This study applies an empirical research method determine whether Texas public school principals’ leadership styles, coupled with their use of real time data in a data warehouse, influenced their leadership ability as measured by student achievement. In today’s world of data rich environments that require campuses and districts to make data-driven decisions, principals find themselves having to organize and categorize data to help their school boards, campuses, and citizenry make informed decisions. Most school principals in Texas have access to data in multiple forms including national and state resources and a multitude of other data reports. A random sample of principals was selected to take the Multi Factor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ5x) and the Principals Data Use Survey. The MLQ5x measured principals’ leadership styles as transformational, transactional, or passive avoidant. The Principals Data Use Survey measured how principals use data to inform campus decisions on student achievement, shaping the vision of the campus, and designing professional development. Data obtained from the survey were correlated to determine the relationship between principals’ use of data warehouses and their leadership styles on student achievement as measured by the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills. The results yielded significant relationships between student achievement, principals’ leadership styles, and the principals’ data use with a data warehouse. Student achievement scores were highly correlated with the campuses that participated in the study and provided limited differences between those with data warehouses and those without data warehouses.

Understanding of how to manage relationships with customers has become an important topic for both academic and practitioners in recent years. The effectiveness of business can be greatly improved by identifying the drivers of the most profitable customers and using them to target the right customers. In this study we identify exchange characteristics such as amount of money spent per purchase, customer relationship duration with firm, ratio of cross-buying and demographic characteristics such as age and gender as important drivers of the most profitable customers. The results of the study have important implications for academicians in understanding what drives the most profitable customers in noncotractual settings as well as practitioners to help design more effective marketing strategies. Moreover, the results of knowledge discovery about customers by different data mining techniques also contribute to help researchers identifying feasibility of these methods. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

Approved for public release; distribution in unlimited. / In a warehouse, a fast-pick-area is a region containing many items that can be retrieved quickly and inexpensively to fulfill customer orders. The Defense Distribution Center San Joaquin (DDJC) implements a similar strategy on a wider scale by designating one of many warehouses as a "fast-pick-area." We develop a plan to optimally slot the fast-pick area at DDJC using a computer model that captures the tradeo.s of storage space versus cost of replenishment from bulk storage. Our results suggest that defense distribution centers should consider implementing a fast pick area as a means of reducing operating costs. / Lieutenant Commander, United States Navy

This Master's Thesis deals with logistic processes within Unipetrol group of chemical companies with main focus on material flow of polyolefin plastics. Thesis's key objectives are thorough exploring of material flow, identifying possible ineffective areas and suggesting solutions. All parts of the material chain (production line, packaging,warehousing and expedition) are carefully analyzed. Theoretical part defines general logistics, importance of supply chain management in connection with globalization, chemical industry specifics and methods used in analyses (inventory management models). Practical part describes Unipetrol and its departments and more importantly results of executed analyses. Ten selected products with the greatest impact on department efficiency are examined carefully. Thesis conclusion includes final recommendations and chain's weakest places that should be eliminated.

The aim of the thesis is to analyze material flows in logistics warehouse and to describe methods used for identification of goods. The first chapter focuses on theory and explains the basic concepts related to the terms "supply chain" and "logistics providers". The second chapter characterizes the most common methods of identification and their mutual comparison. The third chapter introduces readers to activities of a particular logistics provider and its position in the supply chain. The final chapter then presents a warehouse logistics case study and comparison of the system originally applied and the system currently used.

[pt] A exploração da Logística como atividade estratégica é o resultado da combinação entre a globalização, o aumento da proliferação dos produtos e da utilização de novas tecnologias, como por exemplo, a Tecnologia da Informação. Os Sistemas de Controle de Armazéns (Warehouse Control Systems WCS) passaram a dar importância à localização do material em um endereço arbitrário no armazém, eliminando a necessidade de locais fixos para a armazenagem, permitindo a estocagem onde quer que haja espaço dentro do armazém. Um sistema computacional deve permitir a melhor utilização do espaço. Esta dissertação se propõe a expor a importância da Tecnologia de Informação para a logística, concebendo um projeto em uma empresa de pequeno porte que se enquadre nas técnicas de gestão de armazém, de modo a realizar o mapeamento da atual operação do armazém da empresa. A metodologia empregada foi estudo de caso, utilizando-se o processo de pesquisa-ação, pela necessidade de reavaliação contínua do modelo implementado. Foram realizadas análises das operações antes e durante a implementação do WCS no armazém da referida empresa, além da descrição de suas principais funções e atividades. Foram feitas considerações e discussões práticas sobre a eficiência das operações atuais, bem como de suas funções e objetivos. Foi proposto um novo padrão de execução para as operações de armazenagem com destaque ao endereçamento, separação de pedidos, embalagem, unitização e expedição. Uma base de dados e um novo layout foram constituídos com o objetivo de dar suporte a estas atividades. / [en] The exploration of Logistics as a strategic activity is the result of the combination and the use of new technologies, specially the Information Technology. Identified by area, properly registered and controlled by the computer, the Warehouse Control Systems (WCS), defines by an address the location of the material in the warehouse, eliminating the traditional existence of fixed places for storage and extending the stockpiling in several sections inside the warehouse,. The main objective of this dissertation is to conceive, in a small company, a project framed in the techniques of storage administration, or in other words, the development of the current operations of the company´s warehouse. The methodology used in the elaboration of this work included the action-research process, forced by the need of continuous reevaluation of the implemented model. The main functions and activities of the warehousing operations were described and analyzed before and after the implementation, with the intent to adjust the necessary modifications in the system and its operation. Several considerations and practical discussions are included about the current operation efficiency. A new standard for carrying out warehousing operations, to activities like location issues, separation requests, package, and shipment were suggested. A data base and a new layout have been developed in order to help the realization of these activities.

[pt] A partir da flexibilização do monopólio do petróleo, ocorrida na segunda metade da década de 90, o setor de petróleo e gás no Brasil vem sofrendo uma série de modificações que têm impactado diretamente nas relações comerciais entre as empresas do setor. Há um crescimento contínuo do número de companhias de petróleo e de fornecedores de bens e serviços que vêm se instalando no país. Neste novo contexto do setor de petróleo, o aumento da eficiência operacional e a redução de custos tornam-se fatores fundamentais para as empresas que desejam competir neste mercado, reforçando assim a importância da logística para o setor. As empresas precisam de informações precisas e adequadas sobre custos para tomar decisões estratégicas e alcançar aprimoramentos operacionais (Kaplan, 1998). Esta dissertação apresenta um estudo cujo objetivo é mapear, modelar e determinar os custos envolvidos nos processos de movimentação interna de um depósito utilizado como apoio logístico às atividades de produção de petróleo offshore. Com base na descrição dos processos de movimentação interna para armazenagem dos produtos, são identificados os principais recursos e atividades que compõem estes processos. É elaborado, então, um modelo matemático baseado na metodologia de Custeio Baseado em Atividades (ABC - Activity-Based Costing), onde os resultados gerados com este modelo são os valores de custos de movimentação interna para cada tipo de produto movimentado no depósito. / [en] As from the flexibilization of the petroleum monopoly, which took place in the second half of the 1990`s, the petroleum and gas sector in Brazil has undergone a series of changes which have directly impacted the commercial relations among the companies in the sector. There has been a continuous growth in the number of petroleum companies and suppliers of goods and services that have been setting up operations in the country. In this new petroleum sector context, the increase in operational efficiency and reduction of costs have become basic factors for the companies wishing to compete in this market, thereby, reinforcing the importance of logistics to the sector. The companies need precise and appropriate data on costs in order to be able to make strategic decisions and reach operational enhancements (Kaplan, 1998). This dissertation presents a study whose objective is to map, model and determine the costs involved in the processes for internal movement in a warehouse used as logistics support to offshore petroleum production. Based on the description of the internal movement processes for product storage, the main resources are identified. Then, a mathematical model based on Activity-Based Costing is drawn up, in which the results generated with this model comprise the values for internal movement costs for each type of product moved in the warehouse.

"Data warehousing and on-line analytical processing (OLAP) are essential elements for decision support applications. Since most OLAP queries are complex and are often executed over huge volumes of data, the solution in practice is to employ materialized views to improve query performance. One important issue for utilizing materialized views is to maintain the view consistency upon source changes. However, most prior work focused on simple SQL views with distributive aggregate functions, such as SUM and COUNT. This dissertation proposes to consider broader types of views than previous work. First, we study views with complex aggregate functions such as variance and regression. Such statistical functions are of great importance in practice. We propose a workarea function model and design a generic framework to tackle incremental view maintenance and answering queries using views for such functions. We have implemented this approach in a prototype system of IBM DB2. An extensive performance study shows significant performance gains by our techniques. Second, we consider materialized views with PIVOT and UNPIVOT operators. Such operators are widely used for OLAP applications and for querying sparse datasets. We demonstrate that the efficient maintenance of views with PIVOT and UNPIVOT operators requires more generalized operators, called GPIVOT and GUNPIVOT. We formally define and prove the query rewriting rules and propagation rules for such operators. We also design a novel view maintenance framework for applying these rules to obtain an efficient maintenance plan. Extensive performance evaluations reveal the effectiveness of our techniques. Third, materialized views are often integrated from multiple data sources. Due to source autonomicity and dynamicity, concurrency may occur during view maintenance. We propose a generic concurrency control framework to solve such maintenance anomalies. This solution extends previous work in that it solves the anomalies under both source data and schema changes and thus achieves full source autonomicity. We have implemented this technique in a data warehouse prototype developed at WPI. The extensive performance study shows that our techniques put little extra overhead on existing concurrent data update processing techniques while allowing for this new functionality."

Today we are in an age of Information. The systems that effectively use the vast amount of data available all over the world and provide meaningful insight (i.e. BI systems) for the people who need it are of critical importance. The development of such systems has always been a challenge as the development is outweighed by change. The methodologies that are devised for coping with the constant change during the system development are agile methodologies. So practitioners and researchers are showing keen interest to use agile strategies for the BI projects development.The research aims to find out how well the agile strategies suit for the development of BI projects. The research considers a case study in a very big organization as BI is organization centric. There by assessing the empirical results that are collected from interviews the author is trying to generalize the results. The results for the research will give an insight of the best practices that can be considered while considering agile strategies and also the practical problems that we may encounter on the journey. The findings have implications for both business and technical managers who want to consider agile strategies for the BI/DW development projects. / Program: Masterutbildning i Informatik

The problem in the warehouses is that the old and conventional methods which are obsolete are combined with very crowded conditions. Hence there is always a quest for newer and better methods. However, merely installing the newer methods does not mean that the system is effective and efficient, there is also necessity of a strong supervisory organization of the system to make the methods more effective and this also requires lot of training and managing the operations.The purpose of this thesis is to give an overview and to briefly present the concept of warehousing. Analysing the present situation in warehouses by examining four of the biggest retail warehouses in Sweden with the help of a questionnaire given to the respective warehouse managers. Comparing the present situation to the theoretical framework in order to get an idea of the strategies deployed by the businesses.The warehouses today are deploying a mixture of both latest strategies and technologies and the traditional methods in order to have a good efficiency in the warehouses.