Nowadays, all kind of enterprises have to face the tough environment-the low margin age. With the factors like liberalization of global trade, emergence of the newly industrialized countries and the blooming BRICs, the worse situation makes them to tolerate more pressure than before. One of all concern important items is cost system that we cannot put aside while composing a good business strategy, no matter how important low-cost leadership strategy, differentiation strategy, or focus differentiation strategy is. The key ingredients make enterprises more competitive including the implement of strategies and the control of cost. But what is the analysts¡¦ great responsibility for providing the right and instant information to the top managers is the cost information matched with the strategies and delivered precisely in the right time. According to the current cost system in this studied case, neither can the information supplied becomes the key source to assist top managers to make the vital decision, nor can performance appraisal system be used. How to create a feasible cost system which can provide the precise and instant information is the main purpose of the essay. The studied case in the essay is one of the public paper manufacturers in Taiwan and almost produces all kind of paper. To simplify the compliexity, focusing on the fine paper, the most competitive field of paper industry in the world becomes my main part of discussion in the essay. And hopefully it will become the trigger to get lots of people involved to continue the study further.

The movement of heavenly bodies, the interchanging of four seasons, the changes of the environment. This is how the universe revolves, it¡¦s like the changes of the environment when you manage your business. There are many businesses that vanish every year in Taiwan; also there are many businesses that become more & more prosperous, how come? The main reason why businesses vanish is because they cannot timely adopt the rapid changes of the environment, and they could not fully adjust to the new changes on the operation of the business. There is no simple reason for the reformation of the organization; there are also no inevitable ways of success. In facing many changes of the environment, what must a business do so that it can be retained longer? How does it deal with change in trend? Does it continue to apply different suitable transformation in the business interior? Using contingent transformation, to make the foundation of the business prolong? The restructuring of the organization must be carry out simultaneously because of the changes in environment, it is a never ending work without limits, during the process it is inevitable to invest large amount of manpower, material resources, as well as producing a considerably large amount of paper works and information. Time and mental efforts must be sacrificed for the knowledge of this process, therefore this research is aimed using case to case method in applying transformation method on the restructuring of the organization, so that it could conveniently search and collect business information as research analysis, probing into the restructuring practice done by other businesses, at the same time sorting it in an case to case manner using an entirely fashionable manner. 1. Informal Interview 2.Viewable Company Information 3.Updated Observation 4.Viewable Records. The said company have gone thru repeated transformation, and encountered a lot of problems during that course, generalized below: 1.Strategy¡Btarget and resources are not integrated; 2.Strategy and target are not unified & regulated; 3.Strategy and target doesn¡¦t communicate adequately; 4. No strategy feedback systematic management and no professional department handler; 5.Interrelated management system didn¡¦t combine with strategy; 6.The high resignation rate of top management. Aimed at the problems above, the said company can carry out rapid systematic restructuring of its organization rules and regulation, usher in new management tolls for the better, and probably intensify educational training, as to improve the organizations culture and member¡¦s quality, and timely adaptation to the environment changes. Key words: Organization transformation, strategy management, implementation strength, Effectively evaluation, Policy management, Balanced Scorecard.

With the increase of income and rapid wealth accumulation, people, especially those with high net worth, have increased needs for consolidating financial planning service. In order to succeed in this competitive market, all banks are establishing wealth management branches and providing varies, sometimes custom made, products and services to satisfy their clients¡¦ financial needs. The most important component of wealth management is financial consultants. Financial consultants directly service clients, and they form irreplaceable interpersonal relationships with their clients. They are a huge asset for their bank. But because of severe competition, the quality of financial consultant greatly varies. Many banks set high revenue targets for their financial consultants, which results in high turnover rate. Banks also compete intensely for the good financial consultants in the industry. Therefore, in order to retain and develop strong financial consultants, banks should establish effective, comprehensive training and career development programs. My study will focus, discuss and analysis the performance management of financial consultants in wealth management banks. For my study, I interviewed several top management officers of successful wealth management banks to gain deeper understanding of their policies on performance management. I then compared and contrasted the different banks¡¦ policies to investigate the meaning of performance management. From my study, I found every bank has its own policy in performance management that they closely abide by, and they routinely review and update their policies. Interestingly, these distinctive policies all serve the same purpose which is to motivate their financial consultants to increase sales and thus, to increase the bank¡¦s profitability. Furthermore, I learned some effective and ineffective ways to manage financial consultants. I also identified key elements to encourage high loyalty which helped to explain why it was previously difficult to recruit certain financial consultants to my bank. This dissertation is tremendously meaningful and helpful to me professionally, and I will use it to create effective policies, to motivate higher performance, and to promote high loyalty.

Comprehensive studies are required to understand the design of the performance halls in Turkish Early Republican Period. Acoustics, a significant parameter in performance hall design, has been chosen to contribute the studies. Three pioneers of the period, Resim Heykel Museum, K&uuml / &ccedil / &uuml / k Theatre and Opera Halls, are chosen as cases. The acoustical qualities of performance halls of Turkish Early Republican period in Ankara is studied in parallel to the acoustical design of performance halls in Europe which may reveal similarities in case halls. Detailed 3-D models of the halls for acoustical simulations based on the original design data have been prepared and results are to be compared with acoustically recognized halls in the world.

The popularity of the World Wide Web (WWW) in providing a vast array of information has drawn a large number of users in the past few years. The dramatic increase in the number of Internet users, however, has brought undesirable impacts on users, such as long response time and service unavailability. The utilization of multiple servers can be used to reduce adverse impacts. The challenge is to identify a good resource site to allocate to the user given a group of servers from which to select. In this project, a performance-directed site selection system was developed for a web-based application called AADMLSS (African American Distributed Multiple Learning Styles System). Four different sets of experiments were conducted in this study. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the test system, two other server selection methods, Load-based and Random-based methods, were implemented for comparative purposes. The experiments were also run during daytime and nighttime to see the impact of network load on the response time. Experimental results indicate that the performance-directed site selection system outperforms the Load-based and Random-based methods consistently. The response time is typically high during daytime and low during nighttime, indicating that the network load has an impact on the response time delivered. The results also show that server performance contributes to the overall response time, and network performance is the more dominating factor in determining a good resource site for the user.

The proverb ¡§Knowledge is power¡¨ points out the importance of knowledge. Most organizations understand the importance of knowledge and treat knowledge as a vital resource. Research in knowledge management has gained much attention in recent years. This study investigates how knowledge distribution affects knowledge interaction types, and how knowledge interaction affects the performance of knowledge management in an organization. A measure of interaction quality is also defined to include process and outcome quality. A survey research was conducted to examine our research framework. The results show that: 1. knowledge intensity affect the type of knowledge interaction and outcome quality. 2. Different types of knowledge interaction results in different interaction quality. 3. Outcome quality of knowledge interaction types affects KM performance. 4. KM performance affects organizational performance.

The performance issues of state-owned enterprises have been concerned by common people. In order to improve state-owned enterprises¡¦ performance effectively, the government should understand their regular operation efficiency adequately and then establish an appropriate evaluation system. However, the roles and functions of state-owned enterprises have changed significantly since the environment changed and economics progressed in Taiwan. As a result, the views and means toward performance assessment are kind of imbalanced. Therefore, this study researched Taiwan state-owned enterprises¡¦ performance assessment system to assess and review the related problems about existing evaluation methods. The aspects include indicators of evaluation, functions of evaluation and executing the system practically. According to document analysis, this study reviewed literature about performance evaluation, and analyzed rules, methods, indicators and overall report of performance assessment from RDEC (Research, Development and Evaluation Commission, Executive Yuan) over the years to realize the meaning of existing performance assessment system and the challenges of implementing the system. Three comments toward this evaluation system are as follows. First, regulate the relationship between the government and each state-owned enterprise appropriately to avoid or reduce government organizations¡¦ improper interference with state-owned enterprises. Then, there will be more objective and more correct evaluation outcomes. Second, the existing grading mechanism may let importance of evaluation indicators be diluted by subordinate ones. The grading mechanism should be established based on operation features of state-owned enterprises and their budget plans. Third, the existing evaluation emphasizes annual short-term performance and lacks of consideration of long-term development and innovation ability. So, the study suggests that government may apply BSC (Balanced Score Card) to adjust the contents of evaluation standards and items. Key words: State-owned enterprises, Performance assessment system, Performance evaluation

In resent years, the competition between insurance companies in Taiwan has become more and more intense. The main reasons are not only the overall environmental issue such as financial management policies, but also the similarities of the services provided by the insurance companies that easily cause price-cutting competition. Moreover, with the economy crisis happened last year, the financial status of insurance industry has been seriously impacted. It¡¦s becoming harder and harder to run insurance businesses. In this highly competitive financial industry, what strategies should be used in order to strengthen a company¡¦s operation system, to increase efficiency and finally create a competitive advantage? Before deciding which strategy to use, the decision maker has to first understand the ¡§performance verifying index¡¨ of his company, the factors that affect company¡¦s performance, and then evaluate his company¡¦s advantage and disadvantage that it has over its competitors, and finally guide the company toward a correct path. It has been realized that past documents clearly lack a model that can provide suggestions to corporations how to face intensive competitions by using an evaluation method that can verify both financial and non-financial factors. Therefore, this research intends to use the ¡§total performance scorecard¡¨ theory to build a performance verifying index/system for insurance industry, and then develop a strategy guide. This research used ¡§analytic hierarchy process, AHP¡¨ questionnaire to conduct surveys on financial professionals, government officers and scholars, and then develop a hierarchy for the performance verifying index, and finally construct a performance management system for insurance industry. This research found out that when a insurance company is making a performance management strategy, ranking from the most important to least important aspects, they should consider financial aspect, customer aspect, learning/growing aspect and internal corporate flow path aspect. The ten most important indexes are gain per stock (0.099), cash usage net income rate (0.095), cash flow rate(0.076), customer value creation(0.063), retention expense ratio(0.062), employee professions (0.061), underwriting quality audit(0.06), customer return rate(0.059), customer satisfaction(0.055), and employee inspiration (0.052). These findings can be used as a reference when insurance companies are making performance-management decisions and strategies.

Most applications spend a significant amount of time in the iterative parts of a computation. They typically iterate over the same set of operations with different values. These values either depend on inputs or values calculated in previous iterations. While loops capture some iterative behavior, in many cases such a behavior is spread over whole program sometimes through recursion. Understanding iterative behavior of the computation can be very useful to fine-tune it. In this thesis, we present a profiling based framework to understand and improve performance of iterative computation. We capture the state of iterations in two aspects 1) Algorithmic State 2) Program State. We demonstrate the applicability of our framework for capturing algorithmic state by applying it to the SAT Solvers and program state by applying it to a variety of benchmarks exhibiting completely parallelizable loops. Further, we show that such a performance characterization can be successfully used to improve the performance of the underlying application. Many high performance combinatorial optimization applications involve SAT solving. A variety of SAT solvers have been developed that employ different data structures and different propagation methods for converging on a fixed point for generating a satisfiable solution. The performance debugging and tuning of SAT solvers to a given domain is an important problem encountered in practice. Unfortunately not much work has been done to quantify the iterative efficiency of SAT solvers. In this work, we develop quantifiable measures for calculating convergence efficiency of SAT solvers. Here, we capture the Algorithmic state of the application by tracking the assignment of variables for each iteration. A compact representation of profile data is developed to track the rate of progress and convergence. The novelty of this approach is that it is independent of the specific strategies used in individual solvers, yet it gives key insights into the "progress" and "convergence behavior" of the solver in terms of a specific implementation at hand. An analysis tool is written to interpret the profile data and extract values of the following metrics such as: average convergence rate, efficiency of iteration and variable stabilization. Finally, using this system we produce a study of 4 well known SAT solvers to compare their iterative efficiency using random as well as industrial benchmarks. Using the framework, iterative inefficiencies that lead to slow convergence are identified. We also show how to fine-tune the solvers by adapting the key steps. We also show that the similar profile data representation can be easily applied to loops, in general, to capture their program state. One of the key attributes of the program state inside loops is their branch behavior. We demonstrate the applicability of the framework by profiling completely parallelizable loops (no cross-iteration dependence) and by storing the branching behavior of each iteration. The branch behavior across a group of iterations is important in devising the thread warps from parallel loops for efficient execution on GPUs. We show how some loops can be effectively parallelized on GPUs using this information.

This study examines the existence of pay-performance sensitivity in total compensation and bonus during the financial crisis, using data between 2007-2010 from Swedish 196 listed firms. We perform panel data regression analysis of CEO compensation on financial performance measured as stock returns. Our results indicate that there is, although not significant, a weak positive relationship between CEO compensation and firm performance during 2007-2010. However during 2009-2010 in a market state defined as post-crisis we find weak negative pay-performance sensitivity at a significance level of 10 %. Nevertheless, as regards to the bonus paid to executives there was a significantly positive relationship relative bonus % and firm performance. These results contribute to our understanding of the pay-performance sensitivity in times of financial disturbance, highly relevant to the existing debate considering CEO compensation.