Proposing channel coordination and horizontal cooperation in two competitive three‐echelon reverse supply chains

Considering and analyzing various kinds of cooperation among supply chain members is an option for better managing each channel. It is noteworthy that in many real‐world cases, each of vertical and horizontal cooperation has an important role in the success of supply chains. Nevertheless, only vertical cooperation in most previous research is considered. This paper addresses both vertical and horizontal cooperation in two competitive reverse supply chains, each of which includes one collector, one remanufacturer, and one retailer. Our primary concern is to analyze quality improvement competition between the remanufacturers. Moreover, retail price competition between the retailers and the quality competition are simultaneously considered in the extended model. In this research, the investigated system has been analyzed under different structures including decentralized, centralized, horizontal cooperation, and coordinated decision‐making models. The results show that when the remanufacturers cooperate horizontally, the profit of each collector and that of the retailer will decrease compared with those in the decentralized structure. To overcome this problem, a new coordination contract named multiple‐link two‐part tariff is proposed to simultaneously coordinate the members of each chain. The proposed contract effectively convinces the remanufacturers to participate in the coordination model instead of the horizontal cooperation. Moreover, it provides a win–win–win condition for all chain members and improves the quality level of the remanufactured products. The results indicate the proper performance of the proposed contract in improving the benefits of the competing chains, especially when there exists no intense competition between the remanufacturers (i.e., when the market sensitivity to the quality of the remanufactured products is low and consequently less effort is needed to increase the quality of the remanufactured products). Moreover, the proposed contract not only is able to simultaneously increase both remanufactured products demand and of end‐of‐life products supply but also involves both economic and environmental benefits.     

Building Knowledge Management Systems

Why do some organizations prosper and grow while others struggle? There are a variety of interrelated factors that determine the answer to such a complex question, and these factors differ for organizations in different places and at different times. However, one key ability that is common to all successful organizations is effective creation of relevant business knowledge and the timely dissemination of that knowledge to those members of the organization who need it.     

Building Knowledge Management Systems

Abstract

Why do some organizations prosper and grow while others struggle? There are a variety of interrelated factors that determine the answer to such a complex question, and these factors differ for organizations in different places and at different times. However, one key ability that is common to all successful organizations is effective creation of relevant business knowledge and the timely dissemination of that knowledge to those members of the organization who need it.     

A Self-Efficacy Theory Explanation for the Management of Remote Workers in Virtual Organizations

Virtual organizations that use email to communicate and coordinate their work toward a common goal are becoming ubiquitous. However, little is known about how these organizations work. Much prior research suggests that virtual organizations, for the most part because they use information technology to communicate, will be decentralized and non-hierarchical. This paper examines the behavior of one such organization. The analysis is based on a case study of the communication structure and content of communications among members of a virtual organization during a four-month period. We empirically measure the structure of a virtual organization and find evidence of hierarchy. The findings imply that the communication structure of a virtual organization may exhibit different properties on different dimensions of structure. We also examine the relationship among task routineness, organizational structure, and performance. Results indicate that the fit between structure and task routineness affects the perception of performance, but may not affect the actual performance of the organization. Thus, this virtual organization is similar to traditional organizations in some ways and dissimilar in other ways. It was similar to traditional organizations in so far as task-structure fit predicted perceived performance. However, it was dissimilar to traditional organizations in so far as fit did not predict objective performance. To the extent that the virtual organizations may be similar to traditional organizations, existing theories can be expanded to study the structure and perceived performance of virtual organizations. New theories may need to be developed to explain objective performance in virtual organizations.     

Identifying new temporal coordination requirements for calendar systems through a temporal structure lens

Temporal structures have been argued to be an important element of business affecting both the processes that are undertaken within an organization and the overall productivity of the organization and its members. As such, organizations should engage in temporal coordination planning in order to ensure that previously ad hoc temporal structures are streamlined and used to enhance and integrate business processes. This research is at the task analysis stage in the development of such temporal coordination systems. Forty interviews with management, exploring the types of temporal structures used in temporal coordination process, were conducted to capture preliminary functional requirements for temporal coordination systems. The temporal structure difficulties uncovered in this research are used to suggest modifications to current emerging electronic temporal coordination systems, e.g., the personal and collaborative electronic calendar systems. We summarize by giving a set of new requirements that can be used by designers to build the temporal system of the future.     

Non-hydrostatic finite volume model for non-linear waves interacting with structures

An efficient non-hydrostatic finite volume model is developed and applied to simulate non-linear waves interacting with structures. The unsteady Navier–Stokes equations are solved in a 3D grid made of polyhedrons, which are built from a 2D horizontal unstructured grid by adding several horizontal layers. A new grid arrangement in the vertical direction is proposed, which renders the resulting model is relatively simple. Moreover, the discretized Poisson equation for pressure is symmetric and positive definite, and thus it can be solved effectively by the preconditioned conjugate gradient method. Several test cases including solitary wave interacting with a submerged structure, solitary wave scattering from a vertical circular cylinder and an array of four circular cylinders are used to demonstrate the capability of the model on simulating non-linear waves interacting with structures. In all cases, the model gives satisfactory results in comparison with analytical solutions, experimental data and other published numerical results.     

An it Architecture for Nimble Organizations: Managing Access from Cyberspace

In today's world of “co-opetition” among organizations, where one organization competes and cooperates simultaneously with business partners, all organizations must have IT architectures that are nimble and flexible. This article takes a look at one important aspect in achieving a flexible IT architecture: access management of information resources over the Web. It describes an access management architecture that can change as business does and recommends how best to implement this nimble architecture.     

Integrating manufacturing systems through knowledge exchange protocols within an agent-based Knowledge Network

Manufacturing enterprises need the ability to respond to rapid changes in the market more than ever before. Besides, they are forced to constantly modify their culture and internal organization structures because of change and intense competition in the market. This obviously requires industrial organizations to manage the different components of their organizations by integrating and coordinating them into a highly efficient, effective, and responsive system in order to maintain and improve their competitiveness. This paper presents a knowledge exchange procedure for creating an integrated intelligent manufacturing system. The basic features of the proposed scheme are introduced and the approach is supported through a case study.     

Agile Enterprise: A Human Factors Perspective

The results of the case study showed that the organizational identity includes the attributes that affect the organization's ability to be agile. Comparison of 2 companies, one of which has the characteristics of an agile organization and the other that operates in the traditional manner, showed that the evaluation of these attributes is some kind of a prerequisite for assessing the agility of the organization. This issue may become the next research problem. The article also presents the results of a study concerning the values important for Wielkopolska residents. Analysis of the results shows that Wielkopolska residents have the potential to take agile action and develop agile organizations. The role of managing staff in this organizations is to make the proper use of available social capital and to develop entrepreneurial and pro‐innovative attitudes among their subordinates.     

Connection law and networks

Cooperation is one of the most important factors in organizations. The mechanisms of cooperation remain an important area of research. Barnard analyzed the principle of cooperation but not the mechanism of cooperation, because he considered the abilities of each individual to be equal. However, not all individuals are equal, therefore we examine how connections work within a cooperative network organization when individuals are unequal in ability. We apply a percolation model of a network organization to examine the connection law under the condition of unequal abilities of individuals. The conditions of connection will take on more significance in the age of information technology than ever before.     

Tailoring IT support to communities of practice

Many organizations have benefited from recognizing communities of practice (COPs) operating in their midst. By identifying a group as a COP, an organization has made a critical skill area visible. Without this awareness it would be more likely, for example, that the corporate talent in auditing software processes could quietly disappear. With the importance of COPs established, organizations can now turn their attention to ensuring that their IT and knowledge management systems enable COPs to flourish. A simple folder on a corporate server to share documents is an example of such support. More comprehensive support to a COP may include virtual space on the corporate intranet for synchronous and asynchronous collaboration, expertise location, and content structuring (B. Lewis, "On-Demand KM: A Two-Tier Architecture", IT Professional, Jan.-Feb. 2002, pp. 27-33). As organizations decide how to support COPs, they should know that COPs are not in any way uniform entities. There is wide variation among COPs and understanding these differences can go a long way toward providing support that is truly well matched to the needs of each one. Two observations are keys to understanding the variety of COPs that are candidates for organizational support: The number of potential COPs is great, and, there are many kinds of groups and communities; not all of them are COPs.     

An analysis of a firm’s capacity in Mazda’s Keiretsu

Capacity is defined as the power resulting from the specific position of a company in a network organization. This article extends the theory of network organizations to examine Mazda’s Yokokai Keiretsu, and proposes a new approach to calculating a firm’s capacity in a network. Capacity is divided into two categories, take-in capacity and take-out capacity, and the gap between them is called the capacity difference. We analyze the impact of capacity difference as a determinant of corporate performance in network organizations, thus providing a new perspective for successful corporate management.     

CorpWiki: A self-regulating wiki to promote corporate collective intelligence through expert peer matching

One of the main challenges that organizations face nowadays, is the efficient use of individual employee intelligence, through machine-facilitated understanding of the collected corporate knowledge, to develop their collective intelligence. Web 2.0 technologies, like wikis, can be used to address the above issue. Nevertheless, their application in corporate environments is limited, mainly due to their inability to ensure knowledge creation and assessment in a timely and reliable manner. In this study we propose CorpWiki, a self-regulating wiki system for effective acquisition of high-quality knowledge content. Inserted articles undergo a quality assessment control by a large number of corporate peer employees. In case the quality is inadequate, CorpWiki uses a novel expert peer matching algorithm (EPM), based on feed-forward neural networks, that searches the human network of the organization to select the most appropriate peer employee who will improve the quality of the article. Performance evaluation results, obtained through simulation modeling, indicate that CorpWiki improves the final quality levels of the inserted articles as well as the time and effort required to reach them. The proposed system, combining machine-learning intelligence with the individual intelligence of peer employees, aims to create new inferences regarding corporate issues, thus promoting the collective organizational intelligence.     

Modified region decomposition method and optimal depth decision tree in the recognition of non-uniform sized characters – An experimentation with Kannada characters

In contrast to English alphabets, some characters in Indian languages such as Kannada, Hindi, Telugu may have either horizontal or vertical or both the extensions making it difficult to enclose every such character in a standard rectangular grid as done quite often in character recognition research. In this work, an improved method is proposed for the recognition of such characters (especially Kannada characters), which can have spread in vertical and horizontal directions. The method uses a standard sized rectangle which can circumscribe standard sized characters. This rectangle can be interpreted as a two-dimensional, 3×3 structure of nine parts which we define as bricks. This structure is also interpreted as consecutively placed three row structures of three bricks each or adjacently placed three column structures of three bricks each.

It is obvious that non-uniform sized characters cannot be contained within the standard rectangle of nine bricks. The work presented here proposes to take up such cases. If the character has horizontal extension, then the rectangle is extended horizontally by adding one column structure of three bricks at a time, until the character is encapsulated. Likewise, for vertically extended characters, one row structure is added at a time. For the characters which are smaller than the standard rectangle, one column structure is removed at a time till the character fits in the shrunk rectangle. Thus, the character is enclosed in a rectangular structure of m×n bricks where m3 and n1. The recognition is carried out intelligently by examining certain selected bricks only instead of all mn bricks. The recognition is done based on an optimal depth logical decision tree developed during the Learning phase and does not require any mathematical computation.     

Challenges of Enterprise Resource Planning implementation in Iran large organizations

An Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system is a fully integrated business management system covering functional areas of an enterprise like Logistics, Production, Finance, Accounting and Human Resources. The implementation of this system is a difficult and high cost proposition that places tremendous demands on corporate time and resources. Most of the ERP implementations have been classified as failures because they did not achieve predetermined corporate goals. The main goal of this research is determining the most important challenges of ERP implementation in Iran large organizations and our case study was the Isfahan Telecommunication. The population of this study consists of the 1500 employees of this organization from which 40 experts and employees were selected randomly and uniformly as a sample. We used questionnaire and interviews to collect data and analyzed them by SPSS using one sample t-test. The result of the study shows that the most important challenges of ERP implementation are organizational barriers, especially lack of human resources with the weighted average of 267.33. The next important issues of ERP implementation are technological factors such as unbalanced combination in team projects and then individual factors like lack of senior executives׳ involvement with the weighted average of 48.8 are the least important challenges in ERP implementation.     

An empirical investigation of information technology structure, control and corporate governance

In a study involving 72 large publicly-held organizations, the relationships between information technology (IT) structure, control, and corporate governance were examined. Despite the fact that some have called centralized systems electronic dinosaurs, many companies are turning to this traditional approach because it does offer one thing that decentralized systems generally lack, namely, control. The results indicate that information technology structure (centralized vs. decentralized) is strongly related to management equity ownership and to concentration of stock holding. For example, an organization where top executives and managers own a relatively high percentage of the company's stock possesses a more centralized information technology structure than an organization with a relatively lower percentage of management ownership. This means that user departments in the latter have more control over their IT functions than users in the former. Conversely, companies with a high level of stock concentration have a more decentralized IT structure. In addition, the research revealed a statistically significant relationship between a company's equity to debt ratio and the level of IT centralization.     

一种使用组织结构的访问控制方法

大型组织的信息资源往往根据组织结构维护,其中存在大量同构的、拥有同类信息资源的单元。传统RBAC模型在这种环境下进行访问控制时需要为每个同构部分定义权限和角色。其中存在大量冗余的工作,特别在同构单元数量很多时授权管理非常困难。该文提出了一个支持组织结构的RBAC模型,模型引入了组织结构,定义了抽象的角色,通过将抽象角色与组织结构单元关联解决上述问题。还给出了模型的扩展以支持角色的使用范围限制和细粒度访问控制。     

Electronic Markets, Hierarchies, Hubs, and Intermediaries

The impact of information technologies on organizations is difficult to predict, although critical for developing comprehensive organizational strategies. Much of the difficulty is traceable to the treatment of all information technologies as a single factor, when in fact different technologies may have drastically different impacts on the organization. Specifically, the distinction between two general classes of technologies, communication and information processing technologies, is studied. An analytical model is developed to show that these two classes of technologies have exactly the opposite impacts on the organization. Moreover, the impact also depends on the organization, and its existing structure. Communication intensive and processing intensive organizational structures are distinguished and they are shown to be impacted differently by information technologies. An analytical framework is developed to show a continuum of organizational structures, depending on their relative communication and processing intensity, and the effect of various technologies is shown to be to move the organization along that continuum. Communication and information processing technologies are shown to move the organization in opposing directions. Finally, the analytical framework is shown to be robust and valid under a wide variety of conditions, covering most real life organizations.     

Organizational Adaptation in Multi‐Stakeholder Crisis Response: An Experimental Study

Modern day crises demand organizations to collaborate and adapt to new roles, functions and structures. In such situations, lack of collaborative behaviour and openness between organizations can result in reduced adaptive ability. Therefore, it is important to facilitate collaboration between organizations. We have studied the extent to which crisis managers are prepared to work with personnel and resources from organizations other than their own when responding to crises. An experiment was designed with four different organizations in Sweden, which involved decision making concerning whether the participants systematically favoured their own organization over others. Findings indicate that increasing familiarity and expectation of future cooperation with other organizations increased the likelihood that decision makers would be prepared to work with other organizations in joint crisis management.