Digital Commons Network^™

Accelerated Sap: 4 Case Studies, Ralph Dolmetsch, Thomas Huber, Elgar Fleisch, Hubert Oesterle

Hubert Oesterle

No abstract provided.

Technology On The Factory Floor Iii: Technology Use And Training In Us Manufacturing Firms, Paul Swamidass

Paul Swamidass

This is the third issue of the Technology on the Factory Floor series. The study was sponsored by the Manufacturing Institute and the National Science Foundation. Data for this study of manufacturing technology use was collected from 1,025 manufacturing plant managers during 1997 using a modified survey questionnaire originally used in the 1993 study.

The findings were: Since the 1993 study, inventory turnover increased, rejection and rework reduced, and cycle time and manufacturing costs decreased; overall, there was measurable improvement in manufacturing since 1993. Other findings were: larger plants use technologies more extensively than smaller plants; exporters use more manufacturing …

A Bird's Eye View Of Authority Control In Cataloging, Karen S. Calhoun

Karen S Calhoun

In this invited paper for an NSF-funded workshop for the systematics and library communities, Calhoun relates the story of cooperative authority control in libraries, drawing parallels to the problem domain of the systematics community and biological information managers. She describes what made community-wide authority control possible in libraries; offers a high-level view of how it works from systems and practitioner perspectives; and assesses the limitations, prospects and challenges for the current authority control framework in libraries.

Old And New Theories Of Industry Clusters, Edward J. Feser

Edward J Feser

The paper reviews the broad range of theories and ideas that constitute, often implicitly, the logic behind strategic cluster policies. The title of the paper notwithstanding, there is no theory of industry clusters, per se. Even Porter’s (1990) seminal contribution is more a theory of firm competitiveness than clusters. There is, instead, a variety of older and newer theories of 1) the interrelationships between economic actors that clusters describe, and 2) the implications of such interrelationships for economic growth and development. Industry clusters have proven a useful way of characterizing webs of relationships between and among firms and other institutions. …