The success of business process re‐engineering (BPR) is dependent on the use of data‐driven methods that provide cost‐effective and optimal solutions. Today's business managers are inundated with methodologies and tools that claim to provide sustaining process improvement results....

In the existing BPR methodologies there exists a big division in business analysis techniques due to the black and white approach used in most cases. In some of them, cost is the central issue, in others generic management or the successful use of IT. As a result business analysis techniques are...

E‐service operations that attract and influence customers to buy products and/or services from specific sites is a complex process involving service design, marketing, and delivery, and encompass a number of essential determinants. Determinants that integrate all the three service processes...

An energetic model for walking robots based on both dynamic and actuator models is proposed in this paper. While applied to walking machines, this method allows the evaluation of the influence of leg configuration, body weight, and gait parameters on power consumption. The model is validated by...

A new e‐business model for implementing complex business transactions via the Internet has been created. The model involves search, negotiation, and legal closing, and its implementation, as described here, is able to: quantitatively evaluate preferences of potential customers (tenants and...

A generic foresight process framework is outlined, based on prior independent work by Mintzberg, Horton and Slaughter. The framework was developed as part of work carried out by the author during the introduction of foresight into the formal strategic planning of a public‐sector university in...

Total quality management (TQM) was deemed by many, a decade or so ago, to be a management movement so significant that it was a paradigm change capable of completely reorienting corporate management responsibilities. It was the answer to the product quality challenge from Japan. It made quality...

Enterprise input-output modeling (EIOM) can be used in a process of decision making for many purposes. In this paper the cost price models are developed to perform cost-volume-profit (CVP) analysis in a mass-production with the complex structure of a production process. An illustrative example...

We believe that any adjustment and updating process (AUP) should try to minimize the relative deviation of the new coefficients from the initial ones in a homogeneous way. This homogeneity would mean that the magnitude of this relative deviation is similar among the elements of each row or...

This paper presents an availability optimization problem of an engineering system assembled in a series configuration which has the redundancy of units and teams of maintenance as optimization parameters. The objective is to reach the maximum value of availability, considering installation and...