1,721,026 research outputs found
Product portfolio management
No full textOne of the most famous citations in management literature comes from Henry Ford, who reputedly claimed that customers of his Model T could have it "in any colour, as long as it was black". Apart from the weak historical evidence that the 'father' of mass production ever did use these words, this situation did not last long. After a few years, Ford ran into problems when forced to chase the strategy of Alfred P. Sloan, who had restructured General Motors around a divisional organisation and successfully started selling differentiated motor cars. With Sloan's objective of providing a car for every taste and for every budget, product portfolio management entered the modern industrial world. The problem of product portfolio management can be found in virtually any firm and is indeed a complex matter (Figure 17.1). If you side with marketing, their ideal would be to fit a product to each individual customer. If you listen to product development, they would talk about the nightmare of having to manage more projects simultaneously than one can even remember. If you talk to manufacturing, they would probably remind you of a technique called 'variety reduction program' that was quite successful a few years ago. In response to the implications of different organisational functions, this survey on product portfolio management has been based on contributions from different fields, including economics, marketing and operations management. I hope that this heterogeneity will not disrupt the thread of the discussion, which is structured as follows: the next section will discuss the 'front-end' of product portfolio management or, in other words, the marketing perspective.The second section will discuss the 'back-end', which is concerned with the design and development of multiple products.The third section will present portfolio management tools that may help bring the two perspectives together. Conclusions and open issues that ought to be matter for further research will be briefly discussed in the final section. © Springer-Verlag London Limited 2005
Using organizational analysis and enterprise modelling in SMEs IDEF0 for
No full textThis paper deals with enterprise modelling, and pays special attention towards the requirements of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). Among existing methodologies, SADT/IDEF0 is examined and chosen as a starting point. After having discussed some of the problems connected to the use of such methodology, a new approach is proposed. This method may be seen as a bottom-up variant of SADT, which allows us to reduce the model development time, decrease the influence of subjective viewpoints during the modelling process, and increase the ease with which information in the model may be subsequently processed. Finally, the application of the proposed methodology in a medium-sized enterprise is briefly reported. © 1998 Taylor & Francis Ltd
Data-driven design: The new challenges of digitalization on product design and development
Full text linkDigitalization and the momentous role being assumed by data are commonly viewed as pervasive phenomena whose impact is felt in all aspects of society and the economy. Design activity is by no means immune from this trend, and the relationship between digitalization and design is decades old. However, what is the current impact of this 'data revolution' on design? How will the design activity change? What are the resulting research questions of interest to academics? What are the main challenges for firms and for educational institutions having to cope with this change? The paper provides a comprehensive conceptual framework, based on recent literature and anecdotal evidence from the industry. It identifies three main streams: namely the consequences on designers, the consequences on design processes and the role of methods for data analytics. In turn, these three streams lead to implications at individual, organizational and managerial level, and several questions arise worthy of defining future research agendas. Moreover, the paper introduces relational diagrams depicting the interactions between the objects and the actors involved in the design process and suggests that what is occurring is by no means a simple evolution but a paradigmatic shift in the way artefacts are designed
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
- …
