In this paper we estimate a stochastic production frontier in a panel of manufacturing firms in Côte d’Ivoire. Our main interest is on the impact of the business environment on technical efficiency levels. Moreover the chosen modeling allows us to derive managerial efficiencies, and then define most efficient firms independently of business environment influences. A non-neutral modeling of the ...

The decision to outsource business processes by outsourcing the supporting applications requires the consideration of critical factors within the areas of Delivery and Enablement; Integration; Management and Operations; Business Transformation and the customer/vendor relationship. This paper focuses on the ability of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) to evaluate whether their needs are ...

Grids reliability remains an order of magnitude below clusters on production infrastructures. This work is aimsed at improving grid application performances by improving the job submission system. A stochastic model, capturing the behavior of a complex grid workload management system is proposed. To instantiate the model, detailed statistics are extracted from dense grid activity traces. The mo...

The concern in this study is the approach to evaluating the performance of the open-set speaker identification process. In essence, such a process involves first identifying the speaker model in the database that best matches the given test utterance, and then determining if the test utterance has actually been produced by the speaker associated with the best-matched model. Whilst, conventional...

For better business performance or continuous process improvement of an enterprise, real-time measurement and analysis of the performance of managerial activities is essential. Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) which provides real-time access to key performance indicators or business processes is one of core elements for successful BPM system. Since performance measurement cannot be managed in...

The after-sales activities are nowadays acknowledged as a relevant source of revenue, profit and competitive advantage in most manufacturing industries. Top and middle management, therefore, should focus on the definition of a structured business performance measurement system for the after-sales business. In addition, since many actors are involved along the after-sale service supply chain, an...

The current methods of estimating costs frequently only indirectly take performance engineering (PE) tasks into account. Moreover, there are major differences in the propositions put forward by such methods. To create transparency and acceptance of these tasks, which are of great importance as part of the life cycles of IT systems, an approach is pursued which derives the costs from an appropri...

The creation and execution of sound business strategy is essential to today’s enterprise. Business Performance Management (BPM) offers organizations an IT-enabled approach to formulate, modify, and execute strategy effectively. This article describes Business Performance Management, presents a framework for BPM, and discusses the potential drivers, barriers, and critical success factors for a B...

Today, BI systems and applications, which generate information and knowledge from the data in information systems, are a priority for companies called upon to invest in ICT technologies that can contribute to the implementation of an effective competitive strategy determine a change in the processes and culture of a business. After defining the concept of Business Intelligence, this work attemp...