In a service environment a service provider needs to determine the amount and kinds of capacity to meet customers’ needs over many periods. To make good decisions, she needs to know the probability distribution of her customers’ demand in each period. We study a situation in which customers’ demand for a given service is random in each period, but inelastic, or modeled well by this assumption, ...

Increasingly organizations compete based on time. As a result, cycle-time reduction is a key agenda for organizations interested in achieving increased customer service and reduced cost. With improved cycle time, organizations can often eliminate or reduce inventory while expanding customer service offerings. The purpose of this tutorial is to present the fundamental concepts of cycle time redu...

Research shows that continuing competitive pressure applied during development and production leads to better industry performance, often at reduced cost. However, the entrenched practice of one-time competition for an entire program life-cycle often endows the winner with a very strong monopolistic power that lasts for decades. This paper describes continuous competition as leverage to acquire...

This paper discusses the application of plant-wide control philosophy to enhance the performance and capacity of the Produced Water Treatment (PWT) in offshore oil & gas production processes. Different from most existing facilityor material-based PWT innovation methods, the objective of this work is to propose a software-based breakthrough PWT innovation solution. This is achieved through integ...

This paper introduces how green marketing influences the sustainable development of garment industry. It analyses the cost and profit to implement green marketing, both in a short term and in the long run. In a short term the cost may increase. However, in the long run, the income will overweigh the cost. There’re five reasons: reduced cost, expanding export by broking down green barriers, esta...

We examine the introduction of the voluntary filing program (VFP) by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for the introduction of XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language), or Interactive Data as called in the US. XBRL is a machine-readable standardized format for financial reports. The VFP allowed firms to file annual and quarterly reports using XBRL. This program represents a quas...

This work focuses on cost reduction methods for forest species recognition systems. Current state-of-the-art shows that the accuracy of these systems have increased considerably in the past years, but the cost in time to perform the recognition of input samples has also increased proportionally. For this reason, in this work we focus on investigating methods for cost reduction locally (at eithe...

In an increasingly competitive business environment characterized by more globalization, deregulation and technological advances, companies have been looking for ways of differentiating their products and services and also rethinking their business model through leaner operations and reduced costs. In this context, a new practice that has recently gained a lot of attention is the offshore outso...

Rolling element bearing failure is one of the foremost causes of breakdown in rotating machinery. It is not uncommon to replace a defected/used bearing with a new one that has shorter remaining useful life than the defected one. Thus, prognostics of bearing plays critical role for increased availability and reduced cost. Effective prognostics highly depend on the quality of the extracted featur...

Through their communications mix, firms make decisions that have implications for the ease with which consumers can search for product information. A common intuition is that firms would like to make information easily available to consumers, but choose not to because facilitating consumer search is costly to them. The main result of this paper counters this intuition – firms may not want to ma...