Product tolerancing decisions made in product design have a significant effect on manufacturing environmental and cost performances by strongly influencing both the selection and operation of processing machinery. These decisions however are typically made without quantitative knowledge of their effects in manufacturing. With estimates of environmental and cost performances of manufacturing processes required to achieve specific part designs earlier in the product design cycle, designers may make more informed, and potentially better, design decisions with respect to manufacturing environmental and cost performance goals. In this thesis a method for quantifiably relating product tolerancing decisions to environmental and cost performances in manufacturing in order to provide decision support for cost and environmentally conscious design for manufacturing is developed. The method is instantiated as an Excel-based tool and exercised by two illustrative examples of increasing complexity, as well as a study of the manufacture of automotive transmission pinion gears with differing tolerance requirements. Uncertainty analysis is performed through the use of @RISK software; the uncertainty of parameters associated with manufacturing operations and machinery is captured through the use of probability density functions and Monte Carlo simulation is performed. Simulation results provide insight into the uncertainty of performance estimates and the risks associated with ensuing decision making. This method may be useful to product designers, as well as process planners, to support decision making efforts related to cost and environmental consciousness in the manufacturing phase of the product life cycle.

This study focuses on the Internet auction in the market of jade from Ming or Ch¡¦ing dynasty. Yahoo/Kimo auction, which is the biggest net auction site in Taiwan, has been selected as the research site in the project. Jade from Ming or Ch¡¦ing dynasty is the major goods in this research because of its distinguishable characteristics and reasonable price in the market. ¡§Case studies¡¨ have been chosen as the methodology of this research. Interviews with six jade sellers, trading records of consumers, and observation from the researcher have become methods of data collection. This study attempts to discover workable strategists for jade sellers in the Internet auction. The main research questions are: (1)Why do sellers choose Yahoo/Kimo auction as the site to sell jade of Ming or Ch¡¦ing dynasty¡H(2)How do sellers manipulate perception of consumers to influence their decision making¡H(3)How does rating and feedback work in marketing jade¡H(4)How to pricing¡HHow to satisfy different marketing segmentation¡H Three conclusions have been summarized as following: In Taiwan, Yahoo/Kimo auction site is a suitable site for jade trading because the site is user friendly, with huge size of pictures showing the characteristics of jade, with fast searching engine, low running cost, and highly security system. If a seller wants to run a stylish store, he/she is suggested to design the website by himself/herself. Generally speaking, most consumers in Internet auction are lack of understanding of jade. Therefore, enriching the description and pictures of goods and lowering the price become key points to influence consumers¡¦ decision making. Another fact found in the study is that the rating and feedback system is useful for convincing consumers at the beginning time; however, it plays less and less important role especially for consumers to make their final decisions. Selling with low-price is unable to reach the exceptional profits, but is considered as a way to clean out stocks. High-price jade is hardly to market through Internet auction because it needs a real site to sell it. ¡§Under the table¡¨ bargaining is commonly seen in Internet auction. In the future, the researcher suggests jade sellers in Internet to specialize jade items, to demonstrate in a theme or a style when marketing.

The thesis is concerned with application of Decision Support Systems and Business Intelligence as a tool for decision-making support into processes of operational risk management in insurance company to improve them and reach a higher corporate performance.The goal of the thesis is to analyze a theory for a support of a process improvement design with the mentioned reach and to develop a design of improved operational risk management processes in a particular insurance company. The mean to reach goals is through-out a literature and articles research regarding a process improvement, decision-making, models and technologies of DSS and BI, and risk management. The theoretical framework is then used as back-bone for implementation of a practical part of innovated processes design. The thesis offers the analysis of an area of risk management processes improvement via DSS and BI in an insurance company that has been researched relatively little, but whose principles can be used for improvement projects in different areas too. A department of operational risk management in a certain insurance company obtains a complete design of innovated processes including DSS / BI application support specification which respects modern techniques of process improvements involving specific methods of decision-making quality. For the same department a part of the design was implemented -- Knowledge management system, that can be fully used. Introductory part of the thesis is concerned with techniques of business process improvement and its alignment with corporate performance. The next chapter describes specifics of operational risk management processes. In the third one models, techniques, information technologies of Decision Support Systems and Business Intelligence disciplines are analyzed. The practical part of the text starts with strategic analysis of the insurance company, proceeds with operational risk management processes analysis and reaches the design of innovated processes involving DSS and BI application support. Benefits of designed processes' changes are verified. In the conclusion a certain process change is accepted for the implementation and its results are described.

Cellular decision-making help cells to infer functionally different phenotypes in response to microenvironmental cues and noise present in the system and the environment, with or without genetic change. In Cellular Biology, there exists a list of open questions such as, how individual cell decisions influence the dynamics at the population level (an organization of indistinguishable cells) and at the tissue level (a group of nearly identical cells and their corresponding extracellular matrix which simultaneously accomplish a set of biological operations)? As collective cell migration originates from local cellular orientation decisions, can one generate a mathematical model for collective cell migration phenomena without elusive undiscovered biophysical/biochemical mechanisms and further predict the pattern formations which originates inside the collective cell migration? how optimal microenvironmental sensing is related to differentiated tissue at the spatial scale ? How cell sensing radius and total entropy production (which precisely helps us to understand the operating regimes where cells can take decisions about their future fate) is correlated, and how can one understand the limits of sensing radius at robust tissue development ? To partially tackle these sets of questions, the LEUP (Least microEnvironmental Uncertainty Principle) hypothesis has been applied to different biological scenaros. At first, the LEUP has been enforced to understand the spatio-temporal behavior of a tissue exhibiting phenotypic plasticity (it is a prototype of cell decision-making). Here, two cases have been rigorously studied i.e., migration/resting and migration/proliferation plasticity which underlie the epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) and the Go-or-Grow dichotomy. On the one hand, for the Go-or-Rest plasticity, a bistable switching mechanism between a diffusive (fluid) and an epithelial (solid) tissue phase has been observed from an analogous mean-field approximation which further depends on the sensitivity of the phenotypes to the microenvironment. However, on the other hand, for the Go-or-Grow plasticity, the possibility of Turing pattern formation is inspected for the “solid” tissue phase and its relation to the parameters of the LEUP-driven cell decisions. Later, LEUP hypothesis has been suggested in the area of collective cell migration such that it can provide a tool for a generative mathematical model of collective migration without precise knowledge about the mechanistic details, where the famous Vicsek model is a special case. In this generative model of collective cell migration, the origin of pattern formation inside collective cell migration has been investigated. Moreover, this hypothesis helps to construct a mathematical model for the collective behavior of spherical \textit{Serratia marcescens} bacteria, where the basic understanding of migration mechanisms remain unknown. Furthermore, LEUP has been applied to understand tissue robustness, which in turn shows the way how progenitor cell fate decisions are associated with environmental sensing. The regulation of environmental sensing drives the robustness of the spatial and temporal order in which cells are generated towards a fully differentiating tissue, which are verified later with the experimental data. LEUP driven stochastic thermodynamic formalism also shows that the thermodynamic robustness of differentiated tissues depends on cell metabolism, cell sensing properties and the limits of the cell sensing radius, which further ensures the robustness of differentiated tissue spatial order. Finally, all important results of the thesis have been encapsulated and the extension of the LEUP has been discussed.:Contents Statement of authorship vii Abstract ix I. Introduction to cell decision-making 1 1. What is cell decision-making ? 3 1.1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 1.2. Examplesofcelldecision-making. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 1.2.1. PhenotypicPlasticity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 1.2.2. Cellularmigration:orientationdecisions . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 1.2.3. Celldifferentiation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 1.3. Challengesandopenquestions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 1.4. Solutionstrategy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 1.5. Structureofthesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 II. Least microEnvironmental Uncertainty Principle (LEUP) 11 2. Least microEnvironmental Uncertainty Principle (LEUP) 13 2.1. HypothesisbehindLEUP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 2.2. Mathematicalformulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 2.2.1. CellasBayesiandecisionmaker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 2.2.2. VariationalprincipleforLEUP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 III. LEUP in biological problems 17 3. Phenotypic plasticity : dynamics at the level of tissue from individual cell decisions 19 3.1. Mathematicalframework . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 3.2. Individualbasedmodel(IBM) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 3.3. Mean-fieldapproximation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 3.3.1. Phenotypicswitchingdynamics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 3.3.2. Cellmigrationdynamics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 3.3.3. Superpositionofphenotypicswitchingdynamicsandcellmi- gration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 3.4. Spatio-temporaldynamicsofcellmigration/proliferationplasticity . . 28 3.4.1. CaseI:Largeinteractionradius . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 3.4.2. CaseII:Finiteinteractionradius . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 3.4.3. Phenotypicswitchingdynamicsintheabsenceofmicroenvi- ronmentalsensing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 3.5. Summaryandoutlook . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 4. Cellular orientation decisions: origin of pattern formations in collective cell migrations 39 4.1. Mathematicalframework . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 4.1.1. Self-propelledparticlemodelwithleupbaseddecision-making 41 4.1.2. Orderparametersandobservables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 4.1.3. Statisticaltest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 4.2. ComparisonwithVicsekmodel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 4.2.1. Patternsindifferentparameterregimes . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 4.3. Application:thesphericalbacteriacase. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 4.4. Summaryandoutlook . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 5. Cell differentiation and sensing: tissue robustness from optimal environ- mental sensing 53 5.1. LEUPbasedmathematicalmodelforcelldifferentiation . . . . . . . . 56 5.1.1. StatisticalresultsfromLEUP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 5.2. RelationbetweenLEUPandcellsensing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 5.3. LEUPdrivenfluctuationtheorem: confirmsthethermodynamicro- bustnessofdifferentiatedtissues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 5.3.1. Application: differentiated photoreceptor mosaics are ther- modynamicallyrobust . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 5.4. Thelimitforcellsensingradius . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 5.4.1. Application:Theaveragesensingradiusoftheavianconecell 69 5.5. Summaryandoutlook . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 6. Discussions 75 7. Supplementary Material 91 8. Erklärung 115

Made available in DSpace on 2016-03-15T19:26:42Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Valmir Corbacho.pdf: 3244037 bytes, checksum: 7f58526e7438ad2545e43867ba41fa08 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2009-02-10 / Fundo Mackenzie de Pesquisa / This thesis attempts to study and to examine the new ways of relationship based on interorganizational models in the pharmaceutical industry in the State of São Paulo. This segment is a privileged object of study for this purpose due to its needs of high investments in research and development, the dynamic nature of its environment, the complexity and the way it disseminates the knowledge, as well as its no accumulative technology. These features and idiosyncrasies of the pharmaceutical segment allow a wider collaborative relationship, mainly in order to develop new products. The possibility of creating collaborative nets amplifies the vision strictly rational and competitive of these companies. This work supports that these organizational abilities do not belong anymore to these firms. The nets and the arrangements are part of the organizations, but they go too far the boundaries. Therefore, it emerges a new approach for the theory of the organizations. It means an approximation that understands how the new configuration of the organizational environment is. The aim of this work is to verify how the decision s process occurs in the organizations that developed strategic partnerships in the pharmaceutical industry. Thus, it analyses three firms located in the State of São Paulo. To answer this question, the essay selected the cases in which the technology and the dynamic environmental are examples of high complexity. Due to this reason, we applied the methodology of multiple cases. We selected three national firms that established collaborative partnership to the research, development, commercialization and medicaments distribution under the patent of international companies. The final objective is to investigate the circumstances that involve the company s decision when it decides to enter in partnership with other, the intrinsic risks and the benefits, such as the release of an innovative medicine, the technological improvements and the conquest of a new niche of market. We conclude that the decisory process to establish the collaborative partnership is marked by the use of practices that minimize the limited rationality due to the high investments needed to the research and development, besides that it is a high risk to the companies to succeed in this partnership. Another point that must be highlighted: the collaborative partnership, due to the creation of resources to investments in research and development, was supported by interorganizational networks that have the objective of maintaining the market position while innovative efforts were engendered to introduce new medicaments in the sector. / Esta dissertação busca estudar e investigar como é o processo decisório estratégico para estabelecimento de parcerias interorganizacionais na indústria farmacêutica do Estado de São Paulo. O setor é um objeto de pesquisa privilegiado para o tema em razão da necessidade de altos investimentos em Pesquisa & Desenvolvimento (P&D), da natureza dinâmica do ambiente, da complexidade e forma de distribuição do conhecimento e da não-cumulatividade tecnológica. Tais características inerentes ao setor farmacêutico possibilitam um maior relacionamento colaborativo dessas empresas, especialmente para o desenvolvimento de novos produtos. A perspectiva de redes colaborativas amplia a visão estritamente racional e competitiva das corporações. Nesta dissertação, parte-se do pressuposto de que as capacidades organizacionais já não estão mais contidas nas empresas. As redes e arranjos fazem parte das organizações, mas avançam além de suas fronteiras. Com isso, surge uma abordagem diferente para a teoria das organizações, que procura entender como se dá essa nova configuração do ambiente organizacional. A pesquisa foi realizada com base na estratégia de estudo de casos múltiplos. Foram selecionadas três companhias nacionais com sede no estado de São Paulo que estabeleceram parcerias colaborativas para a pesquisa, desenvolvimento, comercialização e distribuição de medicamentos. O objetivo final foi estudar decisões que envolvessem o estabelecimento de parcerias para se verificar as características do processo decisório estratégico em redes de parcerias estratégicas colaborativas. Conclui-se que o processo decisório para o estabelecimento dessas parcerias colaborativas é caracterizado pelo uso de práticas que minimizam a racionalidade limitada em função dos altos investimentos necessários para pesquisa e desenvolvimento, além de ser um alto risco para o sucesso das empresas participantes da rede colaborativa. Outro fator que deve ser destacado, as parcerias colaborativas são em função da criação de recursos para investimentos em pesquisa e desenvolvimento sendo suportada por redes interorganizacionais que tem o objetivo de manter o posicionamento de mercado das empresas enquanto os esforços inovativos são gerados para a introdução de novos medicamentos no setor.

Submitted by Estagiário SPT BMHS (spt@fgv.br) on 2013-08-08T14:21:01Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertação Eduardo Ferreira dos Reis.pdf: 829547 bytes, checksum: c2739a6a6f01d870ad0929a337f80f5a (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Estagiário SPT BMHS (spt@fgv.br) on 2013-08-08T14:21:15Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertação Eduardo Ferreira dos Reis.pdf: 829547 bytes, checksum: c2739a6a6f01d870ad0929a337f80f5a (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Estagiário SPT BMHS (spt@fgv.br) on 2013-08-08T14:21:32Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertação Eduardo Ferreira dos Reis.pdf: 829547 bytes, checksum: c2739a6a6f01d870ad0929a337f80f5a (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2013-08-08T14:21:45Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertação Eduardo Ferreira dos Reis.pdf: 829547 bytes, checksum: c2739a6a6f01d870ad0929a337f80f5a (MD5) Previous issue date: 2004-12 / O presente trabalho tem o propósito de analisar o processo de fidelização do consumidor corporativo no mercado de comunicação móvel celular. Serão investigadas as práticas comerciais da operadora de telefonia móvel celular Vivo, sob a ótica das teorias propostas. Para que esta análise ocorra será realizada uma pesquisa quantitativa com 120 empresas, divididas entre clientes e ex-clientes, entrevistas em profundidade com 08 empresas, também dividas entre clientes e ex-clientes e entrevistas em profundidade com os executivos responsáveis pela arquitetura das estratégias comerciais. Baseado no resultado da pesquisa, das entrevistas e da análise das teorias propostas, este estudo pretende apontar as práticas de marketing que podem gerar lealdade nos clientes empresariais de pequeno e médio porte no mercado de telefonia móvel celular. / The present work has the purpose of analyzing the process of the corporate consumer's loyalty in the market of cellular mobile communication. The commercial practices of the Vivo operator of cellular mobile telephony will be investigated, under the optics of the proposed theories. So that this analysis happens a quantitative research will be accomplished with 120 companies, divided between customers and former-customers, interviews in depth with 08 companies, also divide between customers and former-customers and interviews in depth with the responsible executives for the architecture of the commercial strategies. Based on the result of the research, of the interviews and of the analysis of the proposed theories, this study intends the marketing practices that can generate loyalty in the business customers of small and medium load in the market of cellular mobile telephony to appear.

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