This book examines supply and value chains in African agriculture, providing both a thorough analysis of existing practices and practical business models for future development. It examines why Africa is a net importer of food, despite its vast agricultural potential, using the tomato value chain in Ghana as a case study. The book explores commodity value chain structures; commodity clusters, arenas, linkages and business models; systematic constraints within commodity value chains; and value chain profiling in practice among others. It would benefit policy makers, policy implementers, development practitioners, agri-entrepreneurs, researchers and all those who have interests in the transformation of African agriculture. It will also be an excellent reference material for students of agriculture management, agribusiness, agricultural economics, and rural development.

In Time Series Analysis and Adjustment the authors explain how the last four decades have brought dramatic changes in the way researchers analyze economic and financial data on behalf of economic and financial institutions and provide statistics to whomsoever requires them. Such analysis has long involved what is known as econometrics, but time series analysis is a different approach driven more by data than economic theory and focused on modelling. An understanding of time series and the application and understanding of related time series adjustment procedures is essential in areas such as risk management, business cycle analysis, and forecasting. Dealing with economic data involves grappling with things like varying numbers of working and trading days in different months and movable national holidays. Special attention has to be given to such things. However, the main problem in time series analysis is randomness. In real-life, data patterns are usually unclear, and the challenge is to uncover hidden patterns in the data and then to generate accurate forecasts. The case studies in this book demonstrate that time series adjustment methods can be efficaciously applied and utilized, for both analysis and forecasting, but they must be used in the context of reasoned statistical and economic judgment. The authors believe this is the first published study to really deal with this issue of context.

Get productive quickly with Pentaho Data Integration Key Features Take away the pain of starting with a complex and powerful system Simplify your data transformation and integration work Explore, transform, and validate your data with Pentaho Data Integration Book DescriptionPentaho Data Integration(PDI) is an intuitive and graphical environment packed with drag and drop design and powerful Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) capabilities. Given its power and flexibility, initial attempts to use the Pentaho Data Integration tool can be difficult or confusing. This book is the ideal solution. This book reduces your learning curve with PDI. It provides the guidance needed to make you productive, covering the main features of Pentaho Data Integration. It demonstrates the interactive features of the graphical designer, and takes you through the main ETL capabilities that the tool offers. By the end of the book, you will be able to use PDI for extracting, transforming, and loading the types of data you encounter on a daily basis. What you will learn Design, preview and run transformations in Spoon Run transformations using the Pan utility Understand how to obtain data from different types of files Connect to a database and explore it using the database explorer Understand how to transform data in a variety of ways Understand how to insert data into database tables Design and run jobs for sequencing tasks and sending emails Combine the execution of jobs and transformations Who this book is forThis book is for software developers, business intelligence analysts, and others involved or interested in developing ETL solutions, or more generally, doing any kind of data manipulation.

The origin of any industrial optimization study lies in the theory that some improvement can be made in a controllable system. The possibility for improvements may arise in any context, for example, in the control of a chemical plant, the organization of production to meet delivery dates, the design of rubber compounds, in traffic signal settings, and so on. In this volume, T. A. J. Nicholson deals with applications of the industrial optimization techniques demonstrated in the first volume of this two-part project, Optimization in Industry: Optimization Techniques. Applications are classified by their main functional areas in industrial planning, design, and control. The fields covered are machine sequencing, stock control and scheduling, plant renewal, distribution, financial problems, and chemical process control and design. These last two, in particular, are subjects often overlooked in operations research curricula. In each field the place and status of optimization techniques is first described and then a wide range of realistic case studies and examples are reviewed, many of them international. The problems given in this volume are primarily concerned with formulation not with solution; the task is to formulate the problems to be solved by one or more of the methods described in volume one. By connecting the optimization techniques with their applications, the gap between the people devising the methods and the people who actually need to use them is bridged. As with the first volume, this text is also supported by new exercises and model answers making this book important as an introduction to the application of optimization techniques for students as well as a reference work for the practitioner.

As the era of ever expanding markets and ample resources ends, governments and business will have to behave differently. The world is facing weak economic growth, limits to affordable resources and increasing concerns about environmental consequences. During the boom times, governments championed de-regulation and business responded by adopting an anything-goes attitude. In these straitened times, strategic analysis has to engage with the challenges that society faces to create resilient corporations fit for the 21st century. In Corporate Strategy in the Age of Responsibility, Peter McManners, who has for nine years run strategy workshops on the Henley MBA focusing on the global business environment, sets about providing a strategic framework for navigating the new economic environment. Chief Sustainability Officers (CSOs) now exist, but they struggle to find the strategic rationale for the improvements they champion. The author argues that their good intentions often lack traction, partly because others in management don't get it, but also because they are not ambitious enough. The book is not about preaching semi-charitable behaviour or how to enhance the reputation of the corporation instead it is about surviving and thriving in a challenging and changing environment. A corporate audience familiar with strategy books will relate to this book, but will find it steers them towards radically new strategic thinking suitable for a turbulent period of transition.

For those wishing to acquire knowledge on national development issues, this comprehensive compendium traverses a spectrum of subjects that the audience ought to be well acquainted with. The Editors provide instructive findings regarding national development, economic growth and their determinants, but they also offer historical perspectives on the subject and the implications for developing countries. The book addresses a suite of critical themes regarded by development experts to be germane in considering the pertinence of policies and their effective execution. These seven general thematic areas are explored: c Leadership, governance, policy and strategy c Public sector and public financial management c Culture, institutions and people c Natural resources c Science, technology and infrastructure c Private sector and financial markets c Marketing, branding and service delivery This thematic approach enables the contributors to explore the impact of the constituents of each subject area on national development, within the context of a developing economy. The significance of the findings for the relevant stakeholders is consequently reviewed. The combination of theory and practice makes the book and its contents unique.

Organizations increasingly use temporary designs. Many temporary organizations are assembled by "mixing and matching" building blocks from static, bureaucratic, parent organizations into a temporary configuration. At the same time, such "mixed and matched" temporary organizations often operate under difficult and dangerous circumstances. During operations, these temporary organizations can experience numerous internal problems: ranging from friendly fire in a military context to budget and time issues in construction projects and problematic coordination in a crisis management context. This book develops insight into the relationship between a "mixing and matching" temporary design strategy and operational problems. To so do, military and crisis management contexts are systematically studied from a sociotechnical design perspective that emphasizes self-organization to develop organizational controllability. Operating Under High-Risk Conditions in Temporary Organizations demonstrates that a "mixing and matching" design strategy can be related to system failure. Furthermore, it is shown that a process of self-design emerged in which operators attempted to create ad-hoc networks for meaningful, safe and controllable operations. The analyses result in a model that shows mechanisms between characteristics of organizational design and controllability of operations. Not only does this model have relevance to the military and crisis management contexts, relevance is also demonstrated for a broader family of temporary organizations and application of sociotechnical network design theory.

Identifying and customizing suitable control strategies is a challenging task, especially when production systems have to cope with variable demands, forecast error, and unstable processes. The focus of this book lies on helping companies with complex and discrete production systems to tailor a production control strategy to their needs. Thereby, the mutual merits of "push" and "pull" systems are taken into account, leading to hybrid strategies. Consequently, the book addresses practitioners who are interested in looking behind the scenes and into the physics of production control. A real-life case study demonstrates the practical applicability of the presented framework.

This book is devoted to the study of a class of optimal control problems arising in mathematical economics, related to the Robinson-Solow-Srinivasan (RSS) model. It will be useful for researches interested in the turnpike theory, infinite horizon optimal control and their applications, and mathematical economists. The RSS is a well-known model of economic dynamics that was introduced in the 1960s and as many other models of economic dynamics, the RSS model is determined by an objective function (a utility function) and a set-valued mapping (a technology map). The set-valued map generates a dynamical system whose trajectories are under consideration and the objective function determines an optimality criterion. The goal is to find optimal trajectories of the dynamical system, using the optimality criterion. Chapter 1 discusses turnpike properties for some classes of discrete time optimal control problems. Chapter 2 present the description of the RSS model and discuss its basic properties. Infinite horizon optimal control problems, related to the RSS model are studied in Chapter 3. Turnpike properties for the RSS model are analyzed in Chapter 4. Chapter 5 studies infinite horizon optimal control problems related to the RSS model with a nonconcave utility function. Chapter 6 focuses on infinite horizon optimal control problems with nonautonomous optimality criterions. Chapter 7 contains turnpike results for a class of discrete-time optimal control problems. Chapter 8 discusses the RSS model and compares different optimality criterions. Chapter 9 is devoted to the study of the turnpike properties for the RSS model. In Chapter 10 the one-dimensional autonomous RSS model is considered and the continuous time RSS model is studied in Chapter 11.

This book presents 27 methods of the Multiple Attribute Decision Making (MADM), which are not discussed in the existing books, nor studied in details, using more applications. Nowadays, decision making is one of the most important and fundamental tasks of management as an organizational goal achievement that depends on its quality. Decision making includes the correct expression of objectives, determining different and possible solutions, evaluating their feasibility, assessing the consequences, and the results of implementing each solution, and finally, selecting and implementing the solution. Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) is sum of the decision making techniques. MCDM is divided into the Multiple Objective Decision Making (MODM) for designing the best solution and MADM for selecting the best alternative. Given that the applications of MADM are mostly more than MODM, wide various techniques have been developed for MADM by researchers over the last 60 years, and the current book introduces some of the other new MADM methods.

Knowledge-Driven Work is a pioneering study of the cross-cultural iffusion of ideas about the organization of work. These ideas, linked with the knowledge of the workforce, are rapidly becoming the primary source of competitive advantage in the world economy.
The book provides an in-depth look at eight Japanese-affiliated manufacturing facilities operating in the United States, combined with examinations of their sister facilities in Japan. The authors offer their insights into the complex process by which elements of work systems in one country interact with those in another. They trace the flow of ideas from Japan to the US and other nations, and the beginnings of a reverse diffusion of innovation back to Japan.
The authors organize their findings into six categories: the cross-cultural diffusion of work practices, team-based work systems, kaizen and employee involvement, employment security, human resource management, and labor-management relations. Their study of team-based work systems yields a taxonomy of teams and reveals some conflicts between the desire for self-management and the existence of interdependencies.
Investigations into kaizen (ongoing incremental improvement) indicate that its emphasis on employee-driven, systematic problem solving makes it a strong counterpoint to the idea of top-down "re-engineering." Looking at employment security, the authors note that while most US managers believe that it restrains managerial flexibility, managers at the firms they observed see it as essential to the flexibility associated with teamwork and kaizen. The study of human resource management practices suggests competitive advantages in diverse, older, unionized, and urban work forces, and emphasizes the importance of wide-ranging training programs in a work system premised on a long-term perspective. The "wildcard" in the work places observed is labor-management relations, the area in which Japanese managers have been least likely to import their ideas. The authors report on several situations in which existing labor-management structures remained untouched, with mixed results: greater labor-management consultation, for example, but also increased ambiguity of roles.
The thread running through all of these areas of work is "virtual knowledge," an ephemeral form of knowledge derived from a particular combination of people focused on a given issue. The authors point out that this powerful form of knowledge is only effectively harnessed in environments that are free of fear, that have established procedures for collective problem-solving, and that have some stability in group composition. They claim that too often companies allow virtual knowledge to dissipate, squandering opportunities to create more competitive workplaces. For those organizations that have succeeded in anticipating and channeling it, however, virtual knowledge leads to a knowledge-driven workplace and continuous improvement.

Management education and training was a key influence on Canadian capital and labour in the post-World War II decades, however it has been the subject of comparatively little academic inquiry. In many ways, historians have frequently learned about management behavior in unionized workplaces by examining labor-management relations. The management experience has thus often been seen through the eyes of rank-and-file workers rather than from the perspective of managers themselves. This book discusses how managers were trained and educated in Canada in the years following the Second World War. Making Managers in Canada, 1945 - 1995 seeks to shed light on the experience of workers who have not received much attention in business history: managers. This book approaches management training from both institutional and social history perspectives. Drawing from community colleges, universities, and companies in British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec, this book reveals the nature of management education and training in English and French Canada, It integrates institutional analysis, and examines how factors such as gender and social class shaped the development of Canadian management in the post-war years and illustrates the various international influences on Canadian management education.

This is the first book to present the fundamentals of nonlinear and mixed-integer optimization. It includes their applications in the important area of process synthesis in chemical engineering. Topics that are unique include the theory and methods for mixed-integer nonlinear optimization. introduction to modelling issues in process synthesis and optimization based approaches in the synthesis and of heat recovery of systems, distillation-based systems, and reactor-based systems. As well as an ideal graduate text this book is designed as a reference for any engineering student or researcher.

In today's developing world, international trade is a field that is rapidly growing. Within this economic market, traders need to implement new approaches in order to satisfy consumers' rising demands. Due to the high level of competition, merchants have focused on developing new transportation and logistics strategies. In order to execute effective transportation tactics, decision makers need to know the fundamentals, current developments, and future trends of intercontinental transportation. The Handbook of Research on the Applications of International Transportation and Logistics for World Trade provides emerging research exploring the effective and productive solutions to global transportation and logistics by applying fundamental and in-depth knowledge together with current applications and future aspects. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as international regulations, inventory management, and distribution networks, this book is ideally designed for logistics authorities, trading companies, logistics operators, transportation specialists, government officials, managers, policymakers, researchers, academicians, and students.

This book is the first in the literature to present the state of the art and some interesting and relevant applications of the Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP). The AHP is a conceptually and mathematically simple, easily implementable, yet extremely powerful tool for group decision making and is used around the world in a wide variety of decision situations, in fields such as government, business, industry, healthcare, and education. The aim of this book is to study various fuzzy methods for dealing with the imprecise and ambiguous data in AHP. Features: First book available on FAHP. Showcases state-of-the-art developments. Contains several novel real-life applications. Provides useful insights to both academics and practitioners in making group decisions under uncertainty This book provides the necessary background to work with existing fuzzy AHP models. Once the material in this book has been mastered, the reader will be able to apply fuzzy AHP models to his or her problems for making decisions with imprecise data.

Business networks are an important economic phenomenon of increasing practical importance throughout Europe. This volume examines business networks from an interdisciplinary perspective, with many contributions dealing with a certain form of business network, the so-called cooperative or non-hierarchical. With regard to this specific form of cooperation the volume presents new economic findings, proposes a definition and discusses the governance structure of those networks.Moreover, this book explores whether the research results can also be applied to hierarchical, centralized business networks. With medium-sized companies and all the more with large companies, business networks also pose the question of the compatibility with anti-trust law. This collection dedicates three contributions to this important question. They are complemented by chapters on liability of the network and its members towards third parties and contributions discussing duties of loyalty and the interpretation of agreements. Drawing on new research from Italy, Spain, Germany and Norway, this work illustrates the European legal perspective on business networks.

This book provides an understanding of the concept of marketing and its role in business and public organization including the need for scientific marketing analysis. It includes a variety of mathematical models applied for better decision making, promotional decisions in the presence of competition, and sales forecasting using an Operational Research (OR) approach. The book also provides a platform to academicians, practitioners, and researchers to gain understanding of marketing management concepts from an OR perspective. This book offers relevant, international perspectives on techniques for market assessment under one canopy. It will be helpful for those who want to gain insight into understanding the managerial aspects from an OR analyst point of view and is a collaboration that contains plenty of related and valuable techniques used in real-life problems faced by industries.

This addition to the ISOR series is a readable yet rigorous advanced text/reference on models and decision-making under uncertainty in the growing area of electricity markets. It is the first book to show how to use stochastic programming procedures to carry out in-depth analysis of decision-making models under uncertainty in these markets, including formulation issues and solution techniques. Due to the recent creation of futures markets for electricity in the past decade, much of the book is groundbreaking and reflects the most recent advances in operations research and its application in energy markets in general.

An electricity market is simply a system for effecting the purchase and sale of electricity using supply and demand to set the price. These markets are competitive, and have been a growing worldwide trend since the 1980 s, and coming to prominence (and notoriety) in 2001 when both the California electricity crisis and the Enron scandal occurred. Though the phenomenon of the electricity market grew from deregulation, and will likely continue to move toward increased openness, the situation in California resulted entirely from faulty regulation, particularly in modeling risk. The fact is, there are so many constraints to consider in modeling these markets, with so many possible points of failure, that it s a wonder it s taken this long for a rigorous text on stochastic programming to appear.

This is an advanced expository book on solving the most current and relevant short- and medium-term decision-making problems pertaining to producers, consumers, retailers, and market operators. Among its unique features: it addresses essentially all operational problems that arise in electricity markets; practical applications are developed up to the stage of working algorithms, coded in the GAMS (General Algebraic Modeling System) so that practitioners can put the book to use immediately; applications encompass areas in applied mathematics and business, as well as electrical and energy engineering; it presents a unified treatment of risk; it includes two chapters on wind power; and it provides an appropriate blend of theoretical background and practical applications. It can be used in graduate level courses (or Conejo s own PhD course in electricity markets) in a broad range of programs, whether economic, mathematic, or engineering, and will also be well-suited for the practitioner.

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Originally published in 1970. Management consultants in the United Kingdom are often accused of cloaking their activities in secrecy. The confidential nature of consulting work often precludes the publication of case examples and it is only occasionally that press reports appear summarizing particular studies. Consulting firms, however, are in the unique position of gaining experience over the whole range of industry, commerce and government, and consequently have a full opportunity for spear-heading new developments and gathering technical know-how of wide value to managers. Science in Management outlines the methods used by a consulting firm specializing in operational research and computer science and describes numerous case examples taken from a wide range of industries and from the public sector. These examples cover tactical problems, problems which overlap functional boundaries within a company and a few major projects of a strategic nature. The aim of the twenty contributors has been to explain in relatively simple terms, some of the more important techniques and to illustrate by practical examples, the wide scope of the management science approach at all problem levels. The book will be helpful to all those seeking to apply science in management. It is written primarily for managers and those studying modern management methods, but parts of the book will be of interest to specialists as well.

Contents:
1. Research Skills and How to Acquire Them 2. What is Research? 3. Ways of Knowing 4. Problem Fields 5. Problem Identification 6. Research Ethics 7. Research Strategies: The Experiment and Survey 8. Research Strategies: The Case-Study, Ethnography and Action Research 9. Data Construction by Asking Questions 10. Data Construction by Making Observations 11. Data Construction by Using Documents and Records 12. Data Analysis and Interpretation 13. Writing and Publication

Contents:
1. Research Skills and How to Acquire Them 2. What is Research? 3. Ways of Knowing 4. Problem Fields 5. Problem Identification 6. Research Ethics 7. Research Strategies: The Experiment and Survey 8. Research Strategies: The Case-Study, Ethnography and Action Research 9. Data Construction by Asking Questions 10. Data Construction by Making Observations 11. Data Construction by Using Documents and Records 12. Data Analysis and Interpretation 13. Writing and Publication

Data and its processed state 'information' have become an indispensable resource for virtually all aspects of business, education, etc. Consequently, decisions regarding the handling of this data, transforming it into meaningful information, and ultimately arriving at the best course of action have taken on a new importance. This book highlights a selection of cutting-edge research on decision making presented at the 25th International Conference on Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM 2019), held in Istanbul, Turkey.

This book provides guidelines for obtaining research and development (RD) results of a consistent and known quality. The approaches discussed here have been developed for an industrial research center engaged in RD to support operating divisions of the parent corporation.

This book will cover heuristic optimization techniques and applications in engineering problems. The book will be divided into three sections that will provide coverage of the techniques, which can be employed by engineers, researchers, and manufacturing industries, to improve their productivity with the sole motive of socio-economic development. This will be the first book in the category of heuristic techniques with relevance to engineering problems and achieving optimal solutions. Features Explains the concept of optimization and the relevance of using heuristic techniques for optimal solutions in engineering problems Illustrates the various heuristics techniques Describes evolutionary heuristic techniques like genetic algorithm and particle swarm optimization Contains natural based techniques like ant colony optimization, bee algorithm, firefly optimization, and cuckoo search Offers sample problems and their optimization, using various heuristic techniques

This title offers a fast track route to mastering global operations. It covers the key areas of international marketing and distribution, logistics, import/export compliance and government regulations. It includes examples and lessons from some of the world's most successful businesses, including Nortel Networks, Terranova Forest Products and Ampro Electronics, and ideas from the smartest thinkers, including Adrian Wooldridge, Christopher Bartlett, Sumantra Ghoshal and John Micklethwait. It also includes a glossary of key concepts and a comprehensive resources guide.