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Course:        Bachelor Thesis in Business Administration, 15 ECTS   Topic:          The Impact of Strategic Purchasing on an Organization’s Profitability                      A Case Study of Ghana Telecom Company                                                     Supervisor:     Mats Viimne Background:  The purchasing function contributes directly to the operating results and                        profitability of an organization. It has been argued out that, the fact that                        purchasing is responsible for spending more than 60 percent of an organization’s                            sales dollars highlights the profit-enhancing potentials of the purchasing on an                        organization.                                     Problem:       How can strategic purchasing affect the profitability of an organization?   Purpose:       The purpose of this research is to describe how strategic purchasing impact on                       the profitability of Ghana Telecom Company.       Method:      The author collected both primary and secondary data in order to fulfill the                       purpose of the paper; the primary data was gathered directly from relevant sources                     in Ghana Telecom Company, through telephone and email interviews. The                     secondary data was obtained from indirect sources, such as textbooks, articles, and                     websites. The method used can be described as a qualitative.   Conclusion: An organization’s purchasing strategy is becoming recognized as a strategic weapon                     equal in importance to its marketing, conversion and finance strategies as pointed                      out by Dobler et al. Ghana Telecom Company’s strategic approach to buying include                     multiple sourcing, short-term contracting and competitive bidding as a measure                     towards increasing its profitability by being able to source at the lowest cost, and                     having other sourcing alternatives, which leads to cost reduction.

Objective: The study compared how specific affect focuses in early stages of treatment predict outcome (SCL-90) for specific cluster C personality disorders. Method: The sample consisted of patients with cluster C personality disorders from a randomized controlled trial comparing 40-sessions of short-term dynamic psychotherapy and cognitive psychotherapy. Thirty-one patients had an avoidant personality disorder (AVPD), 17 patients had an obsessive compulsive personality disorder (OCPD) and 10 had a dependent personality disorder (DPD). The Global Severity Index (GSI) of the SCL-90 was used as the outcome measure and the Achievement of Therapeutic Objective Scale (ATOS) was used as a process measure to rate patients affects in an early session (session 1 and 6). Results: The results indicated that focus on closeness and anger predicted outcome for AVPD, focus on positive feelings for self predicted outcome for OCPD and focus on grief predicted outcome for DPD. Conclusion: Specific affect focuses in early stages of treatment is significant for various cluster C personality disorders to predict outcome.

Our essay focuses on short-term capital inflows and their effects on China’s economy.The reason for this work was the increasing vulnerability of China’s economy and the risk of newupcoming world financial crisis, all because of uncontrollable amounts of speculative capitalflows. Because of this problem, we raised a main question that we try to answer in this essayhowto reduce the possibility and the severity of the future financial crisis in China? In order tosolve this problem, first we searched for the existing theory of capital flows, mainly short-termcapital inflows. We analysed why investors choose capital flows and some specific countries,why it is profitable, but also risky and what could be done by countries, to stop these inflows orat least to diminish their effect on domestic markets. After that, we looked for past experiencesof countries faced with surges of capital flows and their measures for controlling them, weanalysed, if the theoretical tools were actually effective in reality. To finish the model, weapplied these measures to China’s economy and gave our viewpoint on what could be changedin order to avoid the dangers of short-term capital inflows. Last, we sum up the whole essay andsuggest the best mix of measures that China could use to control capital inflows as well as theireffects on the economy.

Exploring the word length effect from the perspective of information density, the current research extended previous findings on cross-linguistic differences in STM capacity with the development of a new strategy that has the potential to double ones digit span with minimal learning and a much shorter training period. Experiments have shown promising results and responses to training differed across language groups. The underlying mechanisms are explored and discussed in relation to strategy usage, capacity estimates and optimization of language systems.

The electric power industry is undergoing a restructuring process. The major goals of the change of the industry structure are to motivate competition, reduce costs and improve the service quality for consumers. In the meantime, it is also important for the new structure to maintain system reliability. Power system reliability is comprised of two basic components, adequacy and security. In terms of the time frame, power system reliability can mean short-term reliability or long-term reliability. Short-term reliability is more a security issue while long-term reliability focuses more on the issue of adequacy. This dissertation presents techniques to address some security issues associated with short-term reliability and some adequacy issues related to long-term reliability in deregulated power systems. Short-term reliability is for operational purposes and is mainly concerned with security. Thus the way energy is dispatched and the actions the system operator takes to remedy an insecure system state such as transmission congestion are important to shortterm reliability. Our studies on short-term reliability are therefore focused on these two aspects. We first investigate the formulation of the auction-based dispatch by the law of supply and demand. Then we develop efficient algorithms to solve the auction-based dispatch with different types of bidding functions. Finally we propose a new Optimal Power Flow (OPF) method based on sensitivity factors and the technique of aggregation to manage congestion, which results from the auction-based dispatch. The algorithms and the new OPF method proposed here are much faster and more efficient than the conventional algorithms and methods. With regard to long-term reliability, the major issues are adequacy and its improvement. Our research thus is focused on these two aspects. First, we develop a probabilistic methodology to assess composite power system long-term reliability with both adequacy and security included by using the sequential Monte Carlo simulation method. We then investigate new ways to improve composite power system adequacy in the long-term. Specifically, we propose to use Flexible AC Transmission Systems (FACTS) such as Thyristor Controlled Series Capacitor (TCSC), Static Var Compensator (SVC) and Thyristor Controlled Phase Angle Regulator (TCPAR) to enhance reliability.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, and San Diego State University, 2004. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 86-93).

Thesis (Psy. D.)--Indiana University of Pennsylvania. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, and San Diego State University, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 135-143).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2009. / Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 109-114).