In a dynamically changing world, business must transform to survive. Although the necessity for change may be apparent, how to change is not. A useful approach can be to learn how successful pioneers transform a core business function such as procurement: how organisations acquire assets and inputs including facilities, materials and people. Traditionally, the business objective for procurement...

The healthcare industry has experienced a proliferation of innovations aimed at enhancing life expectancy, quality of life, diagnostic and treatment options, as well as the efficiency and cost effectiveness of the healthcare system. Information technology has played a vital role in the innovation of healthcare systems. Despite the surge in innovation, theoretical research on the art and science...

In an experiment using two-bidder first-price sealed bid auctions with symmetric independent private values, we collected information on the female participants’ menstrual cycles. We find that women bid significantly higher than men in their menstrual and premenstrual phase but do not bid significantly different in other phases of the menstrual cycle. We suggest an evolutionary hypothesis accor...

With the advancement of technology the banking sector has been dramatically changed from conventional way of banking to the internet banking i.e. web based banking. This advancement of technology has been totally changed the whole scenario of banking. Method. Research has been done to find out the influence of facilitation, low transaction cost ad convenience on customer‟s turnover intention fr...

This paper proposes a method that is based on enterprise core competitiveness to reengineer a procurement and supplier management system. Competition of the notebook industry is becoming more and more intense, with the uncertainty of demand, the vast number of different components and their rapid change in design result in a very complicated supply chain. From the viewpoint of cost, the cost of...

In 2009 the International Stem Cell Banking Initiative (ISCBI) contributors and the Ethics Working Party of the International Stem Cell Forum published a consensus on principles of best practice for the procurement, cell banking, testing and distribution of human embryonic stem cell (hESC) lines for research purposes [1], which was broadly also applicable to human induced pluripotent stem cell ...

This paper explores the business issues affecting the level of implementation of e-procurement in small and medium size enterprises (SME’s). It uses empirical research from 750 organisations to suggest that issues of leadership and waste management are of greater importance to SME’s than development of e-procurement capability to secure competitive advantage. A major barrier is that of people. ...

To receive a project contract through competitive bidding, contractors submit a bid price determined by putting a markup on the estimated project cost. Since a bid is inevitably affected by an inaccurate cost estimate, sufficient resources should be allocated to cost estimation. This paper develops a novel optimization model for determining the bid markup and the resource allocation for cost es...

extensive research has been devoted to resource constrained project scheduling problem. however, little attention has been paid to problems where a certain time penalty must be incurred if activity preemption is allowed. in this paper, we consider the project scheduling problem of minimizing the total cost subject to resource constraints, earliness-tardiness penalties and preemption penalties, ...

The accelerated development in Peer-to-Peer (P2P) and Grid computing has positioned them as promising next generation computing platforms. They enable the creation of Virtual Enterprises (VE) for sharing resources distributed across the world. However, resource management, application development and usage models in these environments is a complex undertaking. This is due to the geographic dist...