Evaluating the Use of Electronic Door Seals (E-Seals) on Shipping Containers

In this study, electronic door seals (E-seals) are tested on shipping containers that traveled through ports, over borders, and on roadways. The findings show that using RFID devices increases supply chain efficiency and improves the security of containerized cargo movements, particularly when E-seals replace common mechanical seals. Before the benefits of E-seals can be realized, several barriers must be addressed. A lack of frequency standards for E-seals is a major problem, hindering their acceptability for global trade. Routine use of E-seals also requires new processes that may slow their acceptance by the shipping industry. Disposable E-seals, which decrease industry concerns about costs and enforcement agency concerns about security by eliminating the need to recycle E-seals, are not common because they must be manufactured in large quantities to be cost effective. Compatibility with existing highway systems could also promote E-seal acceptance, as containers could be tracked on roadways.

Wireless Sensor Network Technology and Its Application Potentials for Service Innovation in Supply Chain Management

The growing awareness of the strategic value of service along with higher product performance expectations has directed many industries to adopt service centric competitive strategies in managing their supply chains. Service innovation based on currently available advanced technologies has become critical in improving enterprises’ competitive strengths. Wireless sensor network (WSN) technology, which can provide a mobile, scalable, and reliable monitoring solution, is emerging as a tool for service innovation in supply chain management. This paper provides an overview of wireless sensor network technology and discusses how it can benefit modern industries. The fundamental theories of WSN are introduced as well as an overview of the development. The impact of information technologies on supply chain management and service innovation is then briefly discussed. Much emphasis is placed on the feasibility, procedures, and critical challenges of implementing WSN in supply chain management innovation. Current and future applications of WSN are also provided, followed by a case study demonstrating the application potentials of WSN for service innovation in the healthcare industry.

Research on Innovation Mechanism and Model of Logistics Enterprise

As a new field in the service industry, logistics is growing rapidly and is regarded as a fundamental industry in a national economy. Its development is an important symbol of a country’s modernization and national strength. It also works as an accelerator in economic development. At the initial stage of transforming traditional logistics service to a modern logistics service in China, logistics enterprises have encountered many difficulties and problems including an imbalanced supply and demand, distempered industrial structure, faultiness of serving process and backwardness of logistics technology since 2005.Compared with developed countries, there is a great gap between Chinese logistics enterprises and advanced countries’ in the aspects of service concepts, model, and content and techniques. Therefore, based on the service innovation driving model theory, the authors analyze the integrated innovation model of logistics enterprises, logistics technology and network model, and the value-added service model. The authors select Shenzhen China Overseas Logistics Co. LTD (COL) as the empirical object to analyze its operation of technology and non-technology innovation and summarize its inner and outer driving force on promoting service innovation.

Streamlining Knowledge Map Construction for an Online Auction House Using Automatic Term Filtering

Organizations are building automated technical support software that can help both consumers and field support engineers with problem resolution. The goal of the automated technical support system is reducing operational cost and increasing customer satisfaction. This paper examines the set of challenges that knowledge engineers face in building automated technical support software. This paper uses a technical services engagement with a major online auction house with tens of millions of users to highlight the challenges and present an automated knowledge map generation technique. The objective of this automated technique was to improve the quality of expressions extracted from documents, which would reduce the burden on knowledge engineers to construct knowledge maps. The technique was run on large corpora of documents in the online auction house and found a significant increase in the quality of the knowledge map. Further experimentation showed that the technique works well for other domains as well.

Collaboration in Cyber Transportation Logistics

Although the topic of supply chain (SC) and logistics (L) has been discussed in many fora, placing it in today’s cyber (e) space is still a subject that receives little attention. This paper analyzes the role of e-SC/L in the context of global business to business (B2B) electronic commerce (e-commerce). A major beneficiary of e-SC/L are small and medium enterprises (SMEs), who can leverage information technology to bypass the extra cost associated with employing a third-party broker, who traditionally bridges the gap between suppliers and retailers. In this paper, a framework for incorporating both e-commerce and e-SC/L for SMEs is proposed in an e-marketplace context. The model consists of a trading platform with e-SC/L capabilities, and a classification scheme for different levels e-SC/L collaboration, presented with relevant types of information, communication and transportation technology (ICTT) needed to facilitate the design of each collaboration level. Included in the highest level are transportation, identification, and modeling and simulation technologies that enable the design of effective forward-looking collaboration.

An Activity Theory Analysis of RFID in Hospitals

Although there have been many proposed applications of RFID in hospitals, few of those applications have received sustained use in hospitals, to-date. As a result, this paper investigates the use of RFID in hospitals in an emerging application, that of using RFID as part of the prescription process, including pharmacists generation of the prescription and nurses’ administration of the medicine. Using activity theory, activity templates are generated for pharmacists, nurses and the hospital to investigate the introduction of RFID. This paper finds that the introduction of RFID involves changes in the activities, as measured by changes in context variables, not just changes in technology. Also, the RFID-based approach eliminates substantial “medicine” slack. Further, using activity theory, the activity design for using RFID facilitates “technologically insulation” of pharmacists and nurses, from each other and doctors. Finally, such “digital specification” of activities likely leads to fewer errors, and constrains action, limiting inappropriate use of prescription drugs.

Analyzing Requirements and Approaches for Sourcing Software Based Services

Increasingly, software is no longer developed as a single system, but rather as a smart combination of so-called software services. Each of these provides an independent, specific and relatively small piece of functionality, which is typically accessible through the Internet from internal or external service providers. There are no standards or models that describe the sourcing process of these software based services (SBS). The authors identify the sourcing requirements for SBS and associate the key characteristics of SBS (with the sourcing requirements introduced). Furthermore, this paper investigates the sourcing of SBS with the related works in the field of classical procurement, business process outsourcing, and information systems sourcing. Based on the analysis, the authors conclude that the direct adoption of these approaches for SBS is not feasible and new approaches are required for sourcing SBS.

Business Service Scheduling

The management and predictive planning of the processes to create business services is more difficult than the planning of production processes, because services cannot be produced in stock and customers are involved in their creation. In this paper, the author proposes a method for service scheduling and optimization based on an ontology to describe business services and related concepts. The author schedules operations required to create a service. With each service process and its operations, soft and hard constraints on the execution of operations and the required resources are posted. These constraints are derived from service level agreements. A legal plan must then satisfy all hard constraints. All soft constraints are matter of optimization. Using a tabu search, a near-optimal solution of the service scheduling problem is achieved.

Managing Enterprise Service Level Agreement

The continued trend of globalization and technology improvement like the internet and transportation have spawned an increasing number of complex service chains that span across local, regional and national boundaries. Service level agreement (SLA) plays a crucial role in gluing service chains together. In that regard, this paper provides a complete guidance of end-to-end lifecycle management of SLA, including SLA-aware service modelling and terms optimization, contract drafting and compliance tracking. Among these, the author introduces his work in the area of enterprise SLA optimization to address existing deficiencies in this area including a roadmap for industry-strength SLA optimization capability and an initial version of SLA modeling and optimization toolset—code-named SLA-OASIS. Some out-of-box toolsets for SLA contract drafting and compliance tracking are also introduced.

Perceived Risk Management

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the theoretical work on service-perceived risk management of knowledge-based services (i.e., intangible and heterogeneous) and experience-based services and to suggest a framework that helps to formalize these risks and the value associated with their management, by arguing that this risk management relies on a sequence of risks (Threat, Event, Ignorance and Damage, called the TEID model) and on three categories of control measures (preventative, detective and protective). By categorizing customer-perceived risks, and by integrating control measures and assurances into their offer, providers can design new and valuable services. Service value-chains involve various providers (implicitly or otherwise) who may engender annoyance and damages as risks are a sequence of events. This paper holds the potential to contribute to extending an understanding and management capacity of customer-perceived risks of knowledge-based services. It brings into play a new framework and new risk management process. It also helps with formalizing and making tangible customer added-value.