Engineering Commons^™

Strategic Approach To Operations Management, Senevi B. Kiridena, Prakash J. Singh

Faculty of Engineering - Papers (Archive)

Learning objectives After reading this chapter you should be able to:

• understand and interpret the concept of operations as part of organisational strategy and related analytical perspectives
• understand and interpret the notion of competitive advantage and the nature of generic competitive strategies pursued by organisations
• understand and appreciate the strategic role of the operations function and its contribution to the sustainable competitive advantage of the organisation
• understand and describe the role of competitive priorities in operationalising strategy
• discuss the concept of trade-offs as applied to key decisions and actions regarding the operations structure and infrastructure of an organisation
• demonstrate your …

A Novel Approach Of Web Search Based On Community Wisdom, Weiliang Zhao, Vijay Varadharajan

Faculty of Engineering - Papers (Archive)

In this paper, we propose a novel approach for Web search based on the statistical information of local setting data of web browsers in a community. The members of the community share their local setting data of browsers and this enables them to take advantage of the peer community members’s opinions in their Web search. Then we develop a new scheme that combines PageRank’s link-based ranking scores with our proposed community based popularity scores for web sites. This hybrid scheme provides a rankordering method for search query results that integrates the content consumers’ opinions with the content producers’ opinions in …

An Agent-Oriented Approach To Support Change Propagation In Software Evolution, Hoa K. Dam

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

Software maintenance and evolution is arguably a lengthy and expensive phase in the life cycle of a software system. A critical issue at this phase is change propagation: given a set of primary changes that have been made to software, what additional secondary changes are needed? Although many approaches have been proposed, automated change propagation is still a significant technical challenge in software maintenance and evolution. This paper presents a Ph.D. research in the final stages of developing and evaluating a novel, agent-based, framework to support semi-automated change propagation in evolving software systems.

Enhancing Information Flow In A Retail Supply Chain Using Rfid And The Epc Network: A Proof-Of-Concept Approach, Samuel Fosso Wamba, Harold Boeck

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

RFID technology and the Electronic Product Code (EPC) network have attracted considerable interest from businesses and academics in recent years. The interest is even stronger in the retail industry where firms such as Best Buy, Wal-Mart, Tesco, Target and Metro AG are capitalizing on the potential of these technologies. Based on a field study conducted in a three-layer retail supply chain, this paper tests several scenarios integrating Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology and the EPC network and evaluates, in a laboratory setting, their potential as enablers of information flow within a retail supply chain. Using an "open-loop" adoption strategy, our …