Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited. / MBA Professional Report / The purpose of this MBA project is to determine how best to collect empirical data regarding the current state of services acquisition management of the installation level within the Department of Defense and conduct an initial analysis of collected data. The project designed a web-based, self-administered, cross-sectional survey using SurveyMonkey, a web-based survey engine. The survey's pilot test was conducted between mid-October and early November 2007 and obtained a 50 percent response rate. Of the respondents, 60 percent was Army, 20 percent was Marine Corps, and 20 percent Air Force. The pilot test captured valuable data which was analyzed; however improvements to the core survey maay generate a higher response rate and provide a clearer picture of the current state of services acquisition management at the installation level within the Department of Defense. The results of this project will support on-going research in the area of services acquisition management.

This dissertation addresses gaps in the interaction between End-of-Life (EoL) product acquisition systems and disassembly sequencing. The research focuses on two remanufacturing research problems; 1) modeling uncertain EoL product quality, quantity, and timing in regards to EoL product acquisition and disassembly sequencing and 2) designing EoL product acquisition schemes considering EoL product uncertainty. The main research objectives within these areas are; analyzing, predicting, and controlling EoL product uncertainty, and incorporating EoL product uncertainty into operational and strategic level decisions. This research addresses these objectives by researching a methodology to determine optimal or near-optimal partial disassembly sequences using infeasible sequences while considering EoL product quality uncertainty. Consumer incentives are integrated into the methodology to study the effect of EoL product take-back incentives, but it also allows for the study of EoL product quantity uncertainty. EoL product age distributions are key to integrating the disassembly sequence method with EoL product acquisition management, acting both as an indicator of quality and as a basis for determining return quantity when considering incentives. At a broader level, this research makes it possible to study the impact of EoL product quality, and to an extent quantity, uncertainty resulting from strategic level (acquisition scheme) decisions, on operational (disassembly sequencing) decisions. This research is motivated by the rising importance of value recovery and sustainability to manufacturers. Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) and Product Stewardship (PS) policies are, globally, changing the way products are treated during their use-life and EoL. Each new policy places a greater responsibility on consumers and manufacturers to address the EoL of a product. Manufacturers, in particular, may have to fulfill these obligations by such means as contracting 3rd parties for EoL recovery or performing recovery in-house. The significance of this research is linked to the growing presence of remanufacturing and recovery in the US and global economy, either via profitable ventures or environmental regulations. Remanufacturing, in particular, was surveyed by the US International Trade Commission in 2011-2012, where it was determined that remanufacturing grew by 15% to $43 billion, supported 180,000 full-time jobs from 2009-2011, and is continuing to grow. A partial disassembly sequence, multi-objective genetic algorithm (GA) is used a solution procedure to address the problem of determining the optimal or near-optimal partial disassembly sequence considering a continuous age distribution of EoL or available consumer products, with and without a consumer take-back incentive. The multi-objective GA, novel to the presented approach, relies on infeasible sequences to converge to optimal or near-optimal disassembly sequences. It is verified with a discrete economic and environmental impact case prior to incorporating EoL product age distributions. Considering the age distribution of acquired EoL products allows for decisions to be made based not only on expected profit, but also on profit variance and profit probability per EoL product, which was not observed in previous literature. As such, the research presented here within provides three contributions to disassembly and EoL product acquisition research: 1) integrating EoL product age distributions into partial disassembly sequencing objective functions, 2) accounting for partial disassembly sequence expected profit, profit variation, and profit probability as compared to disassembly sequencing methods that have, historically, only considered expected profit, and 3) studying the impact of EoL product age distributions and consumer take-back incentives on optimal or near-optimal partial disassembly sequences. Overall, this doctoral research contributes to the body of knowledge in value recovery, reverse logistics, and disassembly research fields, and is intended to be used, in the future, to develop and design efficient EoL product acquisition systems and disassembly operations. / Ph. D.

「流程改善」是任何組織追求卓越、提升競爭力的根本方法，美國卡內基美隆大學軟體工程學院(CMU-SEI)集結經實作證明，可有效提升軟體品質的最佳實作方法成為CMMI，提供開發型組織流程改善的依循準則。繼開發方CMMI (CMMI for Development) 的成功推廣與有效運用，籌獲方的CMMI-ACQ(CMMI for Acquisition)因應而生。 CMMI-ACQ乃針對籌獲方採購流程改善之CMMI模式。在委外環境下，籌獲方與開發方應共同築成CMMI-ACQ與CMMI-DEV互動的協同合作關係，使雙方擁有對等、公平、專業的流程溝通基礎，以更有效的方式完成委外專案協同工作。最終目標，就是使整體專案能如期、如質、如預算的完成，提升資訊服務品質。 本論文以CMMI-ACQ的籌獲需求發展、籌獲確認及籌獲驗證流程領域為參考，規劃資訊科技籌獲管理，以UML活動圖表達其互動關係，並以Zachman 5W1H方法研析籌獲管理必要的作業程序，進一步分析、說明其使用案例，以發掘籌獲管理資訊需求，最後以CMMI評鑑檢視表，回顧本論文所提CMMI-ACQ資訊需求架構所提供之直接證據。透過本文研究的過程，期盼提供籌獲組織一個簡單的導入參考。 / Process improvement is the fundamental way to pursue excellence and promote competitive advantages for any organizations. CMU-SEI has gathered the so-called best practices that has been experienced and proven to be effective to establish the CMMI to provide reference guidelines for process improvement in the software development organizations. Following the pervasive adoption of CMMI-DEV (CMMI for Development) for the developers, CMMI-ACQ (CMMI for Acquisition) was developed for the acquirers. CMMI-ACQ focuses on acquisition processes in order to constitute an equal, fair, and professional common platform for effective collaboration in an outsourcing environment. The goal is to achieve the project completion on time with expected quality and budget. This research proposes an information requirement planning approach for IT acquisition management based on CMMI-ACQ, using ARD, AVER and AVAL process areas as examples. Using the UML activity diagram and Zachman 5W1H, this research analyzes the operation procedures and elaborates the information requirements in the use case diagrams and the associated descriptions. Finally, a set of CMMI self appraisal tables are used to review the support evidences provided by the proposed information requirements architecture. This research provides a reference for any acquisition organization to elicit the information requirements for CMMI-ACQ adoption and its supporting system construction.

The amount of acquisitions has been increasing over the last decades and has been used as a growth strategy by firms all over the world. However, more than fifty percent of all acquisitions never deliver the initially expected value, which in many cases is due to poor integration management of the organizational culture in the post-acquisition phase. Where, in contrast, acquisitions which are integrated into the organizational culture of the acquirer, can see a decrease in social conflicts and receive a higher employee commitment. Which in turn can help the acquisition to provide and remain its human capital and value.  With the support of a Swedish business consulting firm, this study hopes to shed light upon how firms integrate organizational culture in the post-acquisition phase, and which integration management tools are used in the process. This study uses a single opportunistic case study combined with a qualitative and an inductive approach, to gather and handle the data. Where the empirical data was mainly collected through interviews. The results of this thesis show that integration of organizational culture in the post-acquisition phase, is mainly managed through supportive leadership and training, in the business consulting firm. Where those main management activities consist of several different integration management tools.

In this study, we focus on pricing and production decisions in reusable container systems with stochastic demand. We consider a producer that sells a single product to the customers in reusable containers with two supply options: (i) brand-new containers, (ii) returned containers from customers. Customers purchasing the products may return the containers to the producer to receive a deposit price. The return quantity depends on both customer demand and the deposit price determined by the producer. Hence, the producer has the opportunity to manipulate the return quantity via the deposit price. The unit cost of filling brand-new containers is different than the unit cost of refilling returned containers. We also consider resource restrictions on the production operations. Our setting represents certain hybrid manufacturing / remanufacturing systems where (i) the producer collects and recovers his own products, (ii) the producer supplies both brand-new and recovered products to his customers, and (iii) the customers are indierent between brand-new and recovered products. In this setting, we investigate the optimal pricing and production decisions in order to maximize the producer`s profit. Our approach utilizes non-linear optimization techniques. We characterize the optimal acquisition fee and the optimal order quantity of brand-new containers analytically and investigate the effect of parameters with an extensive computational study.

Magistro tezių tikslas yra sukurti skirtingų programinės įrangos tipų (gatavos arba reikalingos sukurti) įsigijimo valdymo gaires. Tokioms gairėms sukurti pirmiausia reikia apibrėžti programinės įrangos tipus. Kiekvienam apibrėžtam programinės įrangos tipui nustatyti jų įsigijimo keliai ir sudaryti kriterijai, kurie padėtų parinkti tinkamą įsigijimo kelią. Literatūros šaltinių apžvalgoje išanalizavus programinės įrangos įsigijimo modelius bei standartus nustatyti šie programinės įrangos tipai: COTS, MOTS ir naujai kuriama programinė įranga (NKPĮ). Remiantis įsigijamos programinės įrangos tipais ir projekto charakteristikomis nustatyti įsigijimo keliai. Programinės įrangos įsigijimo keliui parinkti sudaryti kriterijai, kurie apibūdina įsigyjamą programinę įrangą, įsigijimo projekto resursus ir aplinkos faktorius. Veiklos, kurios turi būti vykdomos kiekviename programinės įrangos įsigijimo kelyje, nustatytos panaudojant CMMI-ACQ procesų modelį. Procesų veiklos vykdytinos kiekviename programinės įrangos įsigijimo kelyje: nurodoma, kokiu keliu turi būti įsigyjama programinė įranga, kokias veiklas reikia vykdyti, pateikiamos rekomenduojamos pastangos, reikalingos kiekvienam PĮ įsigijimo keliui. / The primary objective of master thesis is to provide guidelines for managing a different types of software acquisition projects. Firstly, to provide guidelines is necessary to define types of software. Secondly, to create the ways of acquisition for each defined type of software and to create criteria that allows to select the right way of acquisition. During the analysis of existing software acquisition process models software types was defined: COTS (Commercial-off-the-shelf software), MOTS (Modified-off-the-shelf software), fully developed software. To have an effective acquisition processes, it is useful to employ an adequate level of formality for those processes according to the characteristics of the acquisition project. The ways of software acquisition was defined in accordance with defined software types and characteristics of acquisition projects. That can be used as a guideline on what level of formality is appropriate for the actual software acquisition project. To select the way to acquire software, there were created criteria that describes the characteristics of acquiring software, acquisition project resources and environment factors. CMMI-ACQ process model was used to define activities of each software acquisition way. Each acquisition way contains suggestions on what activities to perform for the different acquisition project customization.

This dissertation has shown that public procurement regulation takes place through regulatory documents that mainly underwent a name change and that the only changes are found in the reporting framework. The South African government identified public procurement as an active instrument to achieve social and economic goals. To provide substance to this realisation, public procurement was taken up in the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa 1996. The constitution prescribes a procurement system that is fair, equitable, transparent, competitive and cost-effective. / Public Administration & Management / M. Admin. (Public Administration)

This dissertation has shown that public procurement regulation takes place through regulatory documents that mainly underwent a name change and that the only changes are found in the reporting framework. The South African government identified public procurement as an active instrument to achieve social and economic goals. To provide substance to this realisation, public procurement was taken up in the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa 1996. The constitution prescribes a procurement system that is fair, equitable, transparent, competitive and cost-effective. / Public Administration and Management / M. Admin. (Public Administration)