Friday, 8 February 2008

Issue 7, Volume 4, July 2007 for Comments, Questions, Discussion ...

Title of the Paper: Achieving Business Process Change with Improved Business Intelligence Systems: A Case of Slovenian Company

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Authors: Andreja Habjan, Ales Popovic

Abstract:
In today's competitive marketplace, companies must focus scarce resources on the strategies most likely to yield success. Business Intelligence Systems (BIS) help them achieve this focus giving the complete vision to learn from the past, monitor and communicate the present, and gain insight into the future. Depending upon the level of BIS maturity companies have different information quality they can base their decision upon. The better the quality of information, the more sound business decisions companies can take and also appropriately carry out business process change for improving their performance. For all these reasons, we try to show throughout a case study, how BIS enhancement contributed to business process improvement in a Slovenian transport company.


Keywords: Business Intelligence Systems, Information Quality, Business Process Change, Information Technology


Title of the Paper: Optimizing Containership Size and Speed: Model Formulation and Implementation

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Authors: Hsien-Lun Wong, Shang-Hsing Hsieh, Chi-Chen Wang

Abstract: One of the most important decisions for shipowners is to determine how big a containership to order. The optimal containership problem represents a trade-off between the cost and revenue resulting from size and speed. In reality, there is a tendency toward increasing containership size and speed, which is resulted from some factors related to profit. However, most of the past studies devoted their attention to the problem from the cost perspective. These models omitted the effect of ship speed on profit, and might result in inadequate solutions to the problem. Based on the cost-volume-profit analysis, a nonlinear programming model is formulated to approach the problem. The objective function is a strictly concave function with a globally unique optimal. An example of the Trans-Pacific Route is employed to test the model�s formulation. The results provide shipowners with a beneficial reference for planning deployment and routing of big containerships.

Keywords: Optimal containership; nonlinear programming; ship speed; concave function

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