeasures. Correspondence and offprint requests to: G. Helmer, Department of Computer Science, 226 Atanasoff Hall, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa 50011, USA. Email: ghelmer@cs.iastate.edu     

A Layered-Encoding Cascade Optimization Approach to Product-Mix Planning in High-Mix–Low-Volume Manufacturing

High-mix-low-volume (HMLV) production is currently a worldwide manufacturing trend. It requires a high degree of customization in the manufacturing process to produce a wide range of products in low quantity in order to meet customers' demand for more variety and choices of products. Such a kind of business environment has increased the conversion time and decreased the production efficiency due to frequent production changeover. In this paper, a layered-encoding cascade optimization (LECO) approach is proposed to develop an HMLV product-mix optimizer that exhibits the benefits of low conversion time, high productivity, and high equipment efficiency. Specifically, the genetic algorithm (GA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) techniques are employed as optimizers for different decision layers in different LECO models. Each GA and PSO optimizer is studied and compared. A number of hypothetical and real data sets from a manufacturing plant are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed GA and PSO optimizers. The results indicate that, with a proper selection of the GA and PSO optimizers, the LECO approach is able to generate high-quality product-mix plans to meet the production demands in HMLV manufacturing environments.     

一种复杂模糊系统生成方法

生成模糊系统传统方法的工作量往往随输入变量数的增长而爆炸性也增加，用于抽取模糊规则的神经网络的规模迅速地增加且能量的极小值点也迅速地增多。针对这一问题，本文发展了一种新的模糊系统生成方法，将复杂系统的模糊输入，输出关系分解成简单的模糊输入，输出关系叠加，采用了一种新的网络优化的方法－基于浮点编码的遗传算法来生成该系统。     

On an Approach to Operational Planning of the Oil Product Mixing System

Consideration was given to the problems of constructing schedules for oil product mixing with the aim of determining the mixing sequence, the times of starting and finishing each mixing, and the amounts of products to be prepared at each mixing. Optimization models were proposed, and computer experiments were carried out to demonstrate their efficiency.     

一种细胞核内DNA物质含量准确测量及回归校正新方法

在定量细胞学研究中,细胞核内DNA物质含量的准确测量是癌症筛查与病理诊断的必要前题与最重要依据。由于算法、设备、环境等因素的影响,在对细胞核的数字显微图像进行处理与分析、测量DNA物质含量时会产生较大的误差。本文提出了一种基于数学形态学和k近邻回归算法的DNA物质含量校正新方法。该方法首先利用膨涨算法对细胞核分割掩码进行处理,从而对DNA物质含量的测量进行空间校正;然后采用k近邻回归算法,充分利用细胞核的形态、纹理等特征参数所蕴含的信息,从而对DNA物质含量进行光学回归校正。实验表明,该方法能够显著提高DNA物质含量测量的准确性和可信度,对提高病理诊断的特异性与敏感性都有积极的意义。     

A Petri-Net Approach to Modular Supervision With Conflict Resolution for Semiconductor Manufacturing Systems

In a semiconductor manufacturing system, particular human operations may violate desired requirements and lead to destructive failure. For such human-in-the-loop systems, this paper proposes a supervisory framework which guarantees that manual operations meet required specifications so as to prevent human errors in operation using Petri nets. Moreover, a modular technique with an intersection mechanism is proposed in order to cope with the state-space explosion problem of large-scale systems. A rapid thermal process in semiconductor manufacturing systems is provided to show the practicability of the proposed approach. Note to Practitioners - This work was motivated by the requirement of remote monitoring and supervision of semiconductor manufacturing systems. In such human-in-the-loop and large-scale systems, certain human operations may violate desired safety requirements and result in catastrophic failure. Moreover, the overall complexity of most existing Petri net modeling and analysis approaches significantly increases with the size of the considered systems. This paper suggests a modular supervisory scheme for modeling and synthesis of supervisory agents using Petri nets. The proposed method contributes a promising tool for preventing abnormal operations from being carried out to semiconductor manufacturing systems which, if appropriately modified, may be also applied to other types of discrete event systems.     

A Constraint-Based Approach to Assigning System Components to Tasks

In multi-component systems, individual components must be assigned to the tasks that they are to perform. In many applications, there are several possible task decompositions that could be used to achieve the task, and there are limited resources available throughout the system. We present a technique for making task assignments under these conditions. Constraint satisfaction is used to assign components to particular tasks. Heuristics suggest a task decomposition for which an assignment can be found efficiently. We have applied our technique to the problem of task assignment in systems of underwater robots and instrument platforms working together to collect data in the ocean.