ITC/USA 2011 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Seventh Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 24-27, 2011 / Bally's Las Vegas, Las Vegas, Nevada / The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Space Network (SN) consists of a Space Segment, composed of the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS) fleet, and a Ground Segment that includes the White Sands Ground Terminal (WSGT), Second TDRS Ground Terminal (STGT) and the Guam Remote Ground Terminal (GRGT). Collectively, the SN Ground Segment is commonly referred to as the White Sands Complex (WSC). Traditional methods of latency and performance measurement across the component links of network have relied on the use of simplified test patterns and basic data formats that are often specific to the instruments providing the measurements. These tests do not often correlate to the operational data normally transferred through the network. This paper discusses an alternative approach to performance measurement within the Space Network. By embedding and extracting performance metrics directly within simulated data sets that closely resemble operational traffic, performance measurement can be combined with link verification and validation to provide a single, comprehensive set of test and measurement activities.

Background: Management control systems (MCS) are used to control organizations and make employees behave and act in the desirable way. Performance measurement (PM) systems one type of MCS and are used to communicate company strategies throughout the organization, motivate the employees to work towards company goals, and measure the outcome. PM systems can be a powerful tool, but if used in the wrong way they can have adverse effects. Aim: This thesis focused on the use of PM systems for management control purposes in research and development (R&D) organisations with the question: How can performance measurement systems be utilized in R&D organizations? Method: The thesis is based on a literature study, complemented by a case study (metric analysis, survey and deep interviews) at a R&D department. The department was investigated at two time points, in between which the PM system was re-designed. In the metric analysis, the performance targets of the PM system were categorized into quantitative-objective, quantitative-subjective and qualitative-subjective targets. Results: The results from the case study were in line with findings from the literature. At study point 2, when the PM system had been re-designed, the employees felt more involved in shaping and influencing the goals. Also the follow-up of the goals was experienced as more implemented at study point two. The types of measured targets had shifted from quantitative to qualitative, including soft values such as team spirit, at study point 2. However, the members did not feel that the goals motivated them at any time point. . Conclusion: In the literature review it was evident from the number of publications that there is a great interest in measuring R&D performance, and that PM systems are an important tool to R&D managers. Just as the company in this case study, each organization needs to analyze its own needs and adopt the PM system thereafter. Moreover, no system should be seen as static, instead it should be continuously evaluated and adjusted to make sure it measures what it is intended to measure and that it does not cause adverse effects on the organization.

<p>The importance of entrepreneurship has been widely acknowledged by many scholars, however, there is an argument that entrepreneurship tends to pose a unique dilemma with management accounting – a part of management control in organizations. The purpose of this paper is to find a solution for the apparent conflict between management accounting and entrepreneurship through a single case study of Litium – a new economy firm operating in information technology industry. The study of Litium reveals that a simple and solid management accounting is an effective way in order to keep management accounting in harmony with entrepreneurial spirit. This finding goes in line with the suggestion of loosely coupled management control in new economy firms by Lukka and Granlund (2003).</p><p>The paper reviews various relevant literatures so as to build a collected framework about management accounting in new economy firms. The framework then provides a guideline for empirical findings and analysis part. We acknowledged that the studies of Lukka and Granlund (2003), Granlund and Taipaleenmaki (2005), Lovstal (2001) and Morris, Allen, Schindehutte, and Avila (2006) are very useful for studying management accounting in new economy firms where entrepreneurship is highly emphasized. In addition, life-cycle perspective is also valuable to understand thoroughly the practice of management accounting in new economy firms. In accordance with the topic and the purpose of our case study, we recognized that qualitative research method is most suitable. Moreover, the interview – one type of qualitative methods – was chosen as a main tool for colleting data in our study since it can provide the authors with important insights into a situation and use-ful shortcuts to the prior history of the situation</p>

<p>Background: In a context of belt-tightening policy and of increasing competition between universities in France and in Germany, universities and therefore professors are required to increase their efficiency and to provide evidence of it. Performance measurement systems are assumed to increase transparency and incentives within the university sector.</p><p>Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to analyze to which extent performance measurement of professors at one French and one German university is relevant and how this performance can be measured. The study is conducted at the business school l’IECS Ecole de Management de Strasbourg (France) and within the Faculty of Business & Economics at the Europa-Universität Viadrina in Frankfurt an der Oder (Germany).</p><p>Method: Performance measurement is considered through the study and the comparison of two universities. Based on a theoretical framework including theories from the private sector, the public sector and the university sector, several in-depth interviews are conducted to collect facts and opinions from both professors and administrators and from both the IECS and the Viadrina.</p><p>Conclusion: This study assesses the relevance of the measurement performance of professors at the IECS and the Viadrina. It provides also the main areas where professors’ performance should be measured and the main methods to measure this performance. Lastly the thesis raises several issues linked to performance measurement such as the organizational culture of universities, the utilisation of performance measurement system information and the impacts of performance measurement.</p>

This thesis addresses the problem of the influence of a control system on the behaviour of an actor in a social or socio-technical system. In particular, the influence of a performance measurement mechanism on the behaviour of an actor and on the development of workarounds is being studied. <br /><br /> Current literature on those topics generally addresses only selected and rather obvious reasons for the existence of dysfunctional behaviour or the workarounds. However, no precise models of the cognitive processes or the explanation of the mechanisms, which govern this problem, are proposed in a satisfactory manner. In addition, most researchers have focused only on the system?s point of view of the task, paying less attention to the actors? perception of that task. Furthermore, the existing body of work mainly uses a case study format to explain the phenomenon or to validate the proposed solutions and theories. <br /><br /> In this thesis, the problem of the influence control system on the behaviour of the actor is framed in terms of four major concepts: (1) the concept of complexity of the task not being fully captured by the performance measurement mechanism; (2) the concept of an actor perceiving that extra complexity is not being captured by the system and thus choosing alternate paths other than the system-prescribed path; (3) the concept of a network of valence forces associated with alternate paths; and finally, (4) the concept of similarity judgment between the alternative paths and the system-prescribed path based on the actor?s model of the control system?s point of view. <br /><br /> This thesis develops the theoretical framework for analyzing and understanding the issues of dysfunctional behaviour and workarounds. It also presents an empirical experimental study in support of the theoretical discussion and the hypothesis. The experiment examines subjects? rating of quality, defined as a degree of similarity to a target object, of several objects on a page under various performance measurement conditions. The stimulus used for experiment was made up of two dimensional quadrangle figures, including rectangle, parallelograms and trapezes, in various shades of red colour.

Over the last 20 years, internal use of Performance Management(PM) within organizations has become much more complex in terms measurement techniques and approaches as well as their deployment within different organizational structures. In contrast to the traditional use of PM as an intra-organizational system, the emergence of networked operations, has extended organizational boundaries of Performance Management System (PMS) to new operational settings where actors often deal with a challenge of Collaborative Measures. Consequently, there is a significant lack of feedback and feedforward reporting mechanisms. This raises an important question for Performance Measurement &amp; Management (PMM) literature. How do actors manage operations through inter- organizational performance measures? Hence, the purpose of this thesis is to investigate the management of collaborative measures in a quest to attain better operational performance for inter- organizational PM. The thesis builds on four studies investigating a collaborative PMS for capacity enhancements in airport operations. Due to their operational complexity and highly networked subsystems, airport operations provided a fitting empirical scene for studying PM that transcends organizational boundaries. Within the context of this thesis, airports are viewed as a System of System (SoS), and inter- organizational PM is investigated with the dimensions Organizational Complexity, Continuous Improvement and Social system. The studies use a multimethod approach, including longitudinal action research, multiple-case study, Systematic Literature Review (SLR), Classification and Regression Tree method (CART) and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) Method. The findings show that that (1) inter- organizational performance is affected by intrinsic Performance Measurement Complexity (PMC) which aggregates as interactive complexity with many actors. (2) The challenge of feedback and feedforward mechanisms as a dual control for collaborative performance is analysed with four cybernetic functions: sensor, commander, actuator and process. (3) The concept of Reflective Performance Measurement System (RPMS) is introduced with general conditions to facilitate collaborative decision-making within such platforms. / <p>This research was conducted within the framework of the European Doctorate in Industrial Management—EDIM, which is funded by the Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) of the European Commission. QC 20170524</p> / MASCA- Managing System Change in Aviation

Performance monitoring systems have experienced remarkable development in the past few decades. In today's world, an important issue for almost every industry is to find a way to appropriately evaluate the performance of the provided service. Having a reliable performance monitoring system is necessary, and researchers have developed assessment models and tools to deal with this concern. There are many approaches to the development of performance measurement and observation systems. The internet-of-things (IoT) creates a broad range of opportunities to monitor the systems by using the information from connected people and devices. The IoT is providing many new sources of data that need to be managed. One of the key issues that arises in any data management system is confidentiality and privacy.Significant progress has been made in development and deployment of performance monitoring systems in the signalized traffic environment. The current monitoring and data collection system relies mostly on infrastructure-based sensors, e.g. loop detectors, video surveillance, cell phone data, vehicle signatures, or radar. High installation and maintenance costs and a high rate of failure are the two major drawbacks of the existing system. Emerging technologies, i.e. connected vehicles (CV), will provide a new, high fidelity approach to be used for better performance monitoring and traffic control.This dissertation investigates the real-time performance observation system in a multi-modal connected vehicle environment. A trajectory awareness component receive and processes the connected vehicle data using the Basic Safety Message (BSM). A geo-fence section makes sure the infrastructure system (for example, roadside unit (RSU)) receives the BSM from only the connected vehicles on the roadway and within the communication range. The processed data can be used as an input to a real-time performance observer component.Three major classes of performance metrics, including mobility, signal, and CV-system measures, are investigated. Multi-modal dashboards that utilize radar diagrams are introduced to visualize large data sets in an easy to understand way. A mechanism to maintain the anonymity of vehicle information to ensure privacy was also developed. The proposed algorithm uses partial vehicle trajectories to estimate travel time average and variability on a link basis. It is shown that the model is not very sensitive to the market penetration rate of connected vehicles. This is a desirable feature especially because of the fact that the market penetration rate of connected vehicles will not be very high in near future. The system architecture for connected vehicle based performance observation applications was developed to be applicable for both a simulation environment and a real world traffic system. Both hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) and software-in-the-loop (SIL) simulation environments are developed and calibrated to mimic the real world. Comprehensive testing and assessment of the proposed models and algorithms are conducted in simulation as well as field test networks. A web application is also developed as part of a central system component to generate reports and visualizations of the data collection experiments.

Nowadays software performance is evaluated not only by specialized review companies but it is more and more starting to be a common practice for the software developers themselves. Companies are often forced to develop and maintain their own tools for measuring performance of the developed applications. On the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics there has been created a toolkit for automation of software performance evaluation called BEEN. This toolkit should significantly ease the management of individual performance measurements but it is not possible to test it thoroughly in the environment where it was created. The goal of this thesis is to deploy BEEN in a real environment of commercially oriented company and evaluate the usability of this toolkit for the developers. We will focus on evaluating both objective and subjective positives and drawbacks of this toolkit as observed by unbiased users.

M. Comm. / The aim of this study is to present a practical solution to companies for creating a mechanism whereby the conversion of organisational goals to concrete action items becomes reality. "Over the years we have seen many senior executives that believe that they have a well-developed well-understood and articulated vision that most employees buy into, but without understanding or providing an adequate mechanism with which to actually accomplish the goals" (Best, 1998: 5-9). The references made to the concepts of quality and productivity will refer to the following two definitions respectively: Quality of Organisation "As is the case so often in South Africa, it is quite possible to produce a quality product with a very ineffective and inefficient business process: the penalty that customers pay is getting a quality product which is totally overpriced in order to subsidise the inefficiencies of the business process" (Scholtz, 1998: 33-39). Productivity "The orientation of any new measures will be less concerned with the volume of output (such as the number of orders processed) and more concerned with the value-adding content of work (whether orders are processed correctly the first time and without delay)" (Hope and Hope, 1997: 191-192). Tom Peters supports the view taken on these two definitions in his book Thriving on Chaos (1987:23). Tom Peters is of the opinion that adding value will result from superior quality of products and in exceptional service and responsiveness to customers. Through experience gained in the banking, education, retail and chemical sectors, the problem of dealing with inefficient processes and not having a single accurate, timely and comprehensive source of reference information for decision-making, has been encountered on numerous occasions.

Este trabalho tem por objetivo desenvolver diretrizes para avaliar o uso dos princípios da produção enxuta (PE). Estes princípios foram identificados com base em uma revisão da literatura, enfatizando obras de autores clássicos do sistema da PE. As diretrizes foram testadas por meio de um estudo de caso em uma fábrica de pregos que faz parte de uma planta siderúrgica, que vem adotando a filosofia enxuta desde 2004. As etapas da avaliação dos princípios foram as seguintes: a) avaliar qualitativamente um conjunto de práticas da PE presentes no setor estudado; b) entrevistas com treze operadores para avaliar o seu conhecimento e uso dos princípios da PE; c) elaboração de um questionário para avaliar o uso dos princípios da PE no setor; d) aplicação do questionário junto a 44 funcionários; e) análise dos resultados e f) reunião de retorno dos questionários aos funcionários. No estudo de caso os resultados foram agrupados em quatro constructos: solução de problemas, funcionários e fornecedores externos, processo e filosofia. Os resultados mostraram que os operadores julgam conhecer e vivenciar os princípios da PE no seu dia-a-dia. Entretanto, alguns princípios, como “produzir em fluxo contínuo” e “puxar a produção”, não tiveram respaldo na etapa de observação direta do processo. De fato, embora os operadores tenham respondido nos questionários que usavam esses princípios com grande intensidade, isso não corresponde à realidade no chão de fábrica. / This work aims to develop guidelines to evaluate the use of lean production (LP) principles. These principles have been identified based on a review of the literature, emphasizing works of classic authors of the LP system. The guidelines were tested through a case study in a nail factory that is part of a steel plant, which has adopted the lean philosophy since 2004. The stages of assessment principles are as follows: a) to evaluate qualitatively a set of LP practices present in the studied factory; b) interviews with thirteen operators to assess their knowledge and use of the LP principles; c) development of a questionnaire to evaluate the use of the LP principles in the factory; d) application of the questionnaire to 44 members; e) result analysis and f) return the questionnaires results in a meeting with the employees. In the case study, results were grouped into four constructs: problem solving, staff and external suppliers, process and philosophy. The results showed that the operators assume they know and live the LP principles in their day-to-day. However, certain principles such as "to produce in continuous flow" and "pulled production", they had not support in the stage of direct observation of the process. In fact, although the operators have answered that used these principles with great intensity, that is not the reality on the factory floor.