Dealing with electronic waste: modeling the costs and environmental benefits of computer monitor disposal

The importance of information technology to the world economy has brought about a surge in demand for electronic equipment. With rapid technological change, a growing fraction of the increasing stock of many types of electronics becomes obsolete each year. We model the costs and benefits of policies to manage 'e-waste' by focusing on a large component of the electronic waste stream--computer monitors--and the environmental concerns associated with disposal of the lead embodied in cathode ray tubes (CRTs) used in most monitors. We find that the benefits of avoiding health effects associated with CRT disposal appear far outweighed by the costs for a wide range of policies. For the stock of monitors disposed of in the United States in 1998, we find that policies restricting or banning some popular disposal options would increase disposal costs from about $1 per monitor to between $3 and $20 per monitor. Policies to promote a modest amount of recycling of monitor parts, including lead, can be less expensive. In all cases, however, the costs of the policies exceed the value of the avoided health effects of CRT disposal

The impact of supplychain management practices on competitive advantage and organizational performance

Effective supplychain management (SCM) has become a potentiallyv aluable wayof securing competitive advantage and improving organizational performance since competition is no longer between organizations, but among supplychains. This research conceptualizes and develops five dimensions of SCM practice (strategic supplier partnership, customer relationship, level of information sharing, qualityof information sharing, and postponement) and tests the relationships between SCM practices, competitive advantage, and organizational performance. Data for the studywere collected from 196 organizations and the relationships proposed in the framework were tested using structural equation modeling. The results indicate that higher levels of SCM practice can lead to enhanced competitive advantage and improved organizational performance. Also, competitive advantage can have a direct, positive impact on organizational performance.

Hierarchical production planning with demand constraints

This paper explores the hierarchical production planning (HPP) problem of flexible automated workshops (FAWs), each of which has a number offlexible manufacturing systems (FMSs). The objective is to decompose medium-term production plans (assigned to an FAW by ERP/MRP II) into short-term production plans (to be executed by FMSs inthe FAW)so as to minimize cost on the condition that demands have just been met. Herein, the HPP problem is formulated by a linear programming model with the overload penalty different from the underload penalty and with demand constraints.Sincethescaleofthemodelforageneralworkshopistoolargeto be solved in the simplex method on a personal computer within acceptable time, Karmarkar's algorithm and an interaction/prediction algorithm, respectively, are used to solve the model,the former for the largescale problems and the latter for the very large scale. With the help of the above-mentioned algorithms and HPP examples, Karmarkar's algorithm and the interaction/prediction algorithm are compared and analyzed, the results of which show that the proposed approaches are quite effective and suitable for both 'push' and 'pull' production.

Assessing users' product-specific knowledge for personalization in electronic commerce

While many electronic commerce (EC) companies are adopting one-to-one marketing approaches using various personalization technologies to make their products and services unique for the purpose of attracting and retaining customers and improving their completion edges in the EC ecosystem, which, nevertheless, has low entrance barriers for new players to join and further intensify the competition, none or few of them consider a fundamental issue--the user's product-specific knowledge. Our research proposed to add this new domain of the customer's knowledge on appropriate target products into the personalization process as a part of the overall EC strategy for businesses. In this paper, we present our initial design for assessing the user's product-specific knowledge using the proposed innovative method for detecting it directly in a non-intrusive way without asking users to answer or fill out any types of questionnaires. Our method is based on customer's on-line navigation behaviors by analyzing their navigation patterns through pre-trained artificial neural networks. An empirical study designed for a case of EC store selling digital cameras was conducted in our research to prove the concept, and a good preliminary result was derived from the study. For the purpose of comparing the performances between the conventional approach of using questionnaire and the proposed innovative approach of navigation pattern mining, a questionnaire based approach for evaluating the user's product-specific knowledge was designed and incorporated into our knowledge level assessment system (KLAS). Our study result shows that although the pure questionnaire-based KLAS is intrusive and may not be accepted by some users, for those users willing to complete the questionnaire, the proposed navigation pattern approach can be combined with the questionnaire-based approach to create a hybrid KLAS which has a significantly improved accuracy rate in detecting the customer's product knowledge level.

An investigation of factors that infuence the management of knowledge in organizations

Modern organizations are increasingly seen as knowledge-based enterprises in which proactive knowledge management is important for competitiveness. This paper introduces a descriptive framework for understanding factors that in¯uence the success of knowledge management (KM) initiatives in an organization. It identi®es three main classes of in¯uencing factors (managerial, resource, and environmental) and characterizes the individual factors in each class. A Delphi process was used to develop and assess the framework. The Delphi panel was comprised of 31 recognized researchers and practitioners in the KM ®eld. The resultant framework can be used by researchers for KM issue and hypothesis generation, by practitioners for benchmarking KM practices, and by educators for helping organize the study of KM.

Quantifying the value of IT-investments

We described a method to quantify the value of investments in software systems. For that, we adopted the classical risk-adjusted discounted cash flow model and geared it towards the field of information technology. This resulted in a scenario-based approach incorporating two ITspecific risks that can substantially influence IT-appraisals. They are requirements creep and time compression. To account for the risk of failed IT-projects and overrun risks we proposed theWeighted Average Cost of Information Technology (WACIT). WACIT adjusts the well-known Weighted Average Cost of Capital, commonly used in discounted cash flow models. We proposed several methods to approximate WACIT ranging from an investment-specific rate to a (company-wide) one inferred from a quantitative IT-portfolio analysis. We illustrated our quantitative IT-investment management approach by way of a published example. For various risk-scenarios, we calculated using this example the impact on the firm's share price, standard economic indicators like NPV, IRR, PBP, ROI, RAROC, and more, in order to come to grips with the appraisal of information technology--the largest production factor of today.