Critical success factors for ERP implementation in SMEs

ERP implementation is regarded as complex, cumbersome and costly, and, very often, it exceeds the initial estimated resources. The process involves a thorough examination of the business processes in the organisation; selection of the best available software solution that matches the requirements of the enterprise; configuration of the selected systems;, training of staff; and customisation of the selected software solutions including development of required interfaces. Finally, the existing MIS of the organisation is replaced totally or partially by the new system. All the implementation processes should be carried out without affecting the daily operations across the whole enterprise. This can only be achieved by having an understanding of the key elements forming the infrastructure of the organisation, an effective plan for the implementation and an effective procedure to measure and evaluate the project throughout the implementation process. This paper presents the results of a study to identify and analyse the interrelationships of the critical issues involved in the implementation of ERP in small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). Three basic research questions were addressed. First, what are the main critical success factors? Second, how do these factors interact throughout the implementation process? Third, which factors have their highest impact and in what stages? In order to answer these questions, over 50 relevant papers were critically reviewed to identify the main critical success factors (CSFs) for ERP implementation in large organisations. Then, the applicability of the identified CSFs to SMEs was investigated. Next, an industrial survey was also undertaken to identify which CSF has highest impact in what stages. The findings on relationships of the critical success factors have been utilised to develop a tool to monitor, and eventually improve, ERP implementations for SMEs. In the development of the tool, eight people from industry and academia with experience of ERP implementations were interviewed with the aim of validating the model being developed. The overall results provide useful pointers to the interplay of organisational and operational factors for the successful implementation of ERP.     

Low-complexity heterogeneous architecture for H.264/HEVC video transcoding

High efficiency video coding (HEVC) was developed by the Joint Collaborative Team on video coding to replace the current H.264/AVC standard, which has been widely adopted over the last few years. Therefore, there is a lot of legacy content encoded with H.264/AVC, and an efficient conversion to HEVC is needed. This paper presents a hybrid transcoding algorithm which makes use of soft computing techniques as well as parallel processing. On the one hand, a fast quadtree level decision algorithm tries to exploit the information gathered at the H.264/AVC decoder to make faster decisions on coding unit splitting in HEVC using a Naïve–Bayes probabilistic classifier that is determined by a supervised data mining process. On the other hand, a parallel HEVC-encoding algorithm makes use of a heterogeneous platform composed of a multi-core central processing unit plus a graphics processing unit (GPU). In this way, from a coarse point of view, groups of frames or rows of a frame (both options are possible) are divided into threads to be executed on each core (each of which executes one of the aforementioned classifiers) and, from a finer point of view, all these threads work in a collaborative way on a single GPU to perform the motion estimation process on the co-processor. Experimental results show that the proposed transcoder can achieve a good tradeoff between coding efficiency and complexity compared with the anchor transcoder.     

Iron metabolism: current concepts of an essential micronutrient

Iron is an essential micronutrient involved in multiple biochemical and physiological process. In this review we discuss the most relevant aspect of its metabolism in order to reach a better comprehension of the relevant roll that this micronutrient plays in human health.     

D-SAP: a new, noncytotoxic, and fully protease resistant cell-penetrating peptide

Protease resistant cell-penetrating peptides (CPPs) are promising carriers for drugs unable to cross the cell membrane. As these CPPs are stable in vivo for much longer periods of time compared to other classes of therapeutic peptides, noncytotoxicity is a property sine qua non for their pharmacological development. Described herein is a fully protease resistant CPP that is noncytotoxic at concentrations up to 1 mM. Proteolytic stability was obtained by chiral inversion of the residues of a known self-assembling CPP-from all L-amino acids to all D-amino acids-and then assessed against trypsin and human serum. Circular dichroism studies confirmed the enantiomeric structure of the analogue, and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) studies indicated that the new inverso analogue retains the ability of the original peptide to self-assemble. The results of uptake experiments indicate that the protease-stable (that is, D-amino acid) analogue of the peptide is internalised by cells to the same extent as the protease-susceptible (that is, L-amino acid) parent peptide. Also reported herein are the results of studies on the cellular internalisation mechanism of the all-D analogue, which reveal the steps followed by the peptide upon its entry into the cell.     

Heterogeneous CPU plus GPU approaches for HEVC

The Journal of Supercomputing - The high efficiency video coding (HEVC) standard has opened the door to high-quality multimedia contents and new formats such as ultra-high definition as a result of...     

Tolerance to noise in 91 bird species from 27 urban gardens of Iberian Peninsula

Urban noise is one of the most important factors explaining the abundance of birds in urban areas. If urban planners have information on the effects of noise on diverse avian species, they can design better gardens that can be useful for the conservation of endangered species. In this sense, many studies have been realized in diverse urban areas across the world. However, information on the exact effects of noise on urban birds in SW Iberian Peninsula does not exist. In this paper, we show the first study on the effects of urban noise on 91 bird species in 27 parks in diverse cities and villages of Spain and Portugal. Our study includes from rural areas with noise levels below 40 dB, to parks inside big cities such as Madrid and Sevilla that surpass 70 dB. The range of noise conditions, studied parks and the seasonal and annual replication of this study permits extraction clears conclusions. In this sense, the ten species most affected by noise, in terms of percentage of explained variance, are: Regulus regulus with 34.62% variability associated with noise, Streptopelia turtur (24.24%), Dendrocopos minor (20.39%), Buteo buteo (15.15%), Hirundo daurica (13.15), Corvus corax (11.09%), Oriolus oriolus (10.23%), Cettia cetti (6.47%), Passer hispanoliensis (6.33%) and Sylvia melanocephala (5.82%). Our data demonstrates that many of these protected species could be attract to urban gardens if noise levels were reduced below 50 dB by using, for example, acoustic barriers.     

Biodegradation of diesel fuel-contaminated wastewater using a three-phase fluidized bed reactor

Aerobic biodegradation of diesel fuel (DF)-contaminated wastewater is carried out in a three-phase fluidized bed reactor under unsteady and steady state conditions. The solid phase lava rock particles, which act as the support for the biomass, are fluidized by the upward flows of influent wastewater, and air. The results show that the reactor under unsteady state operation achieved 100% DF removal from synthetic wastewater loaded with 0.43-1.03 kg/m3 day of DF. An average of over 97% of the influent chemical oxygen demand (COD) was also removed from the wastewater with COD concentrations in the range, 547-4025 mg/L. For influent COD concentrations up to 1345 mg/L, the removal is greater than 90%. Under steady state operation, the reactor was able to remove 100% of the DF, and an average of 96% of the COD from the wastewater. It had approximately 200 mg/L of DF, and 1237 mg/L of COD at a low hydraulic residence time of 4 h. In general, the results demonstrate that the reactor is very efficient, and requires short residence times to remove both DF and COD from heavily contaminated wastewater.     

Impact of moisture and grinding on yield,physical, chemical and thermal properties of wholegrain flour obtained from hydrothermally treated sorghum grains

The present work evaluates the potential of sorghum with high content of tannins for wholegrain flour production. Two types of mills were used: a roller mill (RM) and a blade (BM) mill. The impact of moisture and grinding on yield, physical, chemical and thermal properties were evaluated. Maximum yield was obtained using a BM with 25% moisture in the grain, resulting in 60.9% versus 28% (g flour g⁻¹ of wholegrain sorghum) for the RM. Grain moisture and milling type affected flour colour and ashes. For both mills, the pasting and thermal properties of flour with grain moisture variation were significantly different from the untreated control sample. By studying the procedures for flour production and quality characteristics, it is possible to produce flour with good physical attributes, which can contribute to the development of gluten-free foods based on sorghum for the coeliac population.     

Effects of cyclic parenteral nutrition on parenteral-associated liver dysfunction parameters

Introduction

One of the most common complications of parenteral nutrition (PN) is liver dysfunction (LD). Therapeutic approaches for LD include, among others, administering cyclic parenteral nutrition (cPN), allowing some hours for metabolic rest. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of cPN in treating PN-associated LD.

Materials and methods

A retrospective observational study was carried out at the Costa del Sol Hospital in Spain between 2013 and 2014. The study involved inpatients ≥18 years old prescribed with cPN due to the development of PN-associated LD. The hepatic biochemical parameters measured at baseline and after completion of cPN included aspartate aminotransferase (AST), alanine aminotransferase (ALT), gamma-glutamyltransferase (GGT), alkaline phosphatase (ALP) and total bilirubin (TB). Quantitative values (age, biochemical parameters) were compared using matched Student’s t-test; the mean change in qualitative variables (sex, indication of PN, hepatic comorbidities, presence of insulin in cPN, infection during cPN, management of LD prior to cPN administrarion) was estimated using Mann-Whitney U test, and bivariate correlation between quantitative variables was determined by Spearman’s coefficient of correlation.

Results

Thirty-seven patients met inclusion criteria. All hepatic function parameters except ALP improved after the administration of cPN, with statistically significant differences (p < 0.05) in AST GGT and TB.

Conclusion

cPN improves PN-associated LD by restoring abnormal AST, GGT, and BT levels to normal, and reducing ALT levels close to normal. The results obtained suggest that the administration of cPN is effective in reverting PN-associated LD.

     

Auto-tuned nested parallelism: A way to reduce the execution time of scientific software in NUMA systems

The most computationally demanding scientific problems are solved with large parallel systems. In some cases these systems are Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) multiprocessors made up of a large number of cores which share a hierarchically organized memory. The main basic component of these scientific codes is often matrix multiplication, and the efficient development of other linear algebra packages is directly based on the matrix multiplication routine implemented in the BLAS library. BLAS library is used in the form of packages implemented by the vendors or free implementations. The latest versions of this library are multithreaded and can be used efficiently in multicore systems, but when they are used inside parallel codes, the two parallelism levels can interfere and produce a degradation of the performance. In this work, an auto-tuning method is proposed to select automatically the optimum number of threads to use at each parallel level when multithreaded linear algebra routines are called from OpenMP parallel codes. The method is based on a simple but effective theoretical model of the execution time of the two-level routines. The methodology is applied to a two-level matrix–matrix multiplication and to different matrix factorizations (LU, QR and Cholesky) by blocks. Traditional schemes which directly use the multithreaded routine of BLAS, dgemm, are compared with schemes combining the multithreaded dgemm with OpenMP.