Driving a vehicle while it is within the warranty period provide customers with assurance that should a failure occur on the vehicle, there would be no financial obligation for the customer to repair the vehicle. For the manufacturer, it is a huge financial obligation to repair or replace components that fail on the vehicle. The research conducted in this study explores and identifies the main reasons for high warranty costs as well as the reasons that do not influence high warranty costs at VWSA. The purpose of this research is to provide VWSA with a potential starting point to reduce warranty costs and increase profits. The study revealed that the main cause of high warranty costs at VWSA was related to the quality of vehicles. By improving the quality of vehicles produced, VWSA could reduce a significant portion of the warranty costs it spends each year. With reduced warranty costs, VWSA could increase the warranty period and thereby attract more customers to purchase VW products. In a cutthroat automotive industry, this would ensure a competitive advantage over rivals; maintain longevity, increase profits and continued success.

Operating as a commercial company since October 1991, Telkom has grown into the largest communications services provider in Africa based on operating revenue and assets. The Group, consisting of the fixed-line company Telkom and a 50 per cent shareholding in mobile operator Vodacom. Telkom has changed its vision to the following: “To be a leading customer and employee centric ICT solutions service provider”. The company has been retrenching staff since 1999 and the staff numbers have reduced significantly from approximately 65 000 people to 25 575 people in 2006. The focus has been on increasing shareholder value and the staff feel that their value has not been recognised. The research paper focused on the extent that employees engaged to build a performance culture in Telkom’s NCC division. The following research methodology was followed: - A literature survey to determine factors or behaviours that will enhance employee engagement in building a performance culture and what Telkom NCC can do to build the workplace that will foster higher levels of employee engagement. - A survey was conducted to determine what the engagement levels of employees are at Telkom NCC, what stops the employees from doing their best and what Telkom NCC division can do to show they care and value their staff as according to their employees by means of a questionnaire. - The findings from the literature study and empirical study would be used to determine to what extent are employees engaged to build a performance culture in Telkom’s NCC division. A self administered questionnaire was used to collect the data required for this research. In conclusion it was said that employee engagement is a partnership between the company and the employees where everyone works together to achieve the business objectives of the company and the personal aspirations of employees. The organization has the responsibility to create the conditions for this to happen (Understanding Employee Engagement, 2004: 2). It was recommended that in order for NCC to enhance their employees attitudes toward the promoters’ team especially in terms of pride, strong attachment, feeling part of the family and motivating employees to do well promoters must concentrate on building relationships with their teams and individual members of the team. Employees must also be given decision making power for implementing the idea. NCC should educate their leaders on the value of recognition and the best way to go about it. In order for employees to grow and be promoted into higher positions, NCC must consider that if positions become available that they first be advertised in the NCC division before it be made available to the rest of the company.

The pharmaceutical industry is one of the fastest growing and developing industries in the world today. With the ever advancing technology and manufacturing techniques, quality assurance has become the focus of regulatory bodies all over the world. The implementation of quality management systems (QMS) that ensures that quality is built into every step of the design and manufacturing process has been the focus of many pharmaceutical companies. With the implementation of quality systems, employee’s perception of those systems and overall quality standards of the organisation is very important in establishing the quality culture of the organisation. To benefit from sustainable quality systems the organisations must ensure that employees understand the importance of the systems and that employee’s take personal responsibility for ensuring that their functions are performed correctly the first time. FKMSA has invested in a QMS that seeks to integrate all quality issues. The quality system includes documentation, deviations, corrective and preventative action (CAPA), change controls and quality risk management (QRM) in the entire facility. This system is administered by the quality control department, but each department takes ownership for their quality issues with support and guidance from the quality unit. FKMSA also firmly believes that quality cannot merely rely on the quality control test results; every step of the production process has a quality aspect built in to ensure that quality standards are adhered to. Every employee is trained, assessed and deemed competent before they can perform their duties; this is to ensure that human errors are kept to a minimum. Employee’s perception of quality is an integral part of quality assurance and it is important for the organisation to know what the employees believe to be the company’s standards of quality.

Data quality is an important aspect of an organisation’s strategies for supporting decision makers in reaching the best decisions possible and consequently attaining the organisation’s objectives. In the case of public organisations, decisions ultimately concern the public and hence further diligence is required to make sure that these decisions do, for instance, preserve economic resources, maintain public health, and provide national security. The decision making process requires a wealth of information in order to achieve efficient results. Public organisations typically acquire great amounts of data generated by public services. However, the vast amount of data stored in public organisations’ databases may be one of the main reasons for inefficient decisions made by public organisations. Processing vast amounts of data and extracting accurate information are not easy tasks. Although technology helps in this respect, for example, the use of decision support systems, it is not sufficient for improving decisions to a significant level of assurance. The research proposed using data mining to improve results obtained by decision support systems. However, more considerations are needed than the mere technological aspects. The research argues that a complete data quality framework is needed in order to improve data quality and consequently the decision making process in public organisations. A series of surveys conducted in seven public organisations in Abu Dhabi Emirate of the United Arab Emirates contributed to the design of a data quality framework. The framework comprises elements found necessary to attain the quality of data reaching decision makers. The framework comprises seven elements ranging from technical to human-based found important to attain data quality in public organisations taking Abu Dhabi public organisations as the case. The interaction and integration of these elements contributes to the quality of data reaching decision makers and hence to the efficiency of decisions made by public organisations. The framework suggests that public organisations may need to adopt a methodological basis to support the decision making process. This includes more training courses and supportive bodies of the organisational units, such as decision support centres, information security and strategic management. The framework also underscores the importance of acknowledging human and cultural factors involved in the decision making process. Such factors have implications for how training and raising awareness are implemented to lead to effective methods of system development.

In this dissertation we seek to identify ways in which the systems development life cycle (SDLC) can be augmented with improved software engineering practices to measurably address security concerns that have arisen relating to security vulnerability defects in software. By proposing a general model for identifying potential vulnerabilities (weaknesses) and using runtime monitoring for verifying their reachability and exploitability during development and testing reduces security risk in delivered products. We propose a form of contract for our monitoring framework that is used to specify the environmental and system security conditions necessary for the generation of probes that monitor security assertions during runtime to verify suspected vulnerabilities. Our assertion-based security monitoring framework, based on contracts and probes, known as the Contract-Based Security Assertion Monitoring Framework (CB_SAMF) can be employed for verifying and reacting to suspected vulnerabilities in the application and kernel layers of the Linux operating system. Our methodology for integrating CB_SAMF into SDLC during development and testing to verify suspected vulnerabilities reduces the human effort by allowing developers to focus on fixing verified vulnerabilities. Metrics intended for the weighting, prioritizing, establishing confidence, and detectability of potential vulnerability categories are also introduced. These metrics and weighting approaches identify deficiencies in security assurance programs/products and also help focus resources towards a class of suspected vulnerabilities, or a detection method, which may presently be outside of the requirements and priorities of the system. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of using contracts to verify exploitability of suspected vulnerabilities across five input validation related vulnerability types, combining our contracts with existing static analysis detection mechanisms, and measurably improving security assurance processes/products used in an enhanced SDLC. As a result of this evaluation we introduced two new security assurance test suites, through collaborations with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), replacing existing test suites. The new and revised test cases provide numerous improvements to consistency, accuracy, and preciseness along with enhanced test case metadata to aid researchers using the Software Assurance Reference Dataset (SARD). / Graduate

A business process is a defined collection of linked structured tasks, activities, and decisions performed together to produce a desired set of results in order to achieve business goals on behalf of the organization. Companies are increasingly moving their business processes online using Business Process Management (BPM) tools and technologies. With BPM, online business processes are defined by an explicit business process model that flexibly combines and orchestrates forms delivered through a web browser to integrate tasks performed by people, and web services accessible through Internet protocols to integrate tasks performed by software. Often the approach to quality assurance for online business processes is similar to what would be done with any other web application. This is insufficient since it only provides rudimentary verification of single user behavior whereas the orchestration of tasks across many users and software systems can be quite complex. As well, a simple web application testing approach does not leverage the defined model for a business process to ensure consistency, completeness and enable automation. Nor will such an approach validate that a business process is contributing towards the achievement of business goals. A more systematic approach is required. This thesis proposes a quality assurance framework to provide a repeatable, systematic, cost-efficient approach to quality assurance for BPM. A prototype framework was implemented and evaluated using two case studies, including one case study that was developed in collaboration with a local hospital to support a business process for cancer care assessment.

L'étude du coût des inondations passées est essentielle pour permettre aux parties prenantes, publiques et privées, d'améliorer la gestion et la prévention des risques. Les retours d'expérience sur les dommages économiques sont notamment utiles aux gestionnaires de bassin pour justifier leurs mesures de protection ou aux assureurs pour évaluer l'exposition réelle de leurs portefeuilles. Pourtant seuls les événements les plus meurtriers, coûteux ou médiatiques sont étudiés de manière approfondie. Même si elles sont rares, il existe des informations et des données sur des événements moins dommageables, plus locaux et fréquents ; mais elles sont difficiles à exploiter car produites par des acteurs très variés qui communiquent peu entre eux et agissent sur des périmètres différents.L'objectif de cette thèse est de favoriser le partage d'informations entre assureurs et acteurs locaux pour améliorer les connaissances sur les facteurs explicatifs de sinistralité et proposer des pistes d'amélioration dans la prévention des inondations, en exploitant les concepts de périmètres spatio-temporels des événements naturels, l'évaluation des dommages causés par les inondations et les notions d'observation territoriale. / Cost analysis of past flood events is essential for public and private stakeholders to improve the management and risk prevention. For instance, past events lessons learnt allow floodplain managers to justify their preventive measures or insurers to comfort by experience the assessments made on their portfolio's exposure. Yet only the most deadly, costly or dramatic (in the media at least) floods are being studied. Few in number, information and data are available on less damaging events which are more local and frequent, but they are difficult to use because they are produced by a variety of actors who do not communicate with each other and have different scopes of actions.The aim of this PhD work is to promote the sharing of knowledge between public and private stakeholders to better understand the origin of the claims and propose new ways to improve the flood prevention. The research is therefore based on the concept of natural event spatio-temporal scopes, the flood damage assessment and territorial observation.

The work is concerned with the comparison of the assurance instruments anchored in the law environment of the Czech Republic. The work is dealing with the importance of the assurance instruments and sets up its own criterions of efficiency used for the main comparison. The following chapters analyze individual reinsurance tools such as lien, right of retention, warranty, bank warranty, penal clause, conveyance of title and recognition of engagements. The most important aspects of the efficiency are the substance of reinsurance instruments, their law power, their area of application, their economic efficiency and some aspects regarding time delays. The last chapter compares all of these assurance tools according to the above mentioned criterions.

This thesis deals with the controlling environment in the Revenue Assurance team of the telecommunication company Vodafone Inc. Its main goals are the suggestion of realizing and implementation of a new controlling process in Revenue Assurance. The individual goals of the thesis are introducing the term Revenue Assurance, so that the reader would understand the basic connection, and explanation of understanding the Revenue Assurance concept in other companies. The term is further compared to other controlling concepts such as controlling, risk management and internal audit, and the main differences among them are stated. Additionally, it explains the connection between the Revenue Assurance concept and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. This thesis' part is then followed by an explanation of understanding the Revenue Assurance concept in the telecommunication company Vodafone CZ. The key part of the thesis is the description of the suggestion, realizing and implementation of the control into the company process. This part is preceded by a descriptive part dealing with description of the chosen method and the analysis of a telecommunication environment. The final part then deals with the question if the control has been implemented successfully and how it was working during its existence. Finally, I state the benefit for the company according to the number of the cases and the revealed amount of revenue leakage.

Correct and financially optimal covering of licensed software is one of the aims of all companies. Microsoft Corporation offers a wide range of software products and also various types of license financing that significantly affect their financing. License models stating the correct rules of using the licenses for software groups are also very specific and require a thorough understanding of its principles. These two areas include a range of partial aspects that are to be considered from the point of view of company benefit. However, a complex view combining license programs and license models is equally important. Hence the issue of license management is problematic not only for the management of the company, but also for the IT specialists. This thesis embeds the issue of licensing into the frame of strategic IT planning and by means of annotated principles, descriptions of everyday situations and accentuating details significantly affecting licensing provides a perspective of the issue that has not been dealt with in such an elaborate way so far. The aim of this thesis is to provide a complex analysis of license programs and models, their principles and possibilities. In many companies, a detailed knowledge and understanding of the issue of Microsoft licensing is very important. Therefore, this thesis provides some specific output instances in the form of both financial and functional comparison of individual licensing programs. The crucial services of license programs and characteristics of license models are investigated in detail and subject to critical evaluation for purposes of utilization in companies of various sizes and types.