Although business rules have been largely used in database modeling, very little can be found in requirements engineering literature. Many articles have been written about the use of business rules but only a few on how to elicit them. This article focuses on business rules as prescribed procedures that should be followed to achieve the business’s goals. Companies that are according to ISO 9000...

Garvin’s [Garvin, D.A. (1987) Competing on the eight dimensions of quality. Harvard Business Review 65(6), 101–109] eight dimensions of quality have become a widely accepted taxonomy for discussions of product quality. These dimensions were used as the basis for evaluating the impacts of ISO 9000 certification on companies’ product quality. Eleven ISO 9000 certified companies in Europe were stu...

[1] A comparative analysis of global river basins shows that some river discharges are more sensitive to future climate change for the coming century than to natural climate variability over the last 9000 years. In these basins (Ganges, Mekong, Volta, Congo, Amazon, Murray-Darling, Rhine, Oder, Yukon) future discharges increase by 6–61%. These changes are of similar magnitude to changes over th...

While ISO 9000 has been shown to improve internal metrics of firm performance, external measurements may be unaffected. This paper examines the economic value of successive generations of the ISO 9000 standard by assessing the equity returns of 204 firms certified between 1999 and 2002. This study also examines the economic effects of ISO 9001:2000 versus the superseded 1994 standards. The comp...

The ISO 9000 series of quality management systems standards is widely diffused, with over 560,000 sites certified in 159 countries (as of December 2002). Anecdotal evidence suggests that global supply chains contributed to this diffusion, in the following sense. Firms in Europe were the first to seek ISO 9000 certification. They then required their suppliers to do likewise, including those abro...