<p>Radio Frequency Identification RFID är en teknologi för att kunna identifiera produkter via radiovågor, detta med hjälp av radiosändare. Denna uppsats intresserar sig för hur RFID kan användas i tillverkningsföretag och om tekniken kan förbättra och förenkla materialflödesprocesserna. RFID är en relativt komplicerad teknik därför har denna uppsats som syfte att ge företag praktiska tips inför en implementering. För att kunna besvara problemformuleringen har Hästens Sängar AB används som praktikfall. Intervjuer har även gjorts med RFID leverantörer och av företag som idag använder RFID, för att få det praktiska perspektivet.</p><p>RFID används mer och mer i tillverkningsföretag även om utvecklingen har gått långsammare än förväntat. Tekniken kan enligt teorin förbättra kontrollen i följande processer: beställning & lager, tillverkningsprecision, plockkvalitet och leveransprecision.</p><p>Tekniken kan förbättra kontrollen och därmed effektivisera arbetsprocessen vilket i sin tur genererar tidsbesparing och ökad lönsamhet. Det finns dock risker med RFID, såsom höga kostnader, bristen på standarder och ökad sårbarhet.</p><p>Det bör göras uträkningar på avkastning på investeringen innan RFID implementeras. Tidsbesparing och ökad vinst av kontroll är något som behövs räknas ut och analyseras. Efter det börjar implementeringsfasen. Det är viktigt att tänka på att RFID måste vara individuellt utformat för att fungera optimalt. RFID är inget ”plug and play” system, det kommer att behövas en lång testperiod med justeringar efter att systemet är implementerat. Det är även viktigt att ha en noga utformad kravspecifikation och uppsatta mål som utfallet kan jämföras mot.</p><p>För att RFID ska kunna öka kontrollen krävs det att systemet fungerar felfritt. Det finns dock externa material som kan försämra användningen. Metall och vätska kan försämra taggarnas radiovågor. Även utomhusklimat som inkluderar hög/låg temperatur, fukt och dimma försämrar taggarnas sändningsförmåga. Det kan även finnas högspänningsledningar hos företagen som försämrar taggarnas funktion. Det är därför viktigt att analysera dessa problem innan en implementering utförs. För att motverka sådana komplikationer kan olika sorters taggar användas och även olika frekvenser på radiovågorna.</p><p>RFID är en teknik som om den fungerar till fullo kan öka möjligheten till kontroll och jämförelse vilket i sin tur kan leda till ökad kvalitet även till ökad effektivitet vilket leder till ökad lönsamhet.</p><p>Nyckelord: RFID, Supply Chain Management, implementering, processförbättring</p>

<p>In this paper I study how the repeal of the Swedish wealth tax (1 of January 2007) has affected people´s labour supply behaviour. This particular issue is relevant because it may help us understand some of the effects of the earnings tax changes that have taken place in Sweden. Accoring to standard economic theory a repealed wealth tax is similar to an income effect for the persons who previously paid the tax. That means that they theoretically will want to consume more leisure, that is decrease their labour supply. The method I am using to test this hypothesis is a difference-in-difference approach where the treatment group consists of persons who previously paid the tax and the control group of comparable persons who did not pay the tax. The data I am using is taken from a Swedish database called LINDA, compiled by the Swedish Central Agency for Statistics (SCB). My main result in this paper is that the repealed wealth tax does not seem to have had any influnece on the labour supply behavior of the persons who previously paid the tax.</p>

Personal preparedness and self-�����reliance have been themes of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-�����day Saints since its early days as an organized religion. These themes are still strong and vibrant today and one of their key aspects is the practice of food storage. Personal and familial preparation for problems that may be encountered in the course of life are an integral part of the discourse around food storage, as well as the need to be obedient to the admonitions of their church leaders. Though most informants involved in this study would agree that obedience is a key aspect behind their keeping of a storage, there is great variation in their commitment and interpretation of the "Word" as they see it pertaining to their own families. Other key themes that emerged from the data were that a food storage offers peace of mind and security, and that it will be needed to help others as well as their own families. These themes and others are what comprise the Unofficial Word of food storage. This thesis specifically presents research on the differences between the Official and Unofficial Word as they pertain to the practice of food storage by members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-�����day Saints. As the practice of food storage among members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-�����day Saints has not been previously studied anthropologically, this thesis will attempt to show how an overarching hierarchy, such as religion, can so deeply affect the way people view, think about, and practice common tasks such as food choice, food consumption, and food preservation. / Graduation date: 2013

The Accreditation Board for Engineering Technology (ABET) requires that safety and health be integrated into an engineering curriculum in order to be accredited. These criteria for safety and health requirements, however, are not clearly defined. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has initiated Project SHAPE (Safety and Health Awareness for Preventative Engineering) instructional topics and curriculum development for engineering programs for the greater than 300 ABET accredited engineering schools. The present study was designed to evaluate how important safety and health (addressed as Environmental Safety and Health) knowledge/education are to an employer when seeking graduating Bachelor of Science Engineering students at Oregon State University (OSU). The study also seeks to find out what magnitude of ES&H instruction/knowledge is desired by prospective employers. And finally, the type or level of knowledge/education employers are seeking in their prospective OSU engineering employee. A questionnaire was developed and targeted at companies who recruited graduating Bachelor of Science Engineering students at OSU for employment during the 1993/1994 and 1994/1995 academic years. A roster of recruiters and the companies they represented generated a population of 110 recruiters from records kept in the Oregon State University Career Placement Office. Each recruiter was requested to complete a four page questionnaire. Participants were requested to rank qualifications for employment when seeking prospective engineering employees; how important ES&H were when considering a candidate; what kind and level of ES&H knowledge/education was preferred; and if a graduating B.S. Engineering student with ES&H knowledge/education was more likely to gain employment with their firm. A total of 72 surveys were returned, for an overall response rate of 65.5%. The results indicated that recruiters seeking graduating B.S. engineering students at OSU found ES&H knowledge/education 'Not Too' or 'Not At All' important when considering them for employment. However, the majority of those recruiters that indicated ES&H was an important qualification when considering an engineering candidate for employment, indicated the source of ES&H knowledge/education was through integration into the engineering curriculum. / Graduation date: 1998

Decisions on capacity are often treated separately from those of production and inventory. In most situations, capacity issues are longer-term, so capacity-related decisions are considered strategic and thus not part of supply planning. This research focuses on optimal supply planning with emphasis on variable capacity to meet uncertain demand. It also defines three levels of capacity change: operating hours, labor availability and production hardware availability. The work presented here deals with the fundamental decisions to determine capacity, production, and inventory to meet customer demand while optimizing revenue and costs over a planning horizon (typically the life of the product). With the Lagrangian technique for constrained optimization, it can be shown that the optimal supply capacity has upper and lower bounds. The optimal feedback policy prescribes increasing the supply capacity when at the beginning of the planning interval it is below the lower bound. Similarly, the supply capacity should be decreased to the upper bound when it is above the upper bound. This paper will present arguments for characterizing forecast evolution and information sharing in the supply chain to obtain a predictor-corrector approach to supply chain control. / Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA)

We propose a general methodology based on robust optimization to address the problem of optimally controlling a supply chain subject to stochastic demand in discrete time. The attractive features of the proposed approach are: (a) It incorporates a wide variety of phenomena, including demands that are not identically distributed over time and capacity on the echelons and links; (b) it uses very little information on the demand distributions; (c) it leads to qualititatively similar optimal policies (basestock policies) as in dynamic programming; (d) it is numerically tractable for large scale supply chain problems even in networks, where dynamic programming methods face serious dimensionality problems; (e) in preliminary computation experiments, it often outperforms dynamic programming based solutions for a wide range of parameters. / Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA)

In the paper, we minimize the holding cost of the safety stock held in a supply chain modeled as a general network. By our assumption, the demand is bounded by a concave function. This fact allows us to formulate the problem as a deterministic optimization. We minimize a concave function over a discrete polyhedron. The main goal of the paper is to describe an algorithm to solve the problem without assuming any particular structure of the underlying supply chain. The algorithm is a branch and bound algorithm. / Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA)

Due to the perceived performance implications of green supply chain management, research in this area has grown in recent years. However, the literature is limited on the determinants of green supply chain management and its performance implications. Thus, the literature has yet to furnish an accepted explanation for why green practices are manifested in supply chain management and, whether a positive relationship exists between green supply chain management practices and firm performance. This dissertation responded to these challenges through exploring the antecedents and consequences of green supply chain management. This dissertation built on the theoretical base of the resource-based view of the firm (RBV) and investigated two potentially important determinants of green supply chain management practices, and how such practices, in turn, shape firm performance. Specifically, a theoretical model was developed that offered hypothesized relationships among the resources of an environmental orientation, a supply chain orientation, and green supply chain management practices, and how these resources relate to firm performance. Significant results and good fit indices tested with structural equation modeling generated a number of interesting theoretical implications for scholars and practical implications for supply chain managers. The results challenge the current theoretical and operationalization of the green supply chain management construct. The results also show the strategic implications of firm orientations. Finally, for executives and strategists who are concerned about better managing their supply chains, this study provides insights for how firms can develop a competitive edge through the implementation of green supply chain management practices.

Biofuels have been widely recognized as a potential renewable energy source that can lessen the United States’ dependence on imported petroleum and enhance the domestic economy. Particularly, biofuels derived from lignocellulosic biomass (LCB) have been the focus in the development of a sustainable biofuels industry. However, technical barriers in the LCB feedstock supply chain have been one of the major challenges impeding the economic viability of this industry. To expedite the commercialization process of LCB-based biofuels production, this paper employed a spatial mixed-integer mathematical model to explore the optimal biomass logistic system for a switchgrass-based biofuels biorefinery in East Tennessee. The evaluated logistic systems in this study included five conventional systems (one round bale system, one square bale system, and three mixed bale systems) in the baseline scenario and one stretch-wrap bale system in the preprocessing scenario. Results showed that the stretch-wrap bale system could potentially reduce total logistic cost of switchgrass by 12 to 21% compared that of the conventional systems. Also, the result of the optimal case in the conventional systems suggested that the mixed bale system without storage protection is most economical after taking into account the dry matter loss during storage. This study also provided information regarding the optimal location of a biorefinery, a switchgrass production plan, monthly harvested and delivered tonnage, and the draw area of switchgrass under each logistic system. The optimal location of a commercial-scale biorefinery was identified to be located in the northwest of Monroe County, a location close to the demonstration plant in Venore, Tennessee. Additionally, this study showed that the percentage of available hay land used for switchgrass production, the switchgrass-ethanol conversion rate, the energy prices, and the storage dry matter loss of compact switchgrass bale produce significant impacts on the total logistic cost of switchgrass for the biorefinery.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2006. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 128-135).