The telecommunications industry has been in the process of merging. However, the decline of Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) shows the saturation of mobile phone market. At the same time, the Directorate General of Telecommunications (DGT) has announced the implementation of number portability will be in January 2005. Therefore, the resort to sell handsets in high discounts is unavoidable to retain the existing customers and get the new subscribers. Because the high cost, short product lifecycle, diversity of usage, uncertainty of leading time in procurement and indefinite of consumers¡¦ demands, the management of handset inventory has been perplexed the telecommunication industry. This research tries to create an inventory model to provide the mobile phone companies a direction for deciding what the right order quantity is and when the re-order point is. It also can improve the satisfaction of customers and enforce the partnership with vendors. The vendor managed inventory (VMI) which is different from traditional inventory management is taken into consideration, and the target is the high-end function handset. The model will employ the data of average demand in the past few months and the decline curve of market price as the base. The relation of handsets has been created by using the characteristics of classified product. The methodology of time series analysis is used for this research. The construct of this handset inventory model is from the viewpoint of telecommunication industry.

Product life cycle (PLC) may be used as a managerial tool. Marketing strategies must change as the product goes through its life cycle. If managers understand the cycle concept, they are in a better position to forecast the future sales activities and plan marketing strategies. However, people often make the wrong PLC because of the difficulty of data access and lacking decision-making information. Therefore, this thesis applies customer behavior model to analyze the relationship between the frequency and the duration time from the product discussion, and it calculates the PLC pattern to explore the product¡¦s current position in customers¡¦ mind. Finally, the PLC curve will be constructed by using the information that we got from previous analysis. Moreover, we also employ data mining and information retrieval technique to diagnose the variance of discussion frequency and the content of discussion article to extract the distinctive event that influenced PLC curve. The main contributions of this thesis are described as the following sentence:

There is growing interest in the assessment of products from a life cycle perspective. Product life cycles are often dominated by extensive chemical supply chains that lead up to the materials contained in the products and the overwhelming contribution that the production of these chemicals make to the overall life cycle due to their energy intensity. Hence, chemical engineers are uniquely positioned to carry out significant components of this assessment because of their skills in chemical process design and analysis. Furthermore, the complexity and extent of life cycle concerns creates opportunities for new process systems tools to be developed to support product design and analysis. The specific thesis objectives are threefold. The first is to develop a systematic methodology to optimize material selections for a product based on life cycle inventory (LCI) characteristics. The second is to use this methodology combined with sustainability assessment standards to assess whether these standards are congruent with life cycle assessment. The third is to develop an approach to design product sustainability assessment standards that are clear and consistent with life cycle principles. The overall contributions will be in the applied domain of life cycle assessment and its integration into standards setting, and in contributions to optimization tools and methods. The three objectives will be illustrated in the domain of carpet systems. Previous research has generated a substantial database of gate-to-gate (GTG) life cycle inventories for various chemicals that make up carpet, extending from the inputs to the final carpet mill back to the natural resources such as oil, natural gas and mined calcium carbonate. Carpet recycling is a promising alternative approach for reducing life cycle impacts and is being practiced at a growing scale in the U.S. This thesis uses the specific individual LCI gate-to-gate blocks for virgin materials and for important carpet recycling and general polymer recycling processes. A database for the GTG LCI will be used to construct a virtual chemical tree that automatically that represents the potential cradle-to-gate (CTG) use of resources. The alternatives for each possible route for the product will be generated, and optimization approaches will be applied to optimize the performance of the carpet system according to life cycle objectives. Sustainability assessment standards are currently being developed for a range of building products, such as carpet, resilient flooring, commercial textile coverings and office furniture. This activity has been stimulated through the considerable success of the U.S. Green Building Council's (USGBC) LEED standard. The LEED Standard is points-based: the building design and construction earns points for having certain attributes or promoting certain activities. The points are totaled and then the building earns a rating based on the total being above a certain threshold. The second thesis objective is met through extending the LCI optimization methodology to represent point-based standards. A product can then be optimized to maximize the number of points it earns or to minimize its life cycle attributes. This approach can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of an emerging carpet sustainability standard, NSF-140, in integrating LCI into the standard. The last objective, standard design, is approached through designing the tables that award points in the standard to be consistent with life cycle information. Certain minimum principles of consistency are articulated and then the designs shown to be consistent with these principles in the case that the life cycle impact assessment method maps the life cycle inventory to impact through a linear weighting.

<p>The purpose of this thesis is to analyze the effect of human capital in Swedish export. Human capital is here expressed as the number of employees in the private sector per municipality with university education of at least three years. Two regression models were tested with aggregated export value/municipality and export value per kilo/municipality as dependent variables. Human capital as well as the total accessibility to R&D was assumed to have a positive impact on the Swedish export performance.</p><p>During the last decades many economists have attached great importance to education, knowledge and investments in R&D. Sweden is in general abundant in human capital and have also several world leading companies characterized by knowledge intensive production and export. According to the Product Life Cycle Theory, Sweden should focus on the first phase that requires high input of human capital and product competition to maintain the competitiveness in the international market.</p><p>The results indicate as expected that the access to human capital as well as accessibility to R&D have a positive impact on the Swedish aggregated export value and export value per kilo. The assumption about human capital being even more important in high value export could not be confirmed by the results. Innovation promoting investments together with continuous efforts to improve innovation nets and interaction possibilities are presumed to be important factors for Swedish competitiveness also in the future.</p>

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2003. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 91-96). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

In light of increasing pressure from environmental safety advocate groups and governments for eco-friendly manufacturing, safe after life product & waste disposal has had strong emphasizes in the past several years. Industrial manufacturers are becoming more and more responsive towards environment safety concerns. These efforts are being reflected by concepts such as green design or environmentally responsible design and manufacturing (ERDM). The key research areas in the 21st century for reducing the toll on the environment will be material recycling, controlled waste disposal (including fluids and gases) and remanufacturing. Remanufacturing offers a dual advantage over material recycling. First the geometrical form of the product and the functional capabilities are restored with fairly low costs. Second, it reduces the need for dumping or disposal, making it better for the environment Remanufacturing is also an avenue to enforce product take back which has become important for the integrating environmental considerations. Remanufacturing can be lucrative and thus a motivating factor for the profit oriented industrial community.The work in this research is based on making remanufacturing more distinctive in terms of product design. An approach that incorporates remanufacturing principles at the product design inception phase can be highly beneficial in the context of after life processing of product. The approach used in this research is one of determining a suitable method of calculating the remanufacturing index (RI). The remanufacturing index of a product serves as a beforehand indication of the degree of the efforts return a product to its original geometrical shape and functional capabilities. This index will provide an insight at the time of initial design of a particular product for understanding afterlife scenarios, which might help to reduce waste, save energy, virgin material, and other resources.The remanufacturing index formulation devised in this research considers all the major aspects of product after life, including disassembly, recycling and other damage correction efforts. This research offers modular analyses of a product for the purpose of remanufacturing. The index is a collection of interfacing elements such as inspection, damage correction and environmental impact. It considers all possible after life aspects of a product and combines them in a systematic manner to give a fair outlook of efforts to remanufacture.

Given the context of globalization and growing competition, we assist at a reduction of the product life cycle and at a rapid diffusion of creations and innovations. To respond to the fast changing customers’ demand and to reinforce their market position, firms shall design an effective creative process offering superior customer value and insuring their future in the long term. First of all, after an explanation of the differences between creativity and innovation, the creative process of high-tech firms in terms of actors involved, resources allocation, leadership and management of creative people will be depicted. Secondly, the creative destruction process and some of the inherent obstacles and risks of the creative process will be addressed. Thirdly, the concepts of Technology Life Cycle (TLC) and Product Life Cycle (PLC) will be developed. Within this thesis, our ideas are presented and justified through three methodologies: Literature Review, case study and interview. We mainly used the cases of Hewlett-Packard (HP) and France Telecom Orange (FTO) to backup our argumentation. We conceptualized the creative process and we highlighted the connections between the creative process and the Product Life Cycle. With the help of two other small cases study (Nintendo and Apple), we emphasized the downward trend of high-tech products’ lifecycle in the long run. Ultimately, four practical recommendations are given to leaders from high-tech industries and directions to deeper research this topic are advised.

No description available.

No description available.

This study was an exploration of the product life cycle theory as a strategic decision-making tool in an auto-catalyst manufacturing plant. During the literature review stage of this study, many gaps in the product life cycle theory were identified. The product life cycle theory has come under criticism from numerous academic authors. It was also found that there was a definite lack of empirical studies carried out on South African companies and products. The main focus of this study was to investigate use and practical applicability of the product life in strategic decision making in a South African organisation, which is a subsidiary of a multinational corporation. A major limitation to this study was that the decision makers at Johnson Matthey South Africa showed a lack of understanding of strategy, and their role in strategic decision making. From the data collected, using a questionnaire survey methodology, the major findings were that the product life cycle theory has application potential as a strategic decision making tool in future, The decision makers at Johnson Matthey have a good knowledge of their products and where they were on the product life cycle. Further empirical research, into the applicability of the product life cycle theory is needed, on South African organisations. / Thesis (MBA)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Westville, 2006.