Management of Virtual Organizations faces new challenges that traditional approaches cannot address. This research proposes a performance measurement framework for service oriented virtual organizations including a structural and a procedural component. The structural framework aligns the activities of partners in a virtual organization at three different layers. The first layer is designed for partners’ strategic alignment through coordination of the value creation network. In the second layer, performance dimensions of partners’ collaboration are defined and mapped to the service choreography model. The third layer focuses on assessing effectiveness and efficiency of partners’ domain specific services, which is designed based on ITIL V3 service level management guidelines. In order to consolidate the structural framework, these three layers are integrated using a method for extracting service choreography model and SLA aggregation patterns from the value network. The procedural framework, on the other side, defines the processes required to design the KPI structure, implement the solution, communicate the results, and derive improvements. We propose an implementation architecture that enables inter-organizational performance management in collaborative environments. Then, the IBM products for business process and performance management (IBM BPM, Business Monitor, and Cognos BI) are employed to implement the proposed architecture. The conceptual framework along with the implementation architecture provides an integrated solution for decentralized performance measurement without the need for a central authority. We demonstrate that the proposed solution enhances flexibility, scalability, and interoperability, and supports transparency of partners’ performance information at an agreed-upon level as a basis for mutual trust.

The assurance of Quality of Service (QoS) to the applications, although identified as a key feature since long ago [1], is one of the fundamental challenges that remain unsolved. In the Cloud Computing context, Quality of Service is defined as the measure of the compliance of certain user requirement in the delivery of a cloud resource, such as CPU or memory load for a virtual machine, or more abstract and higher level concepts such as response time or availability. Several research groups, both from academia and industry, have started working on describing the QoS levels that define the conditions under which the service need to be delivered, as well as on developing the necessary means to effectively manage and evaluate the state of these conditions. [2] propose Service Level Agreements (SLAs) as the vehicle for the definition of QoS guarantees, and the provision and management of resources. A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a formal contract between providers and consumers, which defines the quality of service, the obligations and the guarantees in the delivery of a specific good. In the context of Cloud computing, SLAs are considered to be machine readable documents, which are automatically managed by the provider's platform. SLAs need to be dynamically adapted to the variable conditions of resources and applications. In a multilayer architecture, different parts of an SLA may refer to different resources. SLAs may therefore express complex relationship between entities in a changing environment, and be applied to resource selection to implement intelligent scheduling algorithms. Therefore SLAs are widely regarded as a key feature for the future development of Cloud platforms. However, the application of SLAs for Grid and Cloud systems has many open research lines. One of these challenges, the modeling of the landscape, lies at the core of the objectives of the Ph. D. Thesis. / García García, A. (2014). SLA-Driven Cloud Computing Domain Representation and Management [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/36579 / TESIS

El texto completo de este trabajo no está disponible en el Repositorio Académico UPC por restricciones de la casa editorial donde ha sido publicado. / The present research seeks to show the importance of applying process management techniques and food safety norms in the operational processes of the supply chain to know the meaning and the need for an integrated hybrid model. The article reviews the sugarcane distillery sector of Peru and its main operational problems. Based on the literature reviewed and discussed with academics who have knowledge of the food supply chain, an integrated hybrid model was developed to help any distillery with lower levels of competitiveness than its competitors in other sectors, such as pisco, applying techniques of process management and food safety to increase the efficiency of liquor distilleries. The findings confirm that distilleries can increase their efficiency, thanks to the higher performance of their operations after their alignment with the integrated model. / Revisión por pares

El texto completo de este trabajo no está disponible en el Repositorio Académico UPC por restricciones de la casa editorial donde ha sido publicado. / The present research seeks to show the importance of applying process management techniques and food safety norms in the operational processes of the supply chain to know the meaning and the need for an integrated hybrid model. The article reviews the sugarcane distillery sector of Peru and its main operational problems. Based on the literature reviewed and discussed with academics who have knowledge of the food supply chain, an integrated hybrid model was developed to help any distillery with lower levels of competitiveness than its competitors in other sectors, such as pisco, applying techniques of process management and food safety to increase the efficiency of liquor distilleries. The findings confirm that distilleries can increase their efficiency, thanks to the higher performance of their operations after their alignment with the integrated model. / Revisión por pares

[pt] A utilização do modelo para ressuprimento automático de estoque pelo fornecedor (Vendor Management Inventory) é um dos fatores importantes para as empresas promoverem um equilíbrio entre o nível de serviço acordado com o cliente e o custo logístico inerente à operação de gestão de estoques. Devido à importância do tema, e com a oportunidade da autora participar da implementação do programa VMI em uma empresa no ramo de distribuição de combustíveis para gestão de estoques de postos de combustíveis, o objetivo desta dissertação foi avaliar o quão efetivo é a metodologia VMI desenvolvida e adotada na melhoria dos indicadores de desempenho. Para tal, foram feitas análises de seis indicadores para cinco clientes envolvidos nesta operação e, realizada a comparação entre os programas VMI em duas empresas distintas, buscando avaliar os fatores críticos, as melhores práticas e vantagens competitivas. A metodologia utilizada para a elaboração desta dissertação contempla pesquisas bibliográficas, dados de fontes primárias extraídos de sistemas de informação da empresa, entrevistas com funcionários envolvidos neste processo, e visitas in loco para observação direta. Os resultados desta dissertação foram a análise da efetividade do programa VMI para a melhoria dos indicadores de desempenho, os motivos que contribuíram para estes resultados e a proposta de melhoria do programa VMI baseada na comparação da aplicação do programa em empresas no mesmo segmento. / [en] The use of an efficient model for inventory replenishment by the supplier, VMI (Vendor Management Inventory) is one of the most important factors for companies to promote a balanced trade-off between the service level offered to the customer and the logistics costs inherent in the operation of inventory management. Due to the importance of this subject, and the opportunity of the author to take part in the implementation of the VMI program in a company of the fuel distribution sector for inventory management of gas stations, the objective of this master’s thesis is to evaluate how effective the VMI methodology is to improve performance indicators. To this end, the six indicators for five customers involved in this operation were analyzed and a comparison made among the VMI programs between two different companies, to evaluate the critical success factors, best practices and competitive advantages. The methodology used to prepare this dissertation includes bibliographic research, extracted data from primary sources of information system of the company, interviews with employees involved in this process, as well as in situ visits for direct observation. The results of this thesis were to analysis the effectiveness of the VMI program for the improvement of the performance indicators, the reasons that contributed to these results and the proposal of improvement actions for the VMI program based on the comparison of the program in two different companies of the same segment.

In hosting environments such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) clouds, desirable application performance is typically guaranteed through the use of Service Level Agreements (SLAs), which specify minimal fractions of resource capacities that must be allocated by a service provider for unencumbered use by customers to ensure proper operation of their workloads. Most IaaS offerings are presented to customers as fixed-size and fixed-price SLAs, that do not match well the needs of specific applications. Furthermore, arbitrary colocation of applications with different SLAs may result in inefficient utilization of hosts' resources, resulting in economically undesirable customer behavior. In this thesis, we propose the design and architecture of a Colocation as a Service (CaaS) framework: a set of strategic and operational services that allow the efficient colocation of customer workloads. CaaS strategic services provide customers the means to specify their application workload using an SLA language that provides them the opportunity and incentive to take advantage of any tolerances they may have regarding the scheduling of their workloads. CaaS operational services provide the information necessary for, and carry out the reconfigurations mandated by strategic services. We recognize that it could be the case that there are multiple, yet functionally equivalent ways to express an SLA. Thus, towards that end, we present a service that allows the provably-safe transformation of SLAs from one form to another for the purpose of achieving more efficient colocation. Our CaaS framework could be incorporated into an IaaS offering by providers or it could be implemented as a value added proposition by IaaS resellers. To establish the practicality of such offerings, we present a prototype implementation of our proposed CaaS framework.

Currently, many industrial companies generate many losses in their after sales this is generated to an error in the control of inventories and in turn in a mishandling of their assets through their processes, therefore the present research proposes a management model of processes and control of inventories in order to reduce customer losses due to the large number of existing complaints and thus increase sales. Therefore, the process management model, which will contribute to the standardization, optimization and control of its critical processes, and for which indicators, procedures and policies will be proposed for each stage of the process in order to measure its efficiency and effectiveness for correct decision making. With respect to the control of inventories, it is proposed to make a segmentation of the products, which allows the identification of the most important products for the company, to then design a demand forecast model for families of products that will later be individualized considering their factors initial and finally using an inventory management model will obtain the optimal quantity of spare parts order to use in the technical service of the equipment reducing the annual costs related to the inventory.

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We study techniques to enforce and provision differentiated service levels in Computational Grid systems. The Grid offers simplified provisioning of peak-capacity for applications with computational requirements beyond local machines and clusters, by sharing resources across organizational boundaries. Current systems have focussed on access control, i.e., managing who is allowed to run applications on remote sites. Very little work has been done on providing differentiated service levels for those applications that are admitted. This leads to a number of problems when scheduling jobs in a fair and efficient way. For example, users with a large number of long-running jobs could starve out others, both intentionally and non-intentionally. We investigate the requirements of High Performance Computing (HPC) applications that run in academic Grid systems, and propose two models of service-level management. Our first model is based on global real-time quota enforcement, where projects are granted resource quota, such as CPU hours, across the Grid by a centralized allocation authority. We implement the SweGrid Accounting System to enforce quota allocated by the Swedish National Allocations Committee in the SweGrid production Grid, which connects six Swedish HPC centers. A flexible authorization policy framework allows provisioning and enforcement of two different service levels across the SweGrid clusters; high-priority and low-priority jobs. As a solution to more fine-grained control over service levels we propose and implement a Grid Market system, using a market-based resource allocator called Tycoon. The conclusion of our research is that although the Grid accounting solution offers better service level enforcement support than state-of-the-art production Grid systems, it turned out to be complex to set the resource price and other policies manually, while ensuring fairness and efficiency of the system. Our Grid Market on the other hand sets the price according to the dynamic demand, and it is further incentive compatible, in that the overall system state remains healthy even in the presence of strategic users. / QC 20101116