today’s b2b selling environment is characterized by much complexity. key drivers of this complexity include group sales efforts, multipart sales offerings and multibusiness unit participation on single deals (CFo research services 2010). Furthermore, the selling process is evolving from a transactional focus to consultative and enterpriselevel selling with a corresponding shift in competencies ...

Sales demand forecasting is an important issue for manufacturing companies. Indeed, such forecasting is decisive in the management of the production systems. This work compares the performance of an Artificial Neural Network to traditional methods in forecasting the sales demand in a textile factory over a reduced data set.

Twenty four broilers (Ross) and 24 ducklings (Cherry berry) aged 45days were stunned and killed by conventional neck cut to evaluate the meat characteristics and fatty acid composition of breast meat. Breast meats were removed from each carcass at different post-mortem times. After complete processing, the breast meats were then placed in a polythene bag and kept in a cold storage room at 4°C f...

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the efficiency indices for 60 Brazilian electricity distribution utilities. These scores are obtained by DEA Data Envelopment Analysis and Bayesian Stochastic Frontier Analysis models, two techniques that can reduce the information asymmetry and improve the regulator’s skill to compare the performance of the utilities, a fundamental aspect in incentive r...

The increase in healthcare costs is a source of concern in most health systems, and the adoption of measures to control costs is at the center of current health policies in most European countries. Efficiency has become a key concern for hospital managers, who are under pressure to provide more services at a lower cost. Associated with this concern, there is an increasing interest of hospital m...

In nuclear medicine, simultaneous dual-isotope imaging is used to determine the distribution of two radiotracers from a single acquisition and for emission/transmission (E/T) imaging in SPECT. However, no general solution to the cross–talk problem caused by scattered and unscattered photons has been found yet and accurate quantification cannot be performed. We describe a general method of spect...

Slow feature analysis (SFA) is a new technique for extracting slowly varying features from a quickly varying signal. It is shown here that SFA can be applied to nonstationary time series to estimate a single underlying driving force with high accuracy up to a constant offset and a factor. Examples with a tent map and a logistic map illustrate the performance.

This research study explores the Cost efficiency of Indian banking sector by employing Stochastic Frontier Approach (SFA). This paper empirically evaluated the impact of Information Technology (IT) on the Cost efficiency of the Indian banks .The present study is based on panel data over the period of 2009-2013. For this paper 77 banks of India are being considered. This paper identifies the ave...

We propose a set of consistency conditions that frontier efficiency measures should meet to be most useful for regulatory analysis or other purposes. The efficiency estimates should be consistent in their efficiency levels, rankings, and identification of best and worst firms, consistent over time and with competitive conditions in the market, and consistent with standard nonfrontier measures o...

The objective of this paper is to inform the debate on how efficiency targets for Network Rail (formerly Railtrack) should be set during the 2002/03 Interim Review and beyond. Given the problems experienced during the 2000 Periodic Review, which focused on external benchmarks, we propose an internal benchmarking approach, drawing on data for seven geographical Zones within Railtrack (over the p...