The inefficient logistics in the construction industry is wasting vast amounts of time and resources. The major contracting firms are aware of the problem and have developed new logistics systems to reduce the waste, but all in vain. The developments are not accepted in practice. This thesis seeks to find and then reduce the factors that make implementation difficult. A literature review provides a theoretical framework. Both a quantitative and a qualitative study are addressed to site managers in larger contracting firms, as well as their suppliers. Results reveal that the three major obstacles are organisational inertia, communication difficulties and poor knowledge management. To overcome these problems, both current theories and empirical results suggest that problems and solution should be shared between production managers on seminars or similar. Know-how must be retained and shared between projects by developing standards for knowledge management on central level in the organisation.

Aparte del primer capítulo que es la introducción, la tesis consiste de tres ensayos. En el segundo capítulo estoy analizando el problema de implementación en el mercado de bienes indivisibles. El modelo trata de asignar un conjunto de bienes indivisibles a los agentes donde cada agente tiene que pagar el precio por el bien que reciba y la suma de los precios tiene que ser igual a un valor determinado. Un ejemplo estándar es el problema de inquilinos donde ha de determinar quien recibe que habitación y que precio tiene que pagar dado que la suma de los precios de las habitaciones que los inquilinos pagan por un piso tiene que ser igual al arriendo. El objetivo consiste en, desconociendo las verdaderas valoraciones de los bienes que tengan los agentes, seleccionar la asignación de los bienes y los precios correspondientes que sea eficaz y que los agentes no tengan envidia. En general, los agentes no tendrán los incentivos para revelar sus verdaderas valuaciones sino otras que permitirían conseguir una asignación más favorable. Como consecuencia, los criterios de eficiencia y sin-envidia no estarán logrados. Sin embargo, he demostrado que las posibilidades de los agentes manipular las asignaciones y los precios están limitadas en el equilibrio. Es decir, he demostrado que seleccionando la asignación con los precios correspondientes que sea eficaz y sin-envidia con respecto a las valoraciones anunciadas, y no necesariamente verdaderas, asegura que en los equilibrios de Nash y Nash Fuerte la asignación seleccionada también es eficaz y sin-envidia con respecto a las valoraciones verdaderas.El tercer capítulo se trata de subastas cuando hay un comprador dominante que desalienta la participación de otros compradores en la subasta, y como la consecuencia los precios suban poco. El objetivo consiste en comparar varias formas de subastas que han sido diseñadas para fomentar la participación. En literatura se han propuesto una mezcla de la subasta inglesa y holandesa. El uso de la subasta holandesa beneficia a los participantes desfavorecidos y por lo tanto aumenta su participación y los ingresos del vendedor. Eso ocurre a coste de eficiencia, se puede ganar la subasta no teniendo la valoración más alta entre los compradores. Nosotros hemos propuesto una subasta alternativa para fomentar la participación y que consiste de la subasta inglesa en dos etapas. En la primera etapa se fija un precio de reserva y si nadie está dispuesto a pagarlo hay la segunda etapa sin precio de reserva. Los participantes potenciales en la segunda etapa aprenden que los que ya han entrado en la primera etapa no tienen las valoraciones altas, por lo tanto tienen mayor probabilidad de ganar. Eso, en vez, atrae mayor participación. Eligiendo un precio de reserva apropiado genera al vendedor más ingresos y además es más eficaz que la otra subasta.El último capítulo consiste del análisis empírico de las subastas que lleva a cabo la compañía "Bosques Estatales de Letonia" para vender el derecho de talar los árboles en los bosques del estado a empresas privadas. La compañía en cada subasta ofrece varios lotes de bosque, y los lotes se venden en secuencia. Los compradores que estén interesados en la dicha lote, compiten en la subasta inglesa. La teoría económica sugiere que el orden en que se venden los lotes es importante cuando los lotes son heterogéneos - los ingresos del vendedor son mayores si empiezan con los lotes más valiosos y venden en el orden decreciente por valor. Mi objetivo es contrastar la dicha hipótesis. El análisis econométrico prosigue en dos etapas. Primero, dado el supuesto que se vende la lote siempre y cuando su valor supera el precio inicial que el vendedor ha fijado, he estimado un modelo de Probit para inferir las valuaciones de los lotes. En la segunda etapa yo contrasto la hipótesis que el orden de la venta no afecta los ingresos del vendedor y no encuentro la evidencia para rechazar la dicha hipótesis. / Besides the introductory chapter, my thesis consists of three essays. In the first essay of my thesis I consider the problem of assigning agents to indivisible objects in which each agent must pay the price of the object he gets and prices must sum to a given number. A standard example is the housemate problem where a group of tenants is sharing an apartment and they must decide who gets which room and how much each must pay, subject to the constraint that the sum of their contributions must equal the rent of the apartment. Previous research concentrated on mechanisms that select an assignment-price pair, which is envy-free and efficient, assuming the knowledge of agents' valuations. However, it is well known that for any mechanism agents have incentives to misrepresent their true valuations if it leads to higher utility. I treat the assignment problem as a game and prove that the mechanism, in which agents are simply required to announce their (possibly false) valuations and an envy-free allocation is selected with respect to these announced valuations, will implement the set of envy-free allocations both in Nash and strong Nash. This means that, in equilibrium, the selected allocation will be envy-free also with respect to the true preferences. I demonstrate that by choosing an efficient and envy-free allocation a social planner does not need to worry about strategic issues, that is, the scope for agents to manipulate the allocations is limited in equilibrium. This result provides a justification on strategic grounds for the use of social choice functions selecting envy-free allocations.The second essay studies auctions when the presence of a strong buyer deters the entry of other potential bidders, preventing competition in the auction and leading to a low sales price. For example, the issue arose during third-generation mobile communication licenses auctions where incumbent firms could effectively discourage entry by threatening to outbid new entrants. As a response, the so-called Anglo-Dutch auction has been proposed to promote entry since the Dutch auction favors weak bidders relative to a pure English auction. However, that is achieved at the cost of efficiency. We propose an alternative two-stage English auction in order to encourage entry. In the first stage there is a reserve price, and if nobody bids at that price, then a second stage is conducted without the reserve price. Potential entrants of the second stage learn that those who entered in the first stage but did not bid have low valuations. This provides incentives for weak bidders to enter in the second stage. We show that by setting an appropriate reserve price it is possible to generate higher revenues for the seller than in the Anglo-Dutch auction and at the same time maintain efficiency. The latter implies that the two-stage English auction is superior to the Anglo-Dutch auction both from the seller's perspective and from a social welfare point of view.Many real life auctions sell more than one object; objects are usually different and often are sold sequentially; hence the questions arise of how the order of sales affects revenue and what the optimal order of sales is. The last essay addresses these issues. It consists of an empirical analysis of auctions conducted by the Latvian state company selling rights to harvest timber in state forests. In each auction the company offers several lots of forest, and they are sold sequentially through oral, ascending price auctions. Theory suggests that the revenues of the seller are highest when objects are sold in the order of decreasing value. My objective is to test empirically this hypothesis. Since we do not observe the valuations of lots the bidders have, first I estimate them, using a discrete choice model, based on the assumption that a lot will be sold if and only if its valuation exceeds the reserve price. Next, I test the order of sales effect on the revenues of the seller. I do not reject the hypothesis that the order does not have effect on the revenues of seller.

Parallel prefix sums algorithms are one of the simplest and most useful building blocks for constructing parallel algorithms. A generic implementation is valuable because of the wide range of applications for this method. This thesis presents a generic C++ implementation of parallel prefix sums. The implementation applies two separate parallel prefix sums algorithms: a recursive doubling (RD) algorithm and a binary-tree based (BT) algorithm. This implementation shows how common communication patterns can be separated from the concrete parallel prefix sums algorithms and thus simplify the work of parallel programming. For each algorithm, the implementation uses two different synchronization options: barrier synchronization and point-to-point synchronization. These synchronization options lead to different communication patterns in the algorithms, which are represented by dependency graphs between tasks. The performance results show that point-to-point synchronization performs better than barrier synchronization as the number of processors increases. As part of the applications for parallel prefix sums, parallel radix sort and four parallel tree applications are built on top of the implementation. These applications are also fundamental parallel algorithms and they represent typical usage of parallel prefix sums in numeric computation and graph applications. The building of such applications become straighforward given this generic implementation of parallel prefix sums.

Fiercely global competition and Taiwan¡¦s readiness to go along with WTO¡¦s requirement have put tremendous pressure on companies on this island to be more responsive to market by becoming more internally integrated enterprise and leveraging limited resources to exert synergy. The motivation that ERP systems are implemented are from several sources: internal system integration from an Intranet prespective, process efficiency improvement, upgrading legacy system, imitation from competitors. The electronics industries, which have been taking orders outsourced from multi-nation companies, are under great pressure from their international partners to implement ERP systems in order to capture the synergy effect of supply chain management. In addition, government subsidies for IT related investment in responding to Y2K crisis has encouraged companies to replace their old systems with ERP systems. The major problem confronted to the company that has implemented an ERP system is how to realize the benefits accompanied with the ERP implementation. Managerial adaptation is usually required when companies introduce a new technology. Thus, this research applies Leonard-Barton¡¦s perspective as the reference structure and adopts case study methodology to investigate how the three dimensions (technical, delivery system and organizational performance) could be related to the four chosen companies (an adaptor manufacturer, a passive component manufacturer, an IC packaging company and a LCD/LCM manufacturer). The data was collected mainly through semi-structured interviews. By doing the above, this research would like to explore the relationship between ERP implementation and organizational adaptation. Based on conventional wisdom, business process reengineering(BPR) goes together with ERP implementation. The research results indicated that BPR in these four cases was conducted according to the built-in system flows of the ERP package adopted. Because of this system-oriented implementation, the targeted company can exploit the integrity and internal flow of the implemented ERP to improve its information flows and strengthens the connection across different departments in the company. The system integrity and the paradigm of built-in flow are the main benefits derived from ERP implementation from the technology perspective. Guided by the built-in flow, the company can adapt itself through learning and obtain potential synergy. However, by so doing, the company is exposed to the risk of system function inadequacy and the deleterious impact brought by BPR, which is conducted without active participation of the user organization. In summary, the potential hazard of technology dimension comes from system function inadequacy and system transplant without conducting proper BPR. This in turn will increase the risk of software project and incur potential costs such as compromise and system tuning. According to data available, this research suggests that: 1.In case that ERP system function does not meet customer requirement, the system integrity should be preserved. 2.Guided by the built-in ERP system flow, the company can keep learning and achieve evolutionary change. 3.Change management is essential to ERP system delivery in order to realize the benefits of implementation. In summary, ERP implementation requires a careful mapping analysis of system function and user requirement. In addition, companies should pay more attention to managerial adaptation to enable organizational change and gain benefits through continuous learning.

Abstract In the turbulent time, an enterprise facing global competition must rapidly respond to change and sustain competitive advantage for survival. Workflow systems is a technology, which has the function of coordination, communication, and collaboration, to improve productivity and response time. However, the implementation of workflow systems needs much investment, but usually results in much gap between expectations and actual benefits. Therefore, it is an important issue to study the implementation of workflow system to assure the results of such investment. This research explores the influencing factors of implementing workflow systems from the organizational perspective (technology, task, people, and structure) and the process (initiation, adoption, and usage). In general, this study tries to answer the following questions: (1) What factors enable a company to initiate a workflow system? (2) What factors influence a company to adopt a workflow system? (3) What factors affect a company to use a workflow system? Based on the literature concerning implementing information system, groupware, and workflow system, this research induces the model of implementing workflow systems. After confirming this model by using case study method, this research proposes the reference model of implementing workflow systems. At the initiation phase, this research finds eight influencing factors: IT infrastructure suitable for workflow systems, human power of developing workflow systems, clear workflows, achievable objectives, top manager¡¦s knowledge and interest, user involvement in selection, size, and incentives system. At the adoption phase, six influencing factors are identified: adequate workflow systems, redesigning workflows, top manager¡¦s support, user involvement in system development, education of all users, and formalization. At the usage phase, we find six influencing factors: realized objectives, technology support, incremental implementation, top manager¡¦s usage, all users¡¦ usage, and corporate policy.

This paper is concerned about an implementation of an accelerated domain decomposition iterative procedure. In [4], Douglas and Huang had shown the convergence for one dimensional partitioning case. This time we make an implementation to show the numerical results, and further more extend our procedure to two dimensional partitioning case. Our results show that the parameter sequence do accelerate our iterative procedure. In one dimensional partitioning case, we have the rule to choose the parameter sequence[4], but in two dimensional partitioning case, we still have no idea about the rule, but we still try to find some parameters to make our procedure more e cient. After some tests, we find that the sequence {0.4, 0.43, 0.45, 0.47, 0.5} works. Though the iteration steps in two dimensional partitioning are not decreasing, our results show the computation time is almost the same as which in the two dimensional partitioning case. It means that the parallelized program could cut down the computation cost.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are becoming mature technologies to support inter- and intra-company business processes in many intermediate and small organizations. However, these systems are complex and expensive. Research indicated that about three-quarters of the ERP projects were judged unsuccessful. A common problem confronted when adopting ERP software has been the issue of misfits, that is, the gaps between the functionality offered by the package and that required and expected by the adopting organization. This study investigated a systematical approach to facilitate the process of ERP implementation. The methodology includes five steps: Implementation Definition, Operation Analysis, Real Practice, Final Preparation, On-line and Maintenance. An ERP implementation case is used to demonstrate the feasibility of the methodology and provide the experience of misfit solving. With this methodology, the ERP adopting organizations can more easily and systematically implement the ERP package. In addition, the experience provides greater insight for misfit solving confronted in the case, and thereby reduce the risk of ERP implementation.

Due to the changing society in Taiwan, R.O.C., values are badly twisted. Many teenagers make use of holiday nights to gather on highways to conduct dangerous driving (motorcycle racing). They cause traffic jams and obstruct traffic notoriously. What's worse, they even use violence to attack passengers, on-duty policemen and related government offices. Such behaviors not only break the law but also critically endanger social public security, posing threat to people's lives, bodies and properties. As police plays a role of maintaining social public security, the crackdowns and control of dangerous driving behaviors are important duties exercised by police. Dangerous driving control projects mainly adopt a "top-down" policy implementation model. The model emphasizes policy makers' decisions on policy goals and their leading position in directing actions. Basically, policy implementers are required to execute policy makers' will, that is, carry out supervisors' intentions and goals loyally in a strictly obedient top-down bureaucratic system. The model on one hand emphasizes a closely linked chain of orders and supervisors' control abilities; on the other hand, it advocates policy makers' reasonable design of policy implementation structure and regulations. Besides, the adoption of top-down implementation model usually emphasizes supervisors' goal-setting and project-planning abilities and overlooks lower-level implementers' motives, intentions and values. As it underestimates local officials' abilities in influencing policy goals, would it neglect a counterproductive effect exerted by policy implementers? While emphasizing laws and regulations, does it provide implementers with any discretion? Could it become a policy implementation game? As regards the bottom-up implementation model, it addresses the need of providing lower-level officials or local implementation organizations with discretion, which enables them to make suitable policies against a complicated environment. This means proper authorization for lower-level departments and subordinates to participate in policy making and implementation. In the model, supervisors or policy makers are not policy leaders but rather supporters who leave sufficient room for discretion so lower-level officials or local implementation organizations can construct a policy implementation process adaptable to the implementation environment. In such thinking mode and from the aspect of policy implementation, the study tries to examine and evaluate police organizations' dangerous driving control policies. A case study of the police organizations in Kaohsiung City was conducted. Based on a policy implementation theory constructed from three research approaches - top-down model of the first generation, bottom-up model of the second generation and integrated model of the third generation, the study made a comprehensive survey of the three research approaches and used it as the research method of the study. The main structure of the study is divided into five chapters: Chapter One - Introduction, which describes the motive, purpose and scope of study and definition of related terms; Chapter Two - Theory Basis and Literature Review, which reviews literature associated with the policy implementation theory constructed from the three research approaches, builds a study framework and decides research methods to be used in the study; Chapter Three - Research Methods, Scope and Limitations; Chapter Four - Analysis of the Results of Evaluation of Police Organizations' Dangerous Driving Control Policies, which makes analysis and induction through in-depth interviews with police officers to find out the reasons for various behaviors that affect police officers' implementation of dangerous driving control policies; Chapter Five - Conclusion and Suggestions, which raises problems discovered in the study, proposes improvement suggestions on dangerous driving control, provides police organizations with the best implementation tool from various dangerous driving control policies and analyses which one is the best in consideration of the choice and use of police tools.

Paderborn, Universität, Habilitation, 2002.

The focus of this master’s thesis is to understand the challenges that middle managers face in highly turbulent internal and external environments of an organization. Middle Managers have to often perform several roles in an organization such as Entrepreneur, Translator, Team Leader, and Motivator. This research provides tools and techniques for the Middle Managers to implement strategy and to help them become an integral part of strategic renewal process, while performing these roles. The research identifies techniques that could help address the challenge of maintaining a balance between concurrent existence of stability and creative chaos within their organizations. The output of the research is a guideline that Middle Managers can use to facilitate successful execution of strategy at middle levels and in-turn build middle management excellence. / text