This study examines staff perceptions of the implementation of an Enterprise Resource Planning system (ERPs) in three Australian universities. It considers the growing body of literature on the issues impacting on effective and efficacious Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementations in organisations including the most recent literature on ERPs in the higher education sector. This literature identifies a number of issues that it is argued, translates from the corporate sector to the higher education sector including a number that require additional focus in this sector. It is proposed in this dissertation that effective and efficacious implementations in Australian universities require particular consideration of organisational influences related to their context and the perceptions of the users of the systems. Case study methodology was used to examine the staff perceptions of the management of ERP implementations in universities. This involved undertaking case studies in three Australian universities in the process of implementing ERP systems. The first phase of the study obtained data through a series of focus groups at one university to explore staff perceptions of the efficacy of the ERP implementation at their university. This data and the relevant literature served as a framework for the development of the research process in the second phase of the study. This phase involved conducting a series of interviews with staff that enabled the researcher to undertake a more detailed exploration of the staff perceptions of influences affecting ERP system implementations at three Australian universities. The research study identifies the influences impacting on the outcomes of these implementations of ERPs in the three Australian universities and forms the basis for the development of guidelines for the effective and efficacious management of ERP implementations in Australian universities. This set of guidelines for the management of implementations of ERPs in Australian universities is an outcome that can have applicability for the higher education sector generally.

Drawing insights from strategic management and international business literature, the present study develops an integrated model to explain the competitive actions between multinational firms in a global context. Accordingly, two research questions are addressed: What key factors explain the competitive actions of multinational firms? What key factors moderate the competitive tensions experienced by different pairs of multinational firms? Using structured content analysis to identify competitive actions, the empirical findings of the present study suggest that subsidiary control, MNE size, national culture, government regulations and multimarket contact are all likely to exert important impact on a multinational firm's motivation and capability to compete and therefore influence its competitive aggressiveness in foreign markets.

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Every enterprise faces various situations in different environments, which influences how they explain the environment and the strategies that they take. This research focuses on exploring the transformational strategies and puts emphases on discussing whether enterprises can transform by their learning when they used to be in the poor situations, while facing the dynamic environment. In the chance of transformation, the Taiwan¡¦s small and medium enterprises (TSME) lacked resources which can support them to do more. Due to rapidly changing conditions and the increasing pressure from the global competition, TSME are harder to make more a comprehensive decision than other enterprises which have great resources and big scales. However, they might get a chance to make a confidential decision for their adventure and flexibility. The organizational learning not only improves the efficiency but also presents more chances to find out the opportunities and resources to make the enterprises grow rapidly. It is an access to the constant development for enterprises. The absorbing, creating, cumulating and diffusing of knowledge are the ways that every enterprise has to do, but we could see the differences within its method and degrees. These differences would be crucial for these organizational abilities. Furthermore, it would influence the chances they got or affluence the organizational transformation. The research was interested in the relation between organizational learning and organization transformation by analyzing organizational abilities. We divide organizational abilities into four dimensions: strategic competence, organization design, human resource management and leader. The research finds that learning will influence four organizational abilities which we designed, especially the strategic ability and leader, which got a direct and crucial effect on organizational transformations. When corporations place emphasize on organizational learning, they would cause the abilities to influence each other and become better. Then, they would get more chances to transform and make it more efficiently.

This dissertation demonstrates how ACE has successfully equipped thousands of poor Filipinos with the tools necessary for them to raise themselves out of poverty by offering them a culture-specific curriculum that they can implement in their businesses. Furthermore, it will be argued that ACE's culture-specific curriculum could theoretically be applied in Mexico, where the "culture of poverty" exists in abundance.

Due to increasing emergence of social needs and problems throughout the world, accompanied by reduced government ability to provide the funding necessary to effectively combat these problems, it is expected that social enterprises will grow in number and importance. Because of this growing importance and the lack of research concerning marketing practices in such organizations, the purpose of this thesis is to develop a deeper understanding of both marketing in social enterprises and the context in social enterprises that has the potential to affect the marketing strategies employed in such organizations. Based upon this enhanced understanding, I develop and propose a model of marketing strategy in social enterprises. To develop this enhanced understanding and model, I conducted empirical qualitative research consisting of a comparative study of fifteen cases of social enterprises. Results show that four major dualities represent the critical context of social enterprises that influence the marketing strategies employed. Marketing is viewed as important by these enterprises and the strategies employed are quite well developed in the areas of market research, product quality, branding, and promotion.

Due to increasing emergence of social needs and problems throughout the world, accompanied by reduced government ability to provide the funding necessary to effectively combat these problems, it is expected that social enterprises will grow in number and importance. Because of this growing importance and the lack of research concerning marketing practices in such organizations, the purpose of this thesis is to develop a deeper understanding of both marketing in social enterprises and the context in social enterprises that has the potential to affect the marketing strategies employed in such organizations. Based upon this enhanced understanding, I develop and propose a model of marketing strategy in social enterprises. To develop this enhanced understanding and model, I conducted empirical qualitative research consisting of a comparative study of fifteen cases of social enterprises. Results show that four major dualities represent the critical context of social enterprises that influence the marketing strategies employed. Marketing is viewed as important by these enterprises and the strategies employed are quite well developed in the areas of market research, product quality, branding, and promotion.

Detta examensarbete går ut på att för TitanX Engine Cooling ABs räkning analysera deras användning av Lean-verktyget Value Stream Mapping (VSM). Detta på grund av att verktyget inte levererar all information som företaget efterfrågar. För att hitta potentiella alternativ till VSM har verktyg och ramverk inom Enterprise Architecture studerats (EA). Utöver detta har även Theory of Constraints och Sex Sigma analyserats. För att undersöka om det är möjligt att även skapa en kostnadsdimension i VSM har påläggskalkylering undersökts. Resultatet av jämförelsen av teorin bakom VSM och hur TitanX använder VSM visar att det finns vissa skillnader, dock är skillnaderna inte så stora och tros inte påverka resultatet av själva kartläggningen. Vidare har analysen givit att EA kan ersätta VSM men också att modellerna och ramverken inom EA är avsevärt mer komplexa och omfattande än VSM. Theory of constraints är integrerbart med Lean och innehåller också en serie mätvärden som ger den information som TitanX efterfrågar.

The creation of an Enterprise Search system involves many challenges that are not present in Web search. Searching a corporate collection is influenced both by the structure of the data present in the collection and by the policies of the corporation. These structures and policies may differ from corporation to corporation, and from collection to collection. In particular, an Enterprise Search system must take a document's genre into account. Examples of document genre within a corporate collection might include FAQs, white papers, technical reports, memos, emails and chat messages. Depending on an individual's current work task, it might be appropriate to give one genre a greater weight than another during the processing of a search request. Moreover, this weighting may change as the individual's work task changes. The work presented in this thesis adapts the Okapi BM25 scoring function to weight term frequency based on the relevance of a document genre to a work task. The method utilizes two user-provided resources, relevance judgments and clickthrough data, to estimate a realistic weight for each task-genre relationship. Using this approach, the method matches the purpose of each user search request with the purpose of each document. Therefore, the proper documents are returned to the user and her/his need can be fulfilled. The method has been incorporated into a prototype search engine, X-site, currently deployed on a corporate intranet. X-Site is a contextual search engine that uses the relationships between work tasks and document genres to improve search precision for software engineers. The system provides a customized and user-controlled means of refining search results to suit the task context of a user. Through X-Site, each employee can make a single search request and has access to documents from the Internet, a corporate intranet, and Lotus Notes databases.

The creation of an Enterprise Search system involves many challenges that are not present in Web search. Searching a corporate collection is influenced both by the structure of the data present in the collection and by the policies of the corporation. These structures and policies may differ from corporation to corporation, and from collection to collection. In particular, an Enterprise Search system must take a document's genre into account. Examples of document genre within a corporate collection might include FAQs, white papers, technical reports, memos, emails and chat messages. Depending on an individual's current work task, it might be appropriate to give one genre a greater weight than another during the processing of a search request. Moreover, this weighting may change as the individual's work task changes. The work presented in this thesis adapts the Okapi BM25 scoring function to weight term frequency based on the relevance of a document genre to a work task. The method utilizes two user-provided resources, relevance judgments and clickthrough data, to estimate a realistic weight for each task-genre relationship. Using this approach, the method matches the purpose of each user search request with the purpose of each document. Therefore, the proper documents are returned to the user and her/his need can be fulfilled. The method has been incorporated into a prototype search engine, X-site, currently deployed on a corporate intranet. X-Site is a contextual search engine that uses the relationships between work tasks and document genres to improve search precision for software engineers. The system provides a customized and user-controlled means of refining search results to suit the task context of a user. Through X-Site, each employee can make a single search request and has access to documents from the Internet, a corporate intranet, and Lotus Notes databases.