Reverse logistics is different from forward logistics in objectives, operations, pricing, quality, quantity, packaging, product and information flow. Further, management of the returned products and their information is a major challenge since it is difficult to predict the time, place of origin, quantity and quality of the goods that will be returned. To establish the importance of reverse logistics as a business process and to understand related issues for information management, this research was undertaken with data from the Australian Manufacturing and E-Business organisations. This research examined six dimensions of reverse logistics. These were: (1) Factors that compel Manufacturing and E-Business organisations to manage reverse logistics; (2) Operations in product return process; (3) Methods of capturing value from returned goods; (4) Barriers to reverse logistics management; (5) Information management issues in reverse logistics; and (6) Product return trends in the E-Business industry. This research was exploratory in nature and was accomplished via a quantitative research method. It adopted a positivist epistemology and followed a deductive approach to capture reverse logistics knowledge. Research data from Manufacturing and E-Business industries was elicited with postal questionnaire surveys using structured questions. Since the data collected from the two main surveys was mainly nominal and ordinal, it was quantitatively analysed using non-parametric tests, Fisher's exact test and one sample Wilcoxon test. It also employed frequency distributions, binomial test and one sample t-test. An additional statistical test was carried out on each set of data to triangulate the finding. The tests were undertaken in Minitab spreadsheet computer packages. This research highlights the fact that reverse logistics management is an important business process in the Australian Manufacturing and E-Business industries. It is a strategic advantage, as well as an important customer service. Although substantial monetary value can be recovered from returned goods, at present two industries investigated have not tapped into this potential. Findings of this research also indicate that a lack of efficient information management is a problem in reverse logistics. Information management in the two industries is based on land-line telephone, fax and computers. This research identified that from E-Business sales error in ordering, customer change of mind on receipt of good and inefficient forward logistics operations (picking, packing and delivery) are important reasons for returns. It also established that e-businesses resell the returned goods and recapture value. The value recovery process in this industry is different from the manufacturing industries where the prevalent value recovery processes are repair, resale and recycle. Further research issues emanating from this project include evaluation methods for recapturing value from returned goods, effective information management strategies for return management and the impact of a law for returning certain types of used goods. This research is an initial effort undertaken to establish returns management in the Australian industries. It establishes that reverse logistics should be recognised as a business process in these industries.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 169-179).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rhode Island, 2003. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 159-169).

Thesis (M.S.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 2006. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 64-71).

EFunds Corporation is the third largest business process outsourcing (BPO) provider in India. Specializing in the financial services, retail and telecommunications industries, EFunds offers financial services, customer services and transaction intensive applications. In early 2005 EFunds was assessing how it could garner a larger share of the growing offshore BPO market. EFunds management was focusing on honing three distinctive competencies: robust IT support, business process expertise, and its unique customer qualification methodology. But to really grow its business EFunds also needed to help customers recognize how BPO could make them stronger.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:24:02Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2007-12-18Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T19:10:06Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 tellaroli_tm_me_bauru.pdf: 1097051 bytes, checksum: 54a6f0297726357b5932a92735d9820d (MD5) / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) / Com a popularização da Internet como meio de difusão de informações, a transformação do jornalismo foi sentida em várias vertentes, como na técnica de produção, captação e difusão da notícia, estilo da escrita, e nas possibilidades disponibilizadas pelo novo meio de comunicação. A transposição do fazer jornalístico impresso ao on-line se deu devido à novidade que a Internet trouxe como meio, sem a definição de estilo. No entanto, houve a necessidade de o jornalismo on-line assumir sua própria técnica e forma; primeiramente utilizando as potencialidades que a rede oferece como o hipertexto, multimídia, interatividade, personalização, memória e instantaneidade para se tornar diferente. A partir da conceituação do jornalismo praticado na Internet, com enfoque no modelo de portal local, este trabalho mapeou o ciberespaço de Mato Grosso do Sul quanto à existência de portais jornalísticos independentes e discutiu a gestão da informação no maior portal do Estado, o Campo Grande News. A gestão da informação foi aplicada sob o enfoque da comunicação e abordou os processos de produção da notícia. O estudo de caráter exploratório utilizou como técnica de coleta de dados, a observação direta do funcionamento do site na Internet e entrevistas com proprietário, funcionários e jornalistas do portal, abordando três grandes questões de análise: planejamento, comunicação e tecnologia. Por fim, esta pesquisa indicou a tendência dos portais locais na Internet, bem como teceu considerações quanto ao modelo explorado atualmente / With the popularization of internet as a mean of information diffusion, the transformation of journalism was felt in several directions, such as in production techniques, news catching and diffusion, writing style, and also in the possibilities made available by the new medium of communication. The transposition of press journalism into on-line journalism occurred because of the novelty brought by internet as a medium, with no definition of style. However, on-line journalism had to assume its own technique and form, at first by using the potentialities offered by the net, such as hypertext, multimedia, interactiviy, personalization, memory and instantaneity, in order to become different. From the concept of internet journalism, focusing on the model of local portal, this paper mapped Mato Grosso do Sul's cyberspace as to the existence of independent journalistic portals and discussed the information management in the State's largest portal, Campo Grande News. Information management was applied under the focus of communication and approached the processes of news production. The techniques of data collection used by this exploratory study was direct observation of the site working on the internet and interviews with the portal owner, employees and journalists, focusing on three major issues: planning, communication and technology. At last, this study indicated the trend of local portals on the internet, as well as drew some considerations as to the model currently explored

Orientadores: João Carlos Setubal, Claudia Bauzer Medeiros / Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Computação / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-08T21:21:44Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Digiampietri_LucianoAntonio_D.pdf: 2647979 bytes, checksum: cb55c9b2b4185459d26541f301c5dd5b (MD5) Previous issue date: 2007 / Resumo: Atividades em bioinformática estão crescendo por todo o mundo, acompanhadas por uma proliferação de dados e ferramentas. Isto traz novos desafios, por exemplo, como entender e organizar esses recursos, como compartilhar e re-usar experimentos bem sucedidos (ferramentas e dados), e como prover interoperabilidade entre dados e ferramentas de diferentes locais e utilizados por usuários com perfis distintos. Esta tese propõe uma infra-estrutura computacional para resolver tais problemas. A infra-estrutura permite projetar, re-usar, anotar, validar, compartilhar e documentar experimentos de bioinformática. Workflows científicos são os mecanismos utilizados para representar tais experimentos. Combinando pesquisa em bancos de dados, workflows científicos, inteligência artificial e Web semântica, a infra-estrutura se beneficia do uso de ontologias para permitir a especificação e anotação de workflows de bioinformática e para servir como base aos mecanismos de rastreabilidade. Além disso, ela usa técnicas de planejamento em inteligência artificial para prover as composições automática, iterativa e supervisionada de tarefas para satisfazer as necessidades dos diferentes tipos de usuários. Os aspectos de integração de dados e interoperabilidade são resolvidos combinando o uso de ontologias, mapeamento entre estruturas e algoritmos de casamento de interfaces. A infra-estrutura foi implementada em um protótipo e validada com dados reais de bioinformática / Abstract: Bioinformatics activities are growing all over the world, following a proliferation of data and tools. This brings new challenges, such as how to understand and organize these resources, how to exchange and reuse successful experimental procedures (tools and data), and how to provide interoperability among data and tools across different sites, and used for users with distinct profiles. This thesis proposes a computational infrastructure to solve these problems. The infrastructure allows to design, reuse, annotate, validate, share and document bioinformatics experiments. Scientific workflows are the mechanisms used to represent these experiments. Combining research on databases, scientific workflows, artificial intelligence and semanticWeb, the infrastructure takes advantage of ontologies to support the specification and annotation of bioinformatics workflows and, to serve as basis for traceability mechanisms. Moreover, it uses artificial intelligence planning techniques to support automatic, iterative and supervised composition of tasks to satisfy the needs of the different kinds of user. The data integration and interoperability aspects are solved combining the use of ontologies, structure mapping and interface matching algorithms. The infrastructure was implemented in a prototype and validated on real bioinformatics data / Doutorado / Sistemas de Informação / Doutor em Ciência da Computação

This report describes the working process and creation of a new website for Lindt & Sprüngli Sweden with the help of the content management systems Magento and TYPO3. The report shows how different elements are created and published on the website, how the education in these systems was acquired and how contact with third party companies has been initiated and maintained. It also accounts for what is shown on the website as well as why it is shown. The goal with this project is to deliver a complete website to Lindt & Sprüngli Sweden where customers can find information about products as well as the company. The results of this project was a website that was launched on www.lindt.se on the 17th of June 2015.

A web portal can be defined as a Web site for a specific audience that aggretates an array of content and provides a variety of services including search engines and directrories, news, e-mail, chat rooms and online shopping. This study investigates the factors that must be considered during the design of a web portal for academics. Guidelines for the design of such a portal were developed on the basis of a literature study and an empirical study. A web portal for academics must support their personal management of academic information and knowledge. Personal interviews were conducted with academics in order to identify the content, functions, appearance and value of an academic portal. / Dissertation (MEd)--University of Pretoria, 2004. / Humanities Education / Unrestricted

Structural biology forms the basis of all functions in an organism from how enzymes work to how a cell is assembled. In silico structural biology has been a rather isolated domain due to the perceived difficulty of working with the tools. This work focused on constructing a web-based Functional Genomics Information Management System (FunGIMS) that will provide biologists access to the most commonly used structural biology tools without the need to learn program or operating specific syntax. The system was designed using a Model-View-Controller architecture which is easy to maintain and expand. It is Python-based with various other technologies incorporated. The specific focus of this work was the Structural module which allows a user to work with protein structures. The database behind the system is based on a modified version of the Macromolecular Structure Database from the EBI. The Structural module provides functionality to explore protein structures at each level of complexity through an easy-to-use interface. The module also provides some analysis tools which allows the user to identify features on a protein sequence as well as to identify unknown protein sequences. Another vital functionality allows the users to build protein models. The user can choose between building models online on downloading a generated script. Similar script generation utilities are provided for mutation modeling and molecular dynamics. A search functionality was also provided which allows the user to search for a keyword in the database. The system was used on three examples in Foot-and-Mouth Disease Virus (FMDV). In the first case, several FMDV proteomes were reannotated and compared to elucidate any functional differences between them. The second case involved the modeling of two FMDV proteins involved in replication, 3C and 3D. Variation between the several different strains were mapped to the structures to understand how variation affects enzymes structure. The last example involved capsid protein stability differences between two subtypes. Models were built and molecular dynamics simulations were run to determine at which protein structure level stability was influenced by the differences between the subtypes. This work provides an important introductory tool for biologists to structural biology. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2009. / Biochemistry / unrestricted