A common issue for small to medium business (SMB) manufacturers is how to increase revenue and grow their businesses without significantly adding staff. Unfortunately, these companies often emerge from the startup phase saddled with inefficient, manual processes that require extra people to maintain them. Learn how to position your company for more predictable business growth, without a reliance on adding more people. Read more…
Category Archives: White Papers
Do More with Less: The Five Strategies Used by Successful SMB Manufacturers
Filed under Free Cases, LEAN Manufacturing, Operations, White Papers
A Case Study on the Effectiveness of Online Learning
A Study about the Effectiveness of Online Learning
Comparative research on learning outcomes in distance education versus face-to-face instructional settings has a long history, reaching back to the 1920s. The findings of hundreds, perhaps thousands of studies, over the decades and through the 1990s have been consistent -there are no significant differences in learning outcomes achieved by students engaged in faceto-face instruction compared to those participating in distance education. This holds true regardless of the technology medium used, the discipline, or the type of student. Beginning around 2000, several studies, including meta-studies.
A large k-125 of experimental and quasi-experimental studies met the established inclusion criteria for the meta-analysis (including data from over 20,000 participating students), and provided effect sizes, clearly demonstrating that in 70 percent of the cases, students taking courses by distance education outperformed their student counterparts in the traditionally instructed courses. By dividing the two-decade time span into four sub-studies, it was determined that the probability of DE [Distance Education] outperforming F2F [Face-to-Face] increased from 1991–2009 and authors predict that it will continue to increase in strength. Keep reading….
Filed under Computers and IT, E-Learning, Technology, White Papers
A Study on Hypothesis Testing and Statistical Power of a Test
A Study about Hypothesis Testing and Statistical Power of a Test
A hypothesis is a specific conjecture (statement) about a property of a population of interest. A hypothesis should be interesting to audience and deserve testing. A frivolous or dull example is “the water I purchased at Kroger is made up of hydrogen and oxygen.” A null hypothesis is a specific baseline statement to be tested and it usually takes such forms as “no effect” or “no difference.”
An alternative (research) hypothesis is denial of the null hypothesis. Researchers often, but not always, expect that evidence supports the alternative hypothesis. A hypothesis is either two-tailed 2 A twotailed test considers both extremes (left and right) of a probability distribution. Keep reading..
Filed under Study Reports, White Papers
A Study on Social Influence Analysis in Large-scale Networks
A Study about Social Influence Analysis in Large-scale Networks
Abstract:~ In large social networks, nodes (users, entities) are influenced by others for various reasons. For example, the colleagues have strong influence on one’s work, while the friends have strong influence on one’s daily life. How to differentiate the social influences from different angles(topics)? How to quantify the strength of those social influences? How to estimate the model on real large networks? To address these fundamental questions, we propose Topical Affinity Propagation (TAP) to model the topic-level social influence on large networks. In particular, TAP can take results of any topic modeling and the existing network structure to perform topic-level influence propagation. With the help of the influence analysis, we present several important applications on real data sets such as 1) what are the representative nodes on a given topic? 2) how to identify the social influences of neighboring nodes on a particular node?
Introduction:~ Social network analysis often focus on macro-level models such as degree distributions, diameter, clustering coefficient, communities, small world effect, preferential attachment, etc; work in this area includes. Recently, social influence study has started to attract more attention due to many important applications. However, most of the works on this area present qualitative findings about social influences[14, 16]. In this paper, we focus on measuring the strength of topic-level social influence quantitatively. With the proposed social influence analysis, many important questions can be answered such as 1) what are the representative nodes on a given topic? 2) how to identify topic-level experts and their social influence to a particular node? 3) how to quickly connect to a particular node through strong social ties?. Keep reading on Social Influence Analysis
Filed under Study Reports, White Papers
A Case Study of Social Influence: Individual
A Case Study about Social Influence: Individual
Introduction:~ The situation or problem on which you will focus: What is going on, who is involved, what is bothering you about the situation, and what do you wish was different and better? Describe the situation in a concrete but concise manner. Note that you do NOT have to figure out WHY this is happening.
The Exercise:~ Try it out in real life, i.e., try to exercise influence. Do this in an ethical way. If you cannot try it out in reality (or ethically), get a friend (preferably someone not in 15.301) to help you role-play the situation. Write out for your friend a brief description of their role, and then act out what you plan to do one step at a time and have them react as if they are in their role. A role-play is not imaginary; it is a planned and possibly somewhat scripted dialogue. Keep reading…
Filed under Study Reports, White Papers
Case Study in Knowledge Management
Knowledge Management (KM) has been growing in importance and popularity as a research topic since the mid 1990s. This is sufficient time for many organizations to implement KM initiatives and KM systems (KMS). This book presents twenty cases investigating the implementation of KM in a number of business and industry settings and a variety of global settings. The purpose of this book is to fill a deficiency that I’ve observed while teaching KM. KM is being taught in specialized courses and as a topic included in Decision Support Systems (DSS), Enterprise Information Systems (EIS), and Management Information Systems (MIS) issues courses.
The deficiency I’ve observed is in moving discussions of KM from a focus on theory to the more practical focus of how to implement KM to help organizations improve their performance. Existing course materials do include some short cases and/or vignettes discussing KM in business settings, but I haven’t found any source that has multiple, detailed teaching cases. Click here to read more…
Filed under White Papers
A Case Study on Nature and Dynamics of Institutions Supporting Exchange
White Paper about Nature and Dynamics of Institutions Supporting Exchange
Markets rest upon institutions. The development of market-based exchange relies on the support of two institutional pillars that are, in turn, shaped by the development of markets. Research in the field of new institutional economics has largely focused upon one such institutional pillar ‘contract-enforcement institutions’ that determine the range of transactions in which individuals can commit to keep their contractual obligations. Yet, markets also require institutions that constrain those with coercive power from abusing others’ property rights. These ‘coercion-constraining’ institutions influence whether individuals will bring their goods to the market in the first place.
Many successful market economies have prevailed in the past; there were adequate market-supporting institutions. Early successes, such as those in the Islamic world or China, were not indicators of later development. It was the commercial expansion that began in Europe during the late medieval period that led to the development of markets that support the complex, dynamic modern economy with its wide-scale reliance on impersonal exchange. Why didn’t early success lead to subsequent market expansion? More generally, what does determine the dynamics of market expansion? Addressing these questions is a key to understanding the ‘Rise of the West,’ the operation of market economies, and the factors that still hinder market development. Keep reading on Institutions Supporting Exchange
Filed under White Papers
Top Floor to Shop Floor: Business Insight for the Discrete Manufacturing Industry
To stay competitive, organizations are looking for ways to facilitate a smoother and more optimized global supply chain. But while companies are turning to business intelligence (BI) tools, many lack the ability to escape the gravity well of becoming data-rich while remaining information-poor. Learn how leading companies have eliminated the obstacles that hinder their ability to make better business decisions. Read More….
Filed under Articles, Free Cases, White Papers
Ten Keys for Project Success
Any project represents significant effort in terms of justifying resource allocation and expense. Project failure may not only diminish or eliminate expected benefits, but also damage existing tools and processes. There are ten key steps for project success; many of these steps occur concurrently, and are important focal points for teams and executives contemplating initiating projects. However there is no single formula to the success but the basics remain the same. Read more..
Filed under White Papers
How Civil Society Helped the Poor?
A Study about How Civil Society Helped the Poor?
Abstract: This paper sets out to explore the achievements of civil society in the area of poverty reduction. The focus is mainly on three domains (1) Advocacy; (2) Policy Change and (3) Service Delivery. Three case studies illustrate how poverty can be addressed at various levels and through different approaches:
(1) Shack Dwellers International (SDI) operating internationally to advocate for the urban poor’s rights;
(2) Civil society organizations participating in the formulation of PRSPs to call for pro-poor policy reforms at the national level; and finally
(3) The example of BRAC (formerly the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee) providing services to the poorest at the grassroots level.
Drawing on these case studies, the paper explains the keys to success and reasons for failure of civil society organizations in tackling poverty reduction effectively.
Introduction: The 1990s saw many changes as the Cold War ended and globalization began to drive social and economic change. Two of these have particular significance for the subject of this paper. First, the evolution of a global consensus that extreme poverty had to be tackled, culminating in the MDGs. Secondly, the belief that civil society should be a major player in this task – mobilizing communities, delivering services and shaping policies. The question is then: can civil society play a major role in delivering the world’s biggest promise, i.e. poverty reduction? Despite the importance of global poverty reduction, no movement has ever been developed around this issue. Why are there environmentalists and feminists but not ‘poverty-reductionists’? The growing international interest in poverty reduction results mainly from the efforts of aid and donor agencies and the energies of thousands of civil society organizations – rather than a selfsustaining social movement on poverty. Keep reading…
Filed under Assorted, Concepts, How To, White Papers