This book explores the practical implementation of an advanced after-sales management framework devoted to warranty management. The framework is intended for companies producing either standardized or customized products and such a management tool will facilitate organizational improvement and support innovative decision making processes for technical assistance in after-sales services. “After–sales Service of Engineering Industrial Assets� comprises a proposal for a warranty management framework, with an account of the different methods that can be used to improve decision making in the different stages of the after-sales service management process, and strategies for strengthening the structure and foundations of the framework. A review of the fundamental issues and current research topics in warranty management and after sales services is also provided, which is exemplified by a case study. This book is intended for postgraduates, researchers and engineers who are interested in after sales management, assets engineering and warranty management.

A tale of mentorship, hard truths, and the path to success. In a fictional account of an entrepreneur's rollercoaster ride to the top, Cap Treeger crafts a series of dynamic, well-drawn lessons for anyone craving a career in the tech startup industry. The hero of the story, Ren, is fired up with ambition and has a strategic dream in place to build his own startup from the ground up, but he has a lot to learn about how this particular sector of the business world works. Fortunately, Ren has the guidance of generous and invested mentors, and their sound recommendations and warnings are chronicled as Ren makes decision after decision. With their advice, as well as his own encounters with trial and error, he discovers that who he chooses to employ and partner with, and how he engages with them, makes all the difference. Ren's journey guides readers through numerous factors necessary for success, including building a solid team with strategic placement of individuals in carefully selected roles appropriate to their skill sets and crafting the all-important business model. Ren navigates the daunting process with grace and hands readers an account loaded with insight-rendering Finding the Way, told in a straightforward and reader-friendly manner, a valuable gem amidst business-building literature.

How to lean in at work.

Women regularly face unfair challenges in the workplace--from being passed over for promotion to being ignored in conversation. Unconscious bias and negative assumptions are working against them. As a woman, how can you break through these barriers and get what you want from your career?

The HBR Guide for Women at Work will help you identify and overcome the factors that are holding you back. It provides practical tips and advice so you can face gender stereotypes head-on, make yourself visible when opportunities arise, and demonstrate your leadership skills.

You'll learn to:

- Speak up in meetings in a way that ensures your ideas will be heard

- Wield influence by building the right relationships

- Advocate for yourself--and for what you want

- Align yourself with mentors and sponsors to support your growth

- Show passion without being perceived as "too emotional"

- Create your unique vision as a leader

The author is one of the prominent researchers in the field of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), a powerful data analysis tool that can be used in performance evaluation and benchmarking. This book is based upon the author’s years of research and teaching experiences. It is difficult to evaluate an organization’s performance when multiple performance metrics are present. The difficulties are further enhanced when the relationships among the performance metrics are complex and involve unknown tradeoffs. This book introduces Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) as a multiple-measure performance evaluation and benchmarking tool. The focus of performance evaluation and benchmarking is shifted from characterizing performance in terms of single measures to evaluating performance as a multidimensional systems perspective. Conventional and new DEA approaches are presented and discussed using Excel spreadsheets — one of the most effective ways to analyze and evaluate decision alternatives. The user can easily develop and customize new DEA models based upon these spreadsheets. DEA models and approaches are presented to deal with performance evaluation problems in a variety of contexts. For example, a context-dependent DEA measures the relative attractiveness of similar operations/processes/products. Sensitivity analysis techniques can be easily applied, and used to identify critical performance measures. Two-stage network efficiency models can be utilized to study performance of supply chain. DEA benchmarking models extend DEA’s ability in performance evaluation. Various cross efficiency approaches are presented to provide peer evaluation scores. This book also provides an easy-to-use DEA software — DEAFrontier. This DEAFrontier is an Add-In for Microsoft® Excel and provides a custom menu of DEA approaches. This version of DEAFrontier is for use with Excel 97-2013 under Windows and can solve up to 50 DMUs, subject to the capacity of Excel Solver. It is an extremely powerful tool that can assist decision-makers in benchmarking and analyzing complex operational performance issues in manufacturing organizations as well as evaluating processes in banking, retail, franchising, health care, public services and many other industries.

The increasing penetration of IT in organizations calls for an integrative perspective on enterprises and their supporting information systems. MERODE offers an intuitive and practical approach to enterprise modelling and using these models as core for building enterprise information systems. From a business analyst perspective, benefits of the approach are its simplicity and the possibility to evaluate the consequences of modeling choices through fast prototyping, without requiring any technical experience. The focus on domain modelling ensures the development of a common language for talking about essential business concepts and of a shared understanding of business rules. On the construction side, experienced benefits of the approach are a clear separation between specification and implementation, more generic and future-proof systems, and an improved insight in the cost of changes. A first distinguishing feature is the method’s grounding in process algebra provides clear criteria and practical support for model quality. Second, the use of the concept of business events provides a deep integration between structural and behavioral aspects. The clear and intuitive semantics easily extend to application integration (COTS software and Web Services). Students and practitioners are the book’s main target audience, as both groups will benefit from its practical advice on how to create complete models which combine structural and behavioral views of a system-to-be and which can readily be transformed into code, and on how to evaluate the quality of those models. In addition, researchers in the area of conceptual or enterprise modelling will find a concise overview of the main findings related to the MERODE project. The work is complemented by a wealth of extra material on the author’s web page at KU Leuven, including a free CASE tool with code generator, a collection of cases with solutions, and a set of domain modelling patterns that have been developed on the basis of the method’s use in industry and government.

Bridge the Gap and Reach the Why Generation If you've ever struggled to motivate the young people in your sphere of influence, Answering Why is the game-changer you've been looking for. From the urgent skills gap crisis to the proven strategies to inspire our youngest generations, Answering Why addresses the burning questions faced by educators, employers, and parents everywhere. Author, CEO, and generational expert Mark C. Perna shares his wide experience and profound success as both a single dad and performance consultant for education and workforce development across North America. Readers will be empowered to: • Embrace the branch-creak crisis moments of life • Make meaningful, productive connections with the Why Generation (anyone under 40 today) • Bring relevance, self-discovery, and passion to the learning process The Why Generation is asking a serious question, and it’s time to answer it. This book will help awaken the incredible potential of young people everywhere and spur them to increased performance on all fronts, so they can make a bigger difference—which is exactly what they want.

LEARN THE BASICS OF MARKETING WITH MANGA FOR SUCCESS! Do you want to increase sales? Improve customer satisfaction? Or are you looking for a basic understanding of marketing to ace your class or improve your outlook in the job market? Whatever your reason for picking up this book, Marketing: Manga for Success makes essential concepts easy to understand using practical examples and situations. You'll learn about: Branding, viral marketing, and advertising and promotions The importance of customer relationships The 4 "P"s of marketing The story follows Marimo, a young woman who wants to help her aging parents save their specialty pastry business. There isn't much she can do but she wants to help them find new opportunities. Just then, she meets two mysterious characters who teach her how to rebuild the family business through marketing, step-by-step. Find out why the Manga For Success series--now available in English for the first time--is so popular in Japan, Korea, and beyond.

​This volume includes the full proceedings from the 1984 Academy of Marketing Science (AMS) Annual Conference held in Niagara Falls, New York. It provides a variety of quality research in the fields of marketing theory and practice in areas such as consumer behaviour, marketing management, marketing education, and international marketing, among others. Founded in 1971, the Academy of Marketing Science is an international organization dedicated to promoting timely explorations of phenomena related to the science of marketing in theory, research, and practice. Among its services to members and the community at large, the Academy offers conferences, congresses and symposia that attract delegates from around the world. Presentations from these events are published in this Proceedings series, which offers a comprehensive archive of volumes reflecting the evolution of the field. Volumes deliver cutting-edge research and insights, complimenting the Academy’s flagship journals, the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (JAMS) and AMS Review. Volumes are edited by leading scholars and practitioners across a wide range of subject areas in marketing science.​

The global economy is entering a new era. Triggered by the crash in EU countries in financial, banking and debt sectors, Europe is turning into a driving force for re-orientation. At the same time, psychology is becoming an increasingly decisive factor in business. In his book, business psychologist and innovation consultant Winfried Neun gives an impressive description of the background to the previous and current global crisis. Based on his experience in consulting, he lists clear examples of why business psychological factors are largely responsible for the development of crises and of what we as entrepreneurs, employers and employees can learn from this. An encouraging and provoking book! “Winfried Neun has succeeded in presenting a plausible and helpful description of how executives and companies can handle economic crises.� Prof. Max Otte, crisis economist, best-selling author and independent fund manager “A profound view of modern-day crises rather than a heavy-handed rant about the crash, Winfried Neun has managed yet again to create added value for managers.� Frank Meyer, n-tv presenter

Although the area of International Manufacturing Network (IMN) and International Operations Network (ION) has received considerable attention in the literature, most of studies appear multifaceted and interdisciplinary, and thereby require thorough investigation from both academic and practical perspectives, in order to deepen our related understanding. The book seeks advanced contributions that will combine theoretical insights and empirical experience by offering a detailed examination of IMN and, further, ION from various perspectives. This book can be used as a reference material for scholar-practitioners, business executives, and university researchers who need to deepen their understanding on the importance and influence of IMN and ION as well as their development. The book is important because there are few reference/resource materials available related to IMN and ION.

This book is designed to help practitioners and academics to assess the added value of HR practices. It provides hands-on recommendations for choosing effective means to manage HR and specific suggestions aimed at facilitating the measurement of HR practices’ impact on value creation. Evidence-based recommendations are made by drawing on thorough empirical research from various research traditions and academic disciplines. It covers a wide variety of tasks faced by the HR function and specifically addresses new challenges such as assessing the added value of work-life balance practices.

This book covers the elements involved in achieving sustainability in textiles and clothing sector. The chapters covered in three volumes of this series title cover all the distinctive areas earmarked for achieving sustainable development in textiles and clothing industry. This third volume highlights the areas pertaining to the regulatory aspects and sustainability standards applicable to textiles and clothing supply chain. There are various standards earmarked for measuring the environmental impacts and sustainability of textile products. There are also plenty of certification schemes available along with the index systems applicable to textile sector. Brands and manufactures are also venturing into new developments to achieve sustainable development in textile sector. This third volume addresses all these important aspects.

Break down the barriers to effective collaboration. For cross-functional projects to work, you need to bring together diverse ideas and resources from across your organization. But office politics, conflicting objectives, and lack of clear authority can get in the way. The HBR Guide to Collaborative Teams provides practical tips and advice to help you collaborate more effectively. Whether you're leading your own direct reports or building a talented group from disparate parts of your organization, you'll discover how to align others' goals and skills so you can solve problems as a team and deliver great results. You'll learn to: Develop a shared purpose Bust departmental silos Lead employees who don't report to you Overcome conflict and turf wars Prevent collaborative overload and fatigue Use the right tools for virtual information sharing Arm yourself with the advice you need to succeed on the job, with the most trusted brand in business. Packed with how-to essentials from leading experts, the HBR Guides provide smart answers to your most pressing work challenges.

This volume collects selected papers of the 3rd CESA Automotive Electronics Congress, Paris, 2014. CESA is the most important automotive electronics conference in France. The topical focus lies on state-of-the-art automotive electronics with respect to energy consumption and autonomous driving. The target audience primarily comprises industry leaders and research experts in the automotive industry. 

This exciting new WMU book series' volume features the first attempt to include detailed experiences of women in the maritime sector at a global level. It highlights the achievement of women in the maritime sector, in particular, women’s leadership and service to the sustainable development of the maritime industry. The volume contains contemporary studies on maritime women and follows an inter-disciplinary approach. It offers an overview of women's integration into the maritime sector since the late 1980s as well as benchmarking its impact on various levels, such as policy, employment, education, leadership and sustainability. Even 20 years after the Beijing Declaration, gender-related challenges at work still remain in the maritime sector, for example, lack of gender policy,  difficulty in work-life balance, access to education, and leadership opportunities. The book addresses a series of recommendations that may further help the integration of women into the maritime sector.

This book describes recent theoretical findings relevant to bilevel programming in general, and in mixed-integer bilevel programming in particular. It describes recent applications in energy problems, such as the stochastic bilevel optimization approaches used in the natural gas industry. New algorithms for solving linear and mixed-integer bilevel programming problems are presented and explained.

This volume includes the full proceedings from the 2009 World Marketing Congress held in Oslo, Norway with the theme Marketing in Transition: Scarcity, Globalism, & Sustainability. The focus of the conference and the enclosed papers is on marketing thought and practices throughout the world. This volume resents papers on various topics including marketing management, marketing strategy and consumer behavior. Founded in 1971, the Academy of Marketing Science is an international organization dedicated to promoting timely explorations of phenomena related to the science of marketing in theory, research and practice. Among its services to members and the community at large, the Academy offers conferences, congresses and symposia that attract delegates from around the world. Presentations from these events are published in this Proceedings series, which offers a comprehensive archive of volumes reflecting the evolution of the field. Volumes deliver cutting-edge research and insights, complimenting the Academy’s flagship journals, the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (JAMS) and AMS Review. Volumes are edited by leading scholars and practitioners across a wide range of subject areas in marketing science.

This book focuses on supply chain management in emerging markets. The authors present issues relating to supply chain development covering countries such as Brazil, China, the Czech Republic, Russia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nepal, Turkey, Egypt and South Africa and focuses on the challenges faced when the supply chain is designed and maintained. Such challenges derive from issues to do with risk, security, quality management and infrastructure among others. Case studies and survey results are presented in chapters which explore practical solutions to these issues. The latter will be of interest not only to local and international managers, but also to students who are interested in emerging economies. The book covers manufacturing, retail and food chains at the local and international levels.

This book provides an evidence-based actionable framework and measure of servant leadership to help management practitioners build effective and ethical workplaces. It explains the reasons why the best workplaces such as Starbucks, Southwest Airlines, Ritz-Carlton and ServiceMaster apply servant leadership. Servant leadership is an intellectually compelling and emotionally satisfying theory of leadership with relevance and application to the workplace settings.   Based on multiple rigorous studies in the Western and Eastern contexts, the book outlines the six dimensions of servant leadership and the impacts they have on key outcomes such as citizenship behaviors, job satisfaction, team creativity and innovation, and organizational performance. The book outlines a measurement instrument that can be used for leadership assessment, selection and training purposes and to develop strategies to leverage the six behavioral dimensions of servant leadership at the personal, team and organizational level.

Presenting an innovative concept and approach for organization management, this book serves to document an organization’s journey towards the ultimate goal of learning organization. This book also shares the experience on how a OL framework built on established learning theories, could be used effectively, overcoming many of the barriers in a real industrial setting. Utilizing a ready-to-use tool called Project Action Learning (PAL) to analyze real life case studies, the authors introduce a framework that allows teams of people to work and learn over the course of business projects. Equal emphasis is placed on the achievement of pre-set project outcomes and the learning objectives of the participants. In addition, a long term organizational learning strategy is put forward and the necessary supporting infrastructure, in the form of four ‘PAL Pillars’, is described. The concepts and development of the PAL driven Organizational Learning model are inspired by and grounded in, Western and Eastern business philosophies and case studies which offer important insights into the management of organizations who are keen to develop sustainable business practices.

Seize the benefits of the five-generation workforce. Generational distrust and ageism are seeping into organizations worldwide. Differences over communication style, technology preferences, identity, and politics are fueling harmful stereotypes and hurting team performance. It doesn't need to be this way. Smart leaders are harnessing age diversity and encouraging mutual learning, cross-generational collaboration, and a culture that embraces both similarities and differences across age groups. Multigenerational Workplace: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review will help you bridge divides, reduce prejudice, and unlock the benefits of age-diverse teams. Business is changing. Will you adapt or be left behind? Get up to speed and deepen your understanding of the topics that are shaping your company's future with the Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review series. Featuring HBR's smartest thinking on fast-moving issues—blockchain, cybersecurity, AI, and more—each book provides the foundational introduction and practical case studies your organization needs to compete today and collects the best research, interviews, and analysis to get it ready for tomorrow. You can't afford to ignore how these issues will transform the landscape of business and society. The Insights You Need series will help you grasp these critical ideas—and prepare you and your company for the future.

The contributions of this volume stem from the “Fifth International Conference on the Dynamics of Information Systems� held in Gainesville, FL in February 2013, and discuss state-of the-art techniques in handling problems and solutions in the broad field of information systems. Dynamics of Information Systems: Computational and Mathematical Challenges presents diverse aspects of modern information systems with an emphasis on interconnected network systems and related topics, such as signal and message reconstruction, network connectivity, stochastic network analysis, cyber and computer security, community and cohesive structures in complex networks. Information systems are a vital part of modern societies. They are essential to our daily actions, including social networking, business and bank transactions, as well as sensor communications. The rapid increase in these capabilities has enabled us with more powerful systems, readily available to sense, control, disperse, and analyze information.

Traditionally, the study of entrepreneurial behavior focuses on such factors as (i) the personality characteristics that distinguish the entrepreneur from non-entrepreneur and (ii) demographic characteristics such gender, age, familiar antecedents and education. With particular respect to investigating the development, acquisition, and dissemination of entrepreneurial skills and behaviors, the authors focus on the university environment, as a locus of research and innovation, where students are exposed to a wide variety of influences that are enhanced by a high degree of connectivity. The underlying theme of this volume is to develop our understanding of the sociology of student entrepreneurial behavior and in doing so attempt to synthesize literature investigating individual talent with the literature on concurrent knowledge sourcing in the pursuit of entrepreneurial activities. Specifically, the authors investigate the degree to which access to diverse knowledge (in addition to such psychological characteristics and tolerance of ambiguity and risk taking) influences the nature and probability of entrepreneurial success. Moreover, they explore the role of social media and social networking in facilitating access to distributed and disparate information and knowledge.   Their research addresses such timely questions as: Where do entrepreneurial opportunities come from? How can higher education best stimulate the creation of firms emanating from young and smart minds in colleges and universities? What is the value of MOOCs for frequent, early, and “thick� communication among the various specialties needed to accomplish entrepreneurial projects? How do we know whether social media affect students’ responses to new knowledge and new ideas? To what extent do educational practices affect racial and ethnic differences in student entrepreneurship? What is the role of the indigenous minority student entrepreneur in establishing high-technology firms? The result is a multi-dimensional approach that sheds light on the dynamics of education, knowledge creation, social networking, innovation and new business development.

This book explores the development, trends and research of library and information sciences (LIS) in the digital age. Inside, readers will find research and case studies written by LIS experts, educators and theorists, most of whom have visited China, delivered presentations there and drafted their articles based on feedback they received. As a result, readers will discover the LIS issues and concerns that China and the international community have in common. The book first introduces the opportunities and challenges faced by the library and information literacy profession and discusses the key role of librarians in the future of information literacy education. Next, it covers trends in LIS education by examining the vision of the iSchool movement and detailing its practice in Syracuse University. The book then covers issues in information seeking and retrieval by showing how visual data mining technology can be used to detect the relationship and pattern between terms on the Q&A of a social media site. It also includes a case study regarding tracing information seeking behavior and usage on a multimedia website. Next, the book stresses the importance of building an academic accreditation framework for scientific datasets, explores the relationship between bibliometrics and university rankings, and details the birth and development of East Asian Libraries in North America. Overall, the book offers readers insight into the changing nature of LIS, including the electronic dissemination of information, the impact of the Internet on libraries, the changing responsibilities of library professionals, the new paradigm for evaluating information, and characteristics and functions of today's library personnel.