It is noticeable that the evaluation of computer software is often dominated by the license cost and the number of functionality boxes that can be ticked. This tends to disadvantage more intelligent software, which whilst it may perform the same functions, does so in a smarter way that will tend to provide a greater capability, robustness, and speed of operation, together with a lower total cos...

Submodular optimization, particularly under cardinality or cost constraints, has received considerable attention, stemming from its breadth of application, ranging from sensor placement to targeted marketing. However, the constraints faced in many real domains are more complex. We investigate an important and very general class of problems of maximizing a submodular function subject to general ...

Agrifood firms in the modernizing/globalizing world, both in developing and developed countries, regularly need to undertake innovations. They develop supply chains to accommodate the nature of the innovations. In this paper we analyze an innovator’s supply chain design problem. The design of the supply chain may include allocating resources between production of feedstock (agricultural product...

The level of price volatility should theoretically be confined to export parity price levels at the lower end and import parity price levels at the upper end of the price band, reflecting supply and demand conditions during surplus and deficit marketing seasons respectively. A greater gap between these export and import parity prices will reflect high marketing costs, often representing high tr...

This paper argues that there are four key conceptual techniques used in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) which should be considered Imperatives for contemporary 21st century e-Business today. Customer Relationship Management itself may be defined as an attempt to find the most efficient way to focus the Marketing effort in order to generate revenue. The antecedents of successful Customer ...

Many companies that embark on business intelligence (BI) initiatives experience serious setbacks to project budgets and timelines. Recent research reveals that “efforts to eliminate time and cost overruns in business intelligence and data warehousing projects are mostly unsuccessful.” In fact, these issues are so common that 62 percent of those surveyed factor delays and cost overruns into the ...

When technological advances emerge in electronic commerce, travel agencies rapidly take account of their application in Internet marketing. Internet marketing presents many advantages to its users, such as the ability to break the barriers of time and space, convenience and speed of trade between travel agencies and consumers, ability to provide customers with sufficient information of travel s...

In the modern era, the program managers and public health professionals need to be well prepared to counter the spectrum of diseases associated with adoption of harmful practices (1). Among the multiple strategies tried with variable range of success, social marketing is a strategy to facilitate acceptance and willingness on the part of the concerned individuals to adopt a particular behavior (...