A group of 22 independent southeastern U.S. logging contractors provided 44 contractor-years of detailed cost and production information. Information was collected on demographics, operational characteristics, and business strategies for the participants. Precipitation was statistically proven to not be a good predictor of production, accounting for 2% of the weekly variation. High production through periods of favorable harvesting did not occur. Loggers contracting for the same mill in the same general area had higher than average production in the winter months and lower than average production in the summer months. Summary analyses for the entire population found that the cost of producing an additional ton dropped in 1997 by $0.90, but fixed annual costs rose. Predicting costs on the basis of production for the population was misleading. A comparison of total costs for individual firms with the population average (regression equation) found that the equation underestimated costs by as much as $408,000 and overestimated costs by as much as $528,000. Contracted services expenditures increased in 1997, as expenditures for equipment, consumables, and labor decreased. Over the study period, total costs per ton increased by 3.7%, but total production increased by 3.9%. The relationship between key cost components revealed strong evidence to disprove previously held theories. A major portion of the population increased production but experienced increased costs per ton. Replacement purchases of equipment tended to be of similar capabilities and technology and did not reduce labor costs. Trends in supply and equipment costs per-unit were not found in the expected fashion. / Master of Science

Since the enactment in 1975 of the Education of All Handicapped Children Act (P.L. 94-142), now renamed the Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA), the cost of special education services has grown substantially in both absolute and relative terms (Duenas 1993). As a result, the issues such as the actual cost of special education services and the relationship of special education financing to regular education funding have become increasingly important to local, state and federal policymakers. The need for cost analysis in special education has become more important as the competition with other governmental agencies for available funds becomes more acute. As a social service, education in general and special education in particular must compete for dollars with highways, sanitation, and other services (Ysseldyke 1992). This study contributes to the need for in depth analysis of special education costs. The cost analysis method replicated in this study, called the Moche Cost Analysis of Public Education or CAPE Model, provided greater accuracy and flexibility than prior methods. The CAPE Model was used to examine and compare costs of regular elementary education, regular secondary education, elementary special education, and secondary special education. Special education costs also were compared across disability categories and service delivery environments. CAPE can be adapted easily to identify expenditures by building level and programs other than special education. CAPE calculations were completed using the LOTUS spreadsheet program. / Ed. D.

Excessive use of fossil fuels to meet everyday energy demands has led to adverse environmental impacts like global warming and high dependence on foreign oil. Development of cellulosic feedstocks provides energy security and also reduces the burden on food crops like corn and sugarcane used for ethanol production. This thesis uses cost-benefit analysis to ascertain the profitability of producing cellulosic ethanol from Switchgrass and Sweet Sorghum Bagasse. First, breakeven price of producing Switchgrass and Sweet Sorghum is calculated to obtain a raw material (feedstock) cost for ethanol production. Next, net present value (NPV) and minimum ethanol selling price (MESP) for Switchgrass and Sweet sorghum are calculated. Lastly, risk analysis is performed and its impacts on NPV are calculated for two farmer categories. The results show that ethanol production from Switchgrass and Sweet Sorghum is commercially feasible and generates a Net Present Value (NPV) of $39.54 million for Switchgrass and $96.76 million for Sweet Sorghum at an ethanol selling price of $2.17 per gallon. At NPV zero the MESP for Switchgrass and Sweet Sorghum is estimated to be $2.10 and $1.96 per gallon respectively. The risk analysis results revealed that there is a 9.5 percent probability that the NPV for a risk-averse Switchgrass farmer will be less than zero. On the other hand, the probability of the NPV being less than zero is 67.4 percent. The overall analysis indicates that ethanol production from Switchgrass and Sweet Sorghum is a promising option. Reduction in feedstock prices, optimization of the conversion process and additional revenues from by-products can make cellulosic ethanol more competitive with current gasoline prices. / Master of Science

No / The marginal cost approach for the analysis of repair/replacement models was introduced by Berg in 1980 and has since been applied to many maintenance policies of various complexity. All models hitherto analysed in the literature by the marginal cost approach have one single decision variable only, this being, typically, the age of the current item at the time of ordering or replacement. This paper is concerned with the extension of the marginal cost technique to maintenance policies with several decision variables. After addressing the general framework appropriate for the multi-parameter case, we exemplify the workings of the technique by analysing a two-variable maintenance model involving replacement and minimal repair. We demonstrate that the marginal cost approach is an attractive and intuitively appealing technique also for models with several decision variables. Just as in the single-parameter situation, the approach is amenable to economic interpretation, a welcome feature for users of maintenance models with a prime interest in its economic (rather than its mathematical) aspects. As an added bonus of the marginal cost approach, in our example, some otherwise necessary tools from the theory of stochastic processes are dispensable.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is a federal agency with a mission to develop water resource projects to benefit the nation. Some of its large scale projects have been built to benefit cities, but through unintended consequences have caused economic and environmental damages. For example, its control of Mississippi River flooding has protected the City of New Orleans, but contributed to land loss in coastal Louisiana, and by some accounts, made the population more susceptible to hurricane damage. The agency has now embarked on a mission to restore some of the damaged environmental areas. This dissertation evaluates whether policies and practices used by the agency to evaluate and select plans to implement is logically flawed and could produce suboptimal project selection. The primary issue is the practice of including only implementation costs in the analysis while excluding other positive and negative economic impacts. A case study is performed using the method to evaluate a traditional economic development project for which optimal project selection has already been determined using widely accepted benefit-cost practices. The results show that the Corps' environmental project evaluation method would cause rejection of the most efficient plan. The loss of welfare that would result from using this technique is measured by comparing the welfare gain of the optimal project to the welfare gain of the suboptimal projects which could be selected using the flawed methodology. In addition, the dissertation evaluates whether suboptimal results could be produced using two other current Corps policies: selecting projects based on production efficiency, and the exclusion of environmental benefits from the discounting process. For the first policy, a simple counter example shows how clearly inferior choices may come from including only supply considerations in investment choices. For the second policy, it is demonstrated mathematically that refraining from discounting benefits while discounting costs causes a bias towards selection of plans that take longer to build, are delayed in their implantation, or a combination of the two.

A well-maintained bridge infrastructure is a fundamental necessity for a modern society that provides great value, but ensuring that it meets all the requirements sustainably and cost-effectively is challenging. Bridge investment and management decisions generally involve selection from multiple alternatives. All of the options may meet the functional demands, but their life-cycle cost (LCC), service life-span, user-cost, aesthetic merit and environmental impact may differ substantially. Thus, life-cycle analysis (LCCA, a widely used decision-support technique that enables comparison of the LCC of possible options), is essential. However, although LCCA has recognized potential for rationalizing bridge procurement and management decisions its use in this context is far from systematic and the integration of LCCA findings in decisions is often far from robust. Thus, the overall objective of the work underlying this thesis has been to contribute to the development of sustainable bridge infrastructures while optimizing use of taxpayers’ money, by robustly incorporating life-cycle considerations into bridge investment and management decision-making processes. The work has introduced a full scheme for applying LCCA throughout bridges’ entire life-cycle. Several practical case studies have been presented to illustrate how an agency could benefit from use of a bridge management system (BMS) to support decisions related to the management of existing bridges and procure new bridges. Further developments include a comprehensive approach incorporating a novel LCCA technique, “LCC Added-Value Analysis”, which enables procurement of the most cost-efficient bridge design through a fair design-build (D-B) tendering process. A further contribution is a novel, holistic approach designed to enable procurement of bridges with the maximal possible sustainability (life-cycle advantages) under D-B contracts. The approach combines LCC Added-Value analysis with other techniques that make bridges’ aesthetic merit and environmental impact commensurable using an adapted concept named the willingness-to-pay-extra (WTPE). The systematic analytical procedures and potential of LCCA to deliver major savings highlighted in this thesis clearly demonstrate both the feasibility and need to integrate LCCA into bridge procurement and management decisions. This need has been recognized by Trafikverket (the Swedish Transport Administration), which has implemented a software tool developed in the research (BaTMan-LCC) in its bridge and tunnel management system (BaTMan). This thesis introduces readers to the field, considers BaTMan and the bridge stock in Sweden, discusses the developments outlined above and obstacles hindering further implementation of LCCA, then presents proposals for further advances. / <p>QC 20131029</p>

Omega Pharma is a distributer of over the counter products, selling thousands of products produced at more than 200 manufacturers and sold in most European countries. The company was founded in Belgium in 1987 and has since then had a high market focus and expanded through acquisitions of brands and products. The company has in recent years started working towards centralization and supplier base management. A project team has been set up to work strategically by choosing key manufacturers and by reducing the supplier base. A first step in this is to look more closely at products with a low turnover and that are not strategically important in order to evaluate if the product is profitable and which products that could be moved to other manufacturers or cancelled from the portfolio. Therefore the purpose of the study is to: Create an evaluation model based on revenue, total cost and manufacturer performance to evaluate a product and if cost reductions can be achieved by ending the production of the product or moving the product to a different manufacturer. A four step approach for analyzing total cost was followed in order to, in a structured way, create the model and identify the relevant elements related to revenue, total cost and manufacturer performance that were to be present in the model. The four steps were: In a first step elements and costs were identified that might be relevant for the model. This was done based on previous research, holding interviews at the company and reviewing documents. The second step was to adapt the elements to the model. In the third step, it was decided how the elements and costs that were to be in the model would be calculated and presented as well as looking into how the model would be built. The fourth step consisted of doing test runs and a sensitivity analysis to test the robustness of the model. The result handed over to the company is in the form of the evaluation model created based on the above stated purpose. Within the model, there are 4 manufacturer performance parameters and 1 for revenue. When it comes to costs, the amount varies depending on the case analyzed. To evaluate product profitability there are 7 cost elements containing 20 identified costs. When evaluating moving a product to another manufacturer there are the same costs, however an additional element for transfer is added containing 5 costs. For the situation ending a production, there are 2 costs. In order to facilitate the use of the model, estimations were done to the costs to the extent possible. From test runs the model was further adapted to the company as it was identified what values connected to a product where possible for the user to find in the system and in what units of measure. The sensitivity analyses showed that none of the estimated values would, if the estimation was not accurate, affect the evaluation of the product. They could however affect the cost element of that cost.

This thesis is a comparative efficiency study of financial transactions executed through the electronic banking system and through the bank branch system. It is based on bank model with a defined market share in the Czech Republic. The thesis is divided excepting formal parts into two main chapters. The first chapter attends purely to electronic banking theory, its distribution channels and continues legislative and normative rules that are associated with this issue. The practical part consists of transaction cost analyses of these banking systems. Based on designed initial system architectures and study presumptions are through analyses of all related costs calculated the total transaction costs of these mentioned systems. Knowing the amount of fixed and variable costs are determined the limiting points of these strategies, where the transaction costs are equal. At theoretical level, this determines the profitability of the strategy. The conclusion compares the analysis results, market research and current trends in banking.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of stochastic dust accumulations and rain events on the cleaning schedule of the parabolic trough collectors that are used to generate power at concentrated solar power (CSP) plants. The level of cleanliness is proportional to the power produced, and thus it affects the economic pay off at CSP plants. Current practice to address this dust problem, termed as conventional cleaning, is to follow a periodic cleaning schedule that entails a fixed setup cost for each cleaning event. The frequency of cleaning under such conventional (periodic schedule) policy is selected based upon a tradeoff between the set up cost and the payoff from improving the cleanliness factor. The conventional practice is to have a constant and periodic cleaning schedule over an entire season (e.g. either severe or mild combination of the dust and rain over a 180-day cleaning season, with either 8 or 4 cycles scheduled for the severe and mild seasons respectively). This thesis draws upon evidence from recent literature to show that presence of random rain events improves the cleanliness of parabolic troughs in CSP plants. Upon analyzing such evidence, this study models rain event as a compound Poisson process that replenishes the level of cleanliness. In this scenario, it is possible to establish an adaptive threshold policy for scheduling plant cleaning that analogous to the formulation of a (s,S) inventory management policy, subject to random replenishment of inventory. The study offers a review of related literature to establish that such formulations are not amenable to a close form solution. The second half of the thesis describes a numerical study that has been conducted using Arena Simulation package for characterizing the adaptive cleaning policy. The parameter of interest for assessing system performance is the average payoff over the average cost of cleaning for a 180-day cleaning season. Numerical study shows that adaptive cleaning policy outperforms the conventional (periodic) cleaning policy under reasonable assumptions for dust and rain event distributions. As an extension, the simulation study also examines the use of alternative cleaning system, known as electrodynamic screening (EDS), for different rain scenarios that may be used in conjunction with either conventional or adaptive cleaning policies to improve the overall system performance. / 2019-07-09T00:00:00Z

Masters of Public Health - see Magister Public Health / Overreliance on donor supported health programs has crippled many African countries and there is inadequate long-term planning on the future sustainability of health systems. In the age of uncertainty in global politics and global economy, the future of these donor funded programs is also uncertain. It is imperative for African nations to begin to take responsibility for their health programs. In as much as the name “donation” suggests that something is given free of charge, in actual sense this may not be the case due to hidden costs attached. In medicine access, the hidden costs are the supply chain costs including cost for clearance, storage and distribution of such medicines which are charged as a percentage of claimed commodity costs on donors’ or suppliers’ invoices. Since the medicines donated are in originators’ brands, the invoiced prices are high thus supply chain costs are high as well. In some cases, it is thought that the hidden costs are higher than the cost of medicines had they been sourced locally as generics. The aim of this research was to assess and determine the hidden supply chain costs associated with the four medicine donation programs supporting the Tanzania Neglected Tropical Diseases Program and inform policy decision on optimal financing options for the program Methodology The cost analysis of the two options was undertaken from a payers’ perspective which in this case is the Government of Tanzania (Ministry of Health). Data was collected on both product and supply chain cost drivers incurred in the medicine donation programs from July 2014 to June 2017. Costs of the current mechanism were obtained from the program’s quantification reports and transaction data for the study period. Transactional data was obtained from shipment documents including sales invoices, parking list, proof of delivery and goods receiving notes were evaluated for actual quantities shipped, commodity prices and other supply chain cost. To verify the actual supply chain cost charged by the program, both the official bills from Medical Stores Department (MSD) to the program and the electronic bills available at MSD electronic database covering the study period were studied.