Search

Covid-19 has highlighted the fragility of supply chains in a range of critical infrastructure— food, medicines, health care, information technology, communications, and more. This paper focuses on an under-appreciated supply chain risk, network cybersecurity, that was present before the pandemic and which the pandemic brings into sharper focus. Between 2004 and 2016 the digital economy has grown nearly four times as fast as the rest of the economy according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The proliferation of digital services has created significant value and employment opportunities; it has also created a wide array of new cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Vulnerabilities of DVRs, CCTVs, voting machines, and municipal systems, leading to denial of service attacks and ransomware hold ups are known, but these examples miss a problem. Although these examples give the impression that only certain hardware and specific entities are affected, taking networked cybersecurity into account changes yields different conclusions. For example, given that enterprise software, which is common for work at home situations, is rapidly becoming a cybersecurity vulnerability, anyone connected by this software necessarily becomes a target too. Malicious cyber incidents, like data breaches, can have ripple effects across a network of businesses and sectors. Yet current definitions and regulations of Critical Infrastructure (CI) miss this point. We argue that the network dimension of cybersecurity risk is an important, under-studied aspect of the problem. Legal definitions of CI and the voluntary nature of cybersecurity governance leave gaps in the classification of CI and how to identify cybersecurity risk, particularly in the professional services sector. In addition, the voluntary nature of cybersecurity governance demands risk-based and objective measures to aid in identifying when to take steps on improving cybersecurity, but exactly what such metrics are is, at best, evolving. We address both these problems. By drawing on a new dataset, we develop metrics that measure productivity effects and that captures cybersecurity risk. This approach allows us to show that a major sector, professional services, is missed by current definitions of critical infrastructure, but could be captured if CI definitions accounted for networked cybersecurity risk. In addition, the approach aids voluntary participation in mitigating cybersecurity risk, because it provides a way for any firm or sector to identify and assess better the nature of its networked cybersecurity risk. In short, these networked cybersecurity vulnerabilities can adversely affect aggregate growth and national security objectives because of connectivity across firms and sectors. This work seeks to provide a path forward for understanding, defining, and protecting networked cybersecurity.

Customer Knowledge Management (CKM) plays an important role in the production of high quality software products. As CKM in Enterprise Software (ES) development is still immature, this raises questions on how CKM enablers can be used to help ES development companies improve their software quality. In this study, Human, Organizational and Technological CKM enablers were identified from the literature. The weights of these factors were determined by experts from the ES development companies. Based on the most important factors, a theoretical model was developed. The proposed model was evaluated by distributing a survey questionnaire to decision-makers in ES development companies. The results showed that “Customer Involvement” together with “Trust” were the most influential factors, followed by “CRM Technology Infrastructure” and “Cross-Functional Cooperation”. In addition, there was no impact from “Organizational Training”, “Customer Knowledge Map”, and “CKM Strategy Development”. The results also revealed that the impact of CKM on software quality is significant. The proposed model in this study can be used as a guideline for the successful application of CKM in ES development companies to improve the software quality.

Cost pressure, demand for individual solutions and increasing importance of software challenge manufacturing companies. Platforms are a solution to extend the value of products through modular digital services by transforming them into smart connected products. This contribution presents a recommendation framework for software ecosystems design, which reveals many factors, influencing the decision of a company whether to join a platform ecosystem or not. The framework’s usability for manufacturing companies is tested by applying it on a case study of connected vacuum gripping systems. In addition to the shown decision support, provided by the framework, the case study aims to depict the need for a framework extension, due to additional IoT components of smart connected products and the enterprise software origin of the initial framework.

To be competitive in the digital era, enterprises need to become sensing to be aware of their context, smart in taking decisions, and sustainable regarding social, environmental, and economic issues. Reference models can guide the enterprise engineering process in such direction. However, the implementation of the enterprise models, generated with reference models, depends on the integration of enterprise resources, which is not always possible due to the diversity of tools and applications needed within each business process. This paper proposes an Enterprise Operating System (EOS) to effectively handle the execution of enterprise models by integrating a diversity of functionalities. The goal of an EOS is to manage the resources (i.e. humans, applications, and machines) of an enterprise to fulfil its operations. The Sensing, Smart, and Sustainable Enterprise Reference Model (S3E-RM) is proposed to guide the implementation of the EOS. This reference model uses the viewpoints defined in the Reference Model of Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP), i.e. enterprise, information, computation, engineering, and technology viewpoints. The EOS presented has been successfully applied in more than 27 industry sectors, including government.

We identify three trust factors in enterprise open source software (OSS) vendors.Vendor's embracement of open standards, security and support influence system trust.System trust increases adopters attitudes and intentions in enterprise OSS vendors. Although significant research attention has been directed at understanding open source software (OSS) adoption, very little attention has been paid to understanding what leads potential adopters to trust enterprise open source vendors. This study identifies organizational trust factors in enterprise open source vendors, namely vendors security, embracement of open standards, and support services. It also examines the impact of system trust on adopters attitudes and intentions. The study draws upon a total of 192 questionnaires collected from enterprise IT and project managers. Our results show that trust factors have a positive effect on system trust. We also found system trust to be effective in increasing adopters attitudes and intentions. Finally, our results provide several managerial implications for organizations as well as enterprise open source vendors.

In information systems development models are used to represent real and target enterprise systems. Ideally the enterprise could have two basic enterprise models an As-Is model an To-Be model that may integrate all representations of the enterprise relevant to information systems development. Although there are many different suggested approaches how to model the enterprise, no consensus exists of what exactly should be the spectrum of model elements and corresponding to them enterprise artifacts for successful enterprise and information systems development. In this paper we propose an approach of identifying core enterprise model constituents for different systems development settings. The approach is based on the integration of professional knowledge regarding artifacts used in various systems development cases with the variations of a continuous requirements engineering framework that combines traditional requirements identification functions with additional continuous audit, monitoring and analytics activities.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is a system of integrated applications used to have full insight over the resources of an enterprise in terms of goods, employees and customers. On the other hand, artificial neural networks are becoming a necessity in applications that require artificial intelligence. A marriage between these two concepts would yield a system capable of storing and displaying dashboards of data, and simultaneously make computed expectations that can determine the future plans of an enterprise. Many have researched different applications in which a neural network can be used in order to achieve such a system. This paper demonstrates the study and simulation of a system that can give a prediction of the goods needed for an enterprise’s inventory depending on the past history of this enterprise sale with respect to the events occurring at different time periods. The system is built using C# and using examples from a real trading cooperation history in the learning process. It was tested using fictional simulations and produced acceptable results.

A portal is expected to promote the creation of enterprise communication. In this paper, the communication process of the Architecture Board utilizing a global enterprise portal is analysed. On the basis of the results, a method for promoting the global enterprise portal is evaluated and proposed for the near future.

Collaborating offline event marketing and online marketing is considered a relatively novel marketing activity for many of the enterprise software companies. In contrast to conventional communication strategies, event marketing features the active and physical participation of limited customers in marketing communication process and online marketing features to expand event awareness to wide range of customers. For both of customers, the companies often have the marketing event to improve software and service awareness in enterprise B2B Software industry. Improving the number of the event attendees is equal to improving the software and service awareness. Therefore, it is required target number of event registration through the website and actual attendance of both new logo customer and existing customers who recently owns or has experiences to use software before. It requires to show the right session to the right customers at the marketing event and website because each user has each different motivation, business scheme, business model, and own role and responsibility. In this study, we could figure out several differences of customer behavior at the marketing event and effectiveness of business impact after the event between 2 segmented customers, such as invited customers and non-invited customers.

Nowadays, companies are not only focused on achieving goals such as cost savings and increasing efficiency and profitability, but are also making a great deal of effort to add other social and environmental goals to their agenda, often including concerns related to health, safety and the environment (HSE). To achieve their HSE goals, organizations are required to have the processes associated with HSE components designed and developed in a single system. However, the organizations dependence on software becomes evident when macro-level managerial decisions are made based on all the data entered and stored in the organizations’ systems such as procurement, logistics, manufacturing, maintenance, and other related systems all of which might be isolated and separated from each other. These systems may provide a variety of features for organizations, but the lack of integration between them makes it difficult to interact and collaborate with the other processes of the organization. Therefore, the critical point is the integration of these systems in a comprehensive enterprise software. This integration challenge is due to the interdependency and the complexity of the data transmission as well as the relationships among various parts of the organization. To shed some light on the integration complexities this paper is intended to propose an approach to tackle these issues by designing an integrated HSE system with all its processes, features, and connections through an industrial enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. To illustrate the applicability of the system in an industrial context, we conduct a case study of the implementation of this HSE system in the mining industry and closely scrutinize the integration-related challenges faced during this process of software analysis, development and deployment.

This case increases your understanding of enterprise systems by applying course concepts in an active-learning setting. Specifically, you build on previous course knowledge by using Microsoft Dynamics GP via a cloud provider, DynamicsCloud. Cloud applications allow companies to reduce information technology costs and use one consistent platform across the entire company, whether they have one or many locations across the globe. The case consists of three main parts (i.e., system overview, data collection and storage, and information retrieval) and integrates internal controls and exercises within each part of the case. Upon completion of this case, you will understand the basic functions of an enterprise system. Activities require you to collect and process data in the revenue and purchasing cycles, identify internal controls within the system, and provide useful information for decision making. In addition, you gain hands-on experience using an enterprise system and acquire skills that transfer to other enterprise systems or to upgraded versions of Dynamics GP, which companies can use to support global operations. The case should increase accounting information system knowledge, system navigation skills, and the ability to learn on your own.

The relevant approaches for migrating legacy applications to the cloud are surveyed.An extensive analysis of existing approaches on the basis of a set of important criteria/features.Important cloud migration activities, techniques, and concerns that need to be properly addressed in a typical cloud migration process are delineated.Existing open issues and future research opportunities on the cloud migration research area are discussed. Moving mission-oriented enterprise software applications to cloud environments is a crucial IT task and requires a systematic approach. The foci of this paper is to provide a detailed review of extant cloud migration approaches from the perspective of the process model. To this aim, an evaluation framework is proposed and used to appraise and compare existing approaches for highlighting their features, similarities, and key differences. The survey distills the status quo and makes a rich inventory of important activities, recommendations, techniques, and concerns that are common in a typical cloud migration process in one place. This enables both academia and practitioners in the cloud computing community to get an overarching view of the process of the legacy application migration to the cloud. Furthermore, the survey identifies a number challenges that have not been yet addressed by existing approaches, developing opportunities for further research endeavours.

A firm's enterprise strategy is its overarching strategic orientation, addressing questions regarding its general purpose and the specific nature of its relationships with stakeholders along two dimensions: (a) scope, which represents the range of stakeholders the organization attempts to serve, and (b) type, which represents the general motivation behind stakeholder initiatives. The corporate social responsibility literature has played an important role in bringing a concern with stakeholder issues; however, this literature does not provide a systematic means of integrating these concerns into the firm's strategic architecture. Enterprise strategy offers a unifying construct, grounded in strategic considerations of both the social and economic demands placed on an organization. However, despite its conceptual importance to strategy and social issues, this construct is empirically underdeveloped. This study develops a reliable and valid measure of the enterprise strategy construct to advance the field's understanding of this increasingly important stream of research. Based on computer-aided text analyses of company letters to stakeholders, we systematically identify terminology that reflects the scope and type of a firm's espoused enterprise strategy. Overall, these data support four fundamental orientations of enterprise strategy: (1) narrow defensive, (2) narrow offensive, (3) broad defensive, and (4) broad offensive.

We propose a new paradigm for next generation enterprise information systems for the continuous alignment of business and IT for the agile enterprise.The metamodelling approach supports both human-interpretable enterprise architecture models and machine-interpretable enterprise ontologies.Semantic lifting transforms metamodels for the enterprise architectures into machine-interpretable enterprise ontologies.Semantic metamodels express the semantics of all modelling concepts by an ontology. The ontology is extended by a metamodel, which defines the notation and syntax of the graphical modelling language.Examples of next generation enterprise information systems are described, which embed modelling tools and algorithms for model analysis, identification of adaptation needs, and risk assessment. The paper deals with Next Generation Enterprise Information Systems in the context of Enterprise Engineering. The continuous alignment of business and IT in a rapidly changing environment is a grand challenge for today's enterprises. The ability to react timeously to continuous and unexpected change is called agility and is an essential quality of the modern enterprise. Being agile has consequences for the engineering of enterprises and enterprise information systems. In this paper a new paradigm for next generation enterprise information systems is proposed, which shifts the development approach of model-driven engineering to continuous alignment of business and IT for the agile enterprise. It is based on a metamodelling approach, which supports both human-interpretable graphical enterprise architecture and machine-interpretable enterprise ontologies. Furthermore, next generation enterprise information systems are described, which embed modelling tools and algorithms for model analysis.

Brief history of Enterprise Information Systems (EISs).EISs discussion in the context of EIS design and engineering.Impact of Enterprise Modelling, Enterprise Architecture, Enterprise Integration and Interoperability and Enterprise Networking on EISs.Special Issue introductory paper on "Future Perspectives on Next Generation Enterprise Information Systems". This state-of-the-art paper is intended to set the scene for a special issue of the Computers in Industry Journal on "Future Perspectives on Next Generation Enterprise Information Systems". It gives a brief history of Enterprise Information Systems (EISs) and discusses various aspects of EISs, including EIS design and engineering, the impact of enterprise modelling, enterprise architecture, enterprise integration and interoperability and enterprise networking on EISs before concluding.

The enterprise risk management has been a recurring theme on the agenda of organizations. The competition is increasingly established among the supply chains of organizations. In this sense, it is appropriate that this research aims to analyze the enterprise risk management in the supply chain of Brazilian companies. As a conceptual framework, it has been adopted three theoretical pillars, namely, New Institutional Economics, Supply Chain and Enterprise Risk Management. The research was divided into three stages: interviews with experts on the subject, survey with managers of large Brazilian companies, and validation of the proposals from the analysis of the results with the same experts. The analysis of results was established mainly by the use of multivariate statistical techniques such as correspondence analysis, factor analysis, cluster analysis and multinomial logistic regression. As a result of the study, it was presented a proposal of model for an enterprise risk analysis, as well as a proposal of model for analysis of the level of maturity in enterprise risk management in the supply chain of large Brazilian companies.

Current economic conditions are forcing market players to bring new products to consumers rapidly, maintaining the high quality and providing the reasonable price. The concept of ramp-up management is designed to meet this request. The implementation of this concept in practice, in particular for Russian industrial enterprises, causes certain challenges. Correspondingly the quality of enterprise management becomes a factor that appreciably influences the ramp-up execution. In this regard, the study designed to develop the theoretical provision and methodological approach towards the assessment of the management quality is viewed as relevant to the practical needs of enterprises during the ramp-up and technological re-equipment. In the present article we propose a conceptual approach to assess the quality of enterprise management on the basis of value chain methodology which is relevant to the conditions of ramp-up preparation and implementation. By the “quality of management” notion in the study it is proposed to understand the totality of objectively existing properties and characteristics of enterprise management system which adequately reflects all aspects of its activities and contributes to the efficiency of enterprises development and competitiveness.

In this paper we present the findings of the first part of a research project examining the adoption, appropriation and long-term use of enterprise collaboration systems (ECS). The aim of the study is to identify the challenges that organizations encounter during the introduction and use of an ECS. Through a meta-analysis and classification of the academic literature and corroborating company interviews five adoption challenge areas were identified: culture , business/ operation , technology in use , benefits , and attitude/ behavior . The challenges and the associated sub-challenges are described and their nature and implications for both theory and practice are discussed.

Enterprise information systems implemented in the organizations are critical assets to provide competitive advantage in changing sectoral conditions and continuity of business processes and management of enterprise resources. In this regard, information security approaches and assessment techniques are used to examine the maturity level of enterprise and determine the risks and potential solutions for enterprise information systems. This study aims to measure information systems in terms of information security and risks. On the other hand, it is also aimed to describe the potential effects of assessment techniques and tools for state organizations to manage their critical assets. In order to achieve these aims, information systems of one of the large scale health sector organizations in Turkey were assessed via an international assessment tool that is adapted to Turkish conditions in some parts like legal regulations. The results obtained through assessment tool provide the current maturity level of the organization and remark the points that should be improved for the security of information systems and the critical components such as risks, processes, people, IT reliance and technology. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.

The progress in the field of Machine Learning (ML) has enabled the automation of tasks that were considered impossible to program until recently. These advancements today have incited firms to seek intelligent solutions as part of their enterprise software stack. Even governments across the globe are motivating firms through policies to tape into ML arena as it promises opportunities for growth, productivity and efficiency. In reflex, many firms embark on ML without knowing what it entails. The outcomes so far are not as expected because the ML, as hyped by tech firms, is not the silver bullet. However, whatever ML offers, firms urge to capitalise it for their competitive advantage. Applying ML to real-life construction industry problems goes beyond just prototyping predictive models. It entails intensive activities which, in addition to training robust ML models, provides a comprehensive framework for answering questions asked by construction folks when intelligent solutions are getting deployed at their premises to substitute or facilitate their decision-making tasks. Existing ML guidelines used in the IT industry are vastly restricted to training ML models. This paper presents guidelines for Applied Machine Learning (AML) in the construction industry from training to operationalising models, which are drawn from our experience of working with construction folks to deliver Construction Simulation Tool (CST). The unique aspect of these guidelines lies not only in providing a novel framework for training models but also answering critical questions related to model confidence, trust, interpretability, bias, feature importance and model extrapolation capabilities. Generally, ML models are presumed black boxes; hence argued that nobody knows what a model learns and how it generates predictions. Even very few ML folks barely know approaches to answer questions asked by the end users. Without explaining the competence of ML, the broader adoption of intelligent solutions in the construction industry cannot be attained. This paper proposed a detailed process for AML to develop intelligent solutions in the construction industry. Most discussions in the study are elaborated in the context of profit margin estimation for new projects.

Platform ecosystems characterized by a few platform owners and numerous other complementor firms that partner with them have become quite common across industries. Even though there has been considerable research on platform ecosystems, attention has mostly been on the platform owners and their strategies. In this paper, we focus on the complementor firms and try to understand the phenomenon of multihoming, a strategy in which a complementor firm chooses to join multiple platforms rather than one. We build a micro-foundational capability framework based on human capital and test it on a novel dataset from the ERP platform ecosystem. The study has implications for our understanding of platform growth and innovation and contributes toward the literature on platform ecosystems as well as strategic human capital.

We provide an analysis of innovation at SAP using bibliometric analysis of patents.A rotation and sort procedure was applied to the text.A frequent itemset analysis was performed using the word occurrence matrix.A blockmodeling algorithm was applied to explore relatedness between terms.We integrate text and network analysis tools to perform bibliometric analysis. Easily accessible patent databases and advances in technology have enabled the exploration of organizational innovation through the analysis of patent records. However, the textual content of patents presents obstacles to gleaning useful information. In this study, we develop an expert system framework that utilizes text and data mining procedures for analyzing innovation through textual patent data. Specifically, we use patent titles representing the innovation activity at one company (SAP) and perform a bibliometric analysis using our proposed framework. Enterprise software, of which SAP is a pioneering developer, must serve a wide assortment of functions for companies in many different industries. In addition, SAP's sole focus is on enterprise software and it is a market leader in the category with substantial patent activity over the last decade. Using our framework to analyze SAP's patent activity provides a demonstration of how our bibliometric analysis can summarize and identify trends in innovation in a large software company. Our results illustrate that SAP has a breadth of innovative activity spread over the three-tier software engineering architecture and a lack of topical repetition indicative of limited depth. SAP's innovation is also seen to emphasize data management and quickly integrate emerging technologies. Results of an analysis on any company following our framework could be used for a variety of purposes, including: to examine the scope and scale of innovation of an organization, to examine the influence of technological trends on businesses, or to gain insight into corporate strategy that could be used to aid planning, investment, and purchasing decisions.

International audience; Risk-based decision making has been always important in everyday business life. Enterprise risk management (ERM) is the state-of-the-art approach to manage risks facing an organization from system perspective. This paper provides a review of popular literature in ERM using management science approaches, and an introduction of the special issue.

A key challenge facing information technology (IT) managers is how to carefully analyze the decision options available to them when considering enterprise software infrastructure upgrades. We present an illustrative case that not only captures the trade-offs involved in retaining an existing software infrastructure as opposed to adopting a new one at an appropriate time, but also demonstrates how the combined application of various analytical tools including real options analysis may provide richer information than a single approach. Our model offers IT managers the potential to arrive at a deeper understanding of software upgrade timing decisions while generating important information relevant to practical decision situations.

The research investigates an area of contemporary interest in British forest policy: community-based and social enterprises. A systematic framework was used to collect and organise qualitative and quantitative evidence from thirty three case studies across Wales, Scotland and England. Two descriptive typologies emerged from an iterative analysis of the case study data: one identifies five different business models and one deals with community involvement in governance and benefit distribution and finds four different enterprise types. Testing detailed financial data against the typologies demonstrates the limitations of current definitions of social and community enterprises in the forestry sector. The balance of traded and grant income used to distinguish between enterprise types is not a satisfactory device in forestry contexts. Three main barriers to enterprise development were identified as start-up costs, woodland and business management skills, and bureaucracy. Evidence supporting the popular hypothesis that social and community enterprises produce more and diverse benefits from woods was elusive. Policy responses should recognise a broad spectrum of woodland enterprise types rather than social enterprise alone, focus on the potential of different business models, and enable communities to find innovative solutions to securing the capital, technical and legal advice they require.

New challenges of enterprise network integration in sensing environment are illustrated.A data convergence oriented enterprise networks integration architecture with relative enabling technologies is developed in the paper.Data Portal (DP) and Collaboration Agent (CA) concepts are introduced for data collection, transfer and fusion from different data sources.Cases to solve problems of product lifecycle management and omni-channel marketing management are discussed. With the process of globalisation and the development of management models and information technologies, enterprise cooperation and collaboration meets a new business and technical environment. The Internet of things, mobile Internet, cloud computing and big data technologies build a sensing environment for all kinds of businesses. Inter enterprise collaboration is also meeting the new challenges of omni-channel marketing, closed-loop supply chain and enterprise networks integration. A data convergence oriented enterprise networks integration architecture with relative enabling technologies is developed in the paper. In order to collect, transfer and fuse data from different data sources, Data Portal (DP) and Collaboration Agent (CA) concepts are introduced, which present a lightweight and loosely coupled infrastructure for enterprise networks integration. How to use the developed technologies to solve problems of product lifecycle management and omni-channel marketing management are discussed in detailed cases studies.

This paper proposes a reference framework for the development of manufacturing Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in developing countries, taking into account the characteristics of the future enterprise. The reference framework has been named Sustainable x Smart x Sensing - Reference Framework (S 3 -RF). This reference framework includes characteristics to address economic, social and environmental issues of the future sustainable enterprise. In order to be sustainable and competitive worldwide, an enterprise must make smart decisions regarding its strategies, processes and use of resources, therefore must be a Smart Organization. Context sensing and sense making is a requirement to understand externally, customers, social networks, markets and competition, but also internally the performance of its processes, resources, business rules and practices, and use of technology, therefore sensing is core to its strategy execution. For the incorporation of these characteristics the framework is based on three main models: Smart x Sensing Enterprise Reference Model (S 2 -RM), Methodology for Integrated Product Process and Manufacturing System Development (IPPMD) and Automation System Pyramid. The S 3 -RF allows the definition of the enterprise's structure based on five viewpoints: enterprise, information, computational, engineering and technology. S 3 -RF uses S 2 -RM for the creation of an enterprise inside the concept of an Integrated Product, Process and Manufacturing System Development. Finally the Automation System Pyramid describes how to implement the architecture generated with reference model. The specific description in each level of the pyramid has to guarantee the correct implementation of the concepts generated with S 2 -RM and IPPMD. A Testbed demonstrates the use of the S 3 -RF in the implementation of a pilot reconfigurable microfactory (RμF).

Aligning enterprise analytics to business capability maturity is a difficult yet, imperative process. This paper will provide a background on Enterprise Intelligence Capability Maturity Model and lists a summary of the key advancements in enterprise analytics. The paper then discusses how enterprise analytics are derived from enterprise intelligence objectives. Enterprise analytics must support and increased enterprise capability maturity and the paper concludes with the taxonomy for enterprise analytics.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) is the core of business information processing. ERP becomes one of the most important factor in business, regardless various core of business (financial, human resources, marketing, operations). Supply chain management (SCM) looks beyond the individual company, taking into account that enterprises are increasingly concentrating on their core competencies, leaving other activities to suppliers. ERP System helps companies to achieve it's competitive advantages by enhancing information flow of process through connected functional system between supplier, manufacture, distributor, even up to end user. The research was carried out for 148 Indonesia Companies’ executives. Hypotheses was tested using multiple regression path analysis. All the constructs or questions of this research were processed quantitatively using Serqual Equation Modelling (SEM). The results indicated that SCM practices has positive impact on competitive advantage (β = .56, p .50). ERP system has positive impact on firm performance (β = .54, p < .05). Finally, that competitive advantage positively affect the firm performance (β = .64, p > .05).

Management of business processes is a comprehensive approach to implementation of the objectives of an organisation. It concentrates on optimising the ways business processes are run in organisations in order to increase effectiveness of operations within an organisation. The aim of this paper is to identify and analyse an enterprise's orientation on process management and to identify the limitations in the process approach to an enterprise management. To achieve this aim, a questionnaire survey was conducted in 2015 examining enterprises and business processes they perform. It enabled identification of statistical relationships with reference to selected categories of enterprises and verification of the research hypotheses which defined, among other things, level of entrepreneurs’ knowledge and orientation on processes occurring in an enterprise management.

Purpose: The aim of this research is to determine the significant factors leading to the adoption of Enterprise Social Software in Australian organisations. The research question is: What are the significant adoption factors of Enterprise Social Software in Australia? Design/methodology/approach: Technology Acceptance Model is adapted for this research to determine the significant adoption factors of Enterprise Social Software. An online questionnaire was distributed among Australian knowledge workers, garnered more than 300 responses, and the results were analysed through Structural Equation Modelling. Findings: The structural model suggests that significant factors influencing the adoption of Enterprise Social Software are External Variables including Individual Factors, Organisational Factors, Task Complexity, Organisational Culture, and Knowledge Strategy, and perceptions of the system including Perceived Usefulness and Perceived Ease of Use. Practical implications: Organisations which desire increased adoption of Enterprise Social Software are recommended to apply conducive strategies around intrinsic variables (Individual Factors, Organisational Culture), as well as extrinsic variables (Task Complexity, Knowledge Strategy), which in turn will positively influence perceptions of usefulness and ease of use, and subsequently positively influence the decision to adopt Enterprise Social Software. Originality/value: In summary, the research determined significant factors to the adoption of Enterprise Social Software in Australia. The discussion emphasised the importance of External Variables as indirect, but highly influential, factors to the adoption of this technology, which are leveraged through Perceived Usefulness and Perceived Ease of Use. By improving our understanding of these factors, we are in position to improve the adoption rates of Enterprise Social Software as a representation of the next generation Knowledge Management Systems.

In this paper an approach to the problem of dynamic modeling and management in an integrated intellectual scientific, manufacturing, infrastructure, educational and social environment of the industrial cluster based on the structure of processes and mathematical processing of statistical data is discussed. The paper highlights methodology of clusters model constructing, quantitative estimates of individual enterprise opportunities, technological capabilities of the enterprise as a whole, the transition from the enterprise to the cluster. An important infrastructure investment project application for cluster enterprise general combined automobile cargo transportation system is considered.

The opportunities for the enterprise financing depend on macroeconomic and microeconomic indicators. The enterprise life cycle has significant influence on financing of chosen development activities. Financing is one of key tasks in many enterprises. It is a process allowing the enterprise to survive or to progress. The aim of operative financing is to finane the enterprise current assets in order to maintain its constant run. It is realised in a form of short-term financing in most of cases but sometimes it has a form of middle-term financing. Operative cycles are important for enterprise because it influences the need of internal and external financial sources. Investment financing is related to long-term assets’ acquisition. Its aim is to fulfil the investment needs of enterprise in a form of spreading investments. State budget withdraws part of financial means of enterprises in a form of taxes and fees. The cash-flow category is used more frequently especially in financial analyses in evaluating the financial stability of enterprise and causes of changes of money sources in short-term planning of financial incomes and expenditures, in middle-term and long-term constitution of enterprise financial prognoses, in evaluating the investment variants effectiveness and as one of methods of defining the enterprise market value.

There has been a large and committed shift to converting corporate risk management programs into enterprise risk management (ERM) systems, but the ERM literature still lacks a clear and structured picture of the incentives/benefits of ERM. We provide a structured and substantiated way of conceptualizing ERM that captures and organizes the already existing discourse. We propose that there are essentially three dimensions of ERM: governance, integration, and strategy. In a further refinement, we propose a categorization of six underlying incentives for ERM: to, (i) achieve risk oversight, (ii) provide structure to the risk management system, (iii) increase organizational risk awareness, (iv) manage portfolios of risk, (v) develop strategy, and (vi) improve strategic decision-making.

While most software defects (i.e., bugs) are corrected and tested as part of the prolonged software development cycle, enterprise software venders often have to release software products before all reported defects are corrected, due to deadlines and limited resources. A small number of these reported defects will be escalated by customers whose businesses are seriously impacted. Escalated defects must be resolved immediately and individually by the software vendors at a very high cost. The total costs can be even greater, including loss of reputation, satisfaction, loyalty, and repeat revenue. In this paper, we develop a Software defecT Escalation Prediction (STEP) system to mine historical defect report data and predict the escalation risk of current defect reports for maximum net profit. More specifically, we first describe a simple and general framework to convert the maximum net profit problem to cost-sensitive learning. We then apply and compare four well-known cost-sensitive learning approaches for STEP. Our experiments suggest that cost-sensitive decision trees (CSTree) is the best methods for producing the highest positive net profit.

The objective of this study is to determine the resistance antecedents to enterprise systems. Thus, by reviewing the extant literature with respect to resistance behavior to information systems, a theoretical model containing the factors that influence user resistance behavior to enterprise systems was compiled. Then, via a web survey, 169 valid questionnaires filled out by Brazilian IT managers who had already implemented enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems were obtained. From there, the research drew on factor analysis and structural equation modeling techniques to refine and test the proposed model. It was found that “systems” and “personal inclination” factors explain about 49% of the variance related to resistance to enterprise systems. The former factor reveals that the characteristics of the enterprise system to be implemented can lead to resistance to implementation per se, whereas the latter suggests that individuals with an inherent bias to resist change might make the implementation of a new ERP system difficult.

The authors discuss applicability of the theory of complementary assets in Enterprise Architecture migration planning area. They propose an approach to planning of transition to the target Enterprise Architecture. The approach is based on the Matrix of Change – the only tool of change management allowing consideration and efficient use of interactions between existing and implemented practices in an enterprise.

Aircraft manufacturing is typically characterized by large, highly complex end items that require a great deal of human assembly resources. For large scale operations producing complex items at high volumes, management oversight is broken down into discrete areas that operate as internal suppliers/customers to each other. While the scale of the production system lends itself to this decomposition, global efficiency can suffer in such a scenario (based on internal managerial and political dynamics). This paper presents an enterprise model for optimizing a large scale, high volume assembly operation based on the minimization of the variability between labour capacity and labour demand.

This paper considers the use of social learning networks to increase the productivity of IT consulting companies. We advocate that using a carefully designed social learning network can reduce the learning time for enterprise software developers and consultants. By viewing learning as a social act, a consulting company can increase its productivity. Increased productivity is based on hastening the learning process. The focus of this paper is to identify the ways in which social networks catalyze the process of knowledge sharing in order to increase the productivity in the enterprise resource planning (ERP) consulting sector. We present a set of detailed practical results that were obtained from experiments with an original knowledge sharing method that was applied to training young software developers to enable them to work for some of the world's most demanding IT companies. The experimental data were collected from 2004 to 2011 during 12 training sessions conducted by an IBM partner in conjunction with the Computer Science Department of a large Eastern European University. The main results of this study were: (1) designed a learning community that reduced the time needed to insert junior consultants into ERP projects; and (2) statistical data were generated that measured the increase in productivity that an ERP consulting company could obtain by employing organizational learning networks. We also discuss the positive impacts of social networks that can be established between private companies and universities.

Nowadays the traditional management approach has given its place to modern mentality. The traditional structured functionality has evolved into system understanding which concerns the whole of enterprise. System approach is used to solve the problems of the organization. The strategic weapons which are necessary to manage the organization as a whole, are "information systems". The critical points about rational management of organizations and obtainment competitive advantage are information and using of information. An enterprise solution on the basis of the software is needed to ensure the integrity of the organization and the integration between the elements. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) whose development is based on 1960s, is a holistic software that is fairly valid in terms of organizations. Disadvantages of ERP has led organizations to search for different software. Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) emerges as solution partner in this sense. In the study, explaining the establishment holism in the organizations and ensuring integration in the focal point, ERP and EAI are analyzed in a comparative manner. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.

Competency modelling is a standardized way to found an enterprise area of experts. Identifying and managing competences acquired by an enterprise and further representing them in a structured manner provide important knowledge for 'know-how' approach. The purpose of this paper is developing a competency based knowledgebase for an enterprise using case study approach. The developed competency knowledgebase for the case study provides information important to decision-making, and can act as an indicator for an enterprise's willingness to engage in robust collaboration. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.

Business Excellence represents a reform for any enterprise, but its achievement requires a continuous circle of evaluations, because only the evaluation of the result will open potential for complex improvement within the entire enterprise. The aim of the paper is to identify and specify methodical bases (dimensions) for evaluating the status of Business Excellence. The emphasis is placed on the characterization of dimensions currently used for the evaluation of Business Excellence status. Application of primary and secondary research methods showed that the object of evaluation can be all those factors, which in a certain way influence the success of the enterprise and the subject of evaluation is the enterprise itself or external company dealing in this issue, respectively; and the choice of suitable method depends on the object and purpose of evaluation, as well as on the knowledge of current trends in evaluating the Business Excellence status.

Project Management Information Systems (PMIS) are software applications that help managers track projects from their conception to their execution. They provide them with pertinent information and collaborative tools. Currently, most businesses use disconnected instruments which are not designed for managing complex projects. Increases in complexity, both due to the extent of scope and the fact that the users who contribute to the decision making process are physically separated, have led to initiatives that deal with cooperation, teamwork and continuous improvement. This work presents an integrated approach to improve PMIS applicability within the Extended Enterprise. The study regards the definition and the building of a management framework where planning, scheduling, and communicating are made immediate and effective by the adoption of common standards, shared communication and appropriate software tools for the management of whole Supply Chains. The proposed approach has been successfully applied within the shipbuilding industry.

In the enterprise system market, software quality is often unobservable at the contracting stage between the vendor and the customer. Two factors complicate the vendor's decision to invest in software quality. First, as a required part of the transaction, services such as installation and maintenance are bundled with the product. Second, the vendor's cost of delivering these services is directly affected by quality of the software. Incorporating these factors, we develop an analytical framework to examine when vendors of enterprise systems have an incentive to invest in software quality under different market structures and market participant behaviors. We also investigate economic consequences of such quality decisions by enterprise software vendors, highlighting certain unique characteristics of these markets. We consider a duopoly setting, with simultaneous and sequential moves of the vendors. Our results show that in the duopoly market, even when customers are uninformed about quality, an investment-equilibrium exists. We find that there exist conditions under which customers might have reasons to trust that vendors would invest in high software quality. Developed an analytical framework to examine when vendors of enterprise systems have an incentive to invest in software quality.Even when customers are uninformed about quality, vendors may still have incentive to invest.The investment equilibrium exists in a wide range of duopoly settings, including both simultaneous and sequential moves by vendors in a duopoly.

Today’s global markets drive enterprises towards closer collaboration with customers, suppliers and partners. Interoperability problems constitute fundamental barriers to such collaboration. A characteristic of modern economic life is the requirement on continuous and rapid change and innovation. The success of an enterprise more and more depends on its ability to seamlessly interoperate with other agile enterprises, and to be able to adapt to actual or imminent changes. Flexible and adaptive interoperability of enterprises, with aligned business processes and information technology, thus emerges as a key business feature. This new enterprise reality calls for advanced technological support, preferably in harmony with technology developments of the Internet, which is our dominant universal communication and information infrastructure. The current special issue aims at contributing to a consolidation of the theoretical and empirical knowledge on enterprise interoperability, and at promoting novel ideas and early experience regarding the use and realization of the Future Internet vision to advance Enterprise Interoperability.

The production scheduling process lies on the core of the day-to-day operation of an industrial organization. Although much attention has been given to the different methods used to generate a production schedule, its understanding as an enterprise process that is limited by resources and restricted by diverse factors, such as time, has not been extensively explored yet. This work presents an enterprise engineering approach to assess the production scheduling process based on a set of enterprise engineering guidelines and a set of recommendations from the production scheduling literature. The approach is composed of an analysis framework and an assessment procedure and results of its application to a case study in a cosmetics manufacturer are presented.

Since the software industry significantly differs from traditional manufacturing in numerous ways, the development effort of software products originate mainly from human resources. In particular, enterprise resource planning (ERP) software is a virtual intelligence and customer service-oriented product. Software developers are thus concerned with how to estimate ERP project effort during the developmental stage. Despite significant advances in procedures that facilitate project management, product managers in the software industry still encounter guesswork and subjective judgment-related problems, frequently resulting in inaccurate estimates. No concrete functional relationship exists between effort estimation and the design requirements of ERP system development. Companies can thus lose their market competitiveness during the marketing phase of attracting customers owing to inefficient and ineffective responses. In addition to reviewing pertinent literature on estimation approaches, this work adopts information system projects developed by the primary Taiwan-based ERP solutions provider as an empirical database. Furthermore, based on analysis of recent ERP software projects, this work presents a feasible estimation model to satisfactorily estimate the person-hour of an ERP system development project efficiently. Based on systematic modeling, the proposed estimation model enables project decision makers or sales departments to react immediately to preliminary project cost with rate per person-hour, ultimately increasing their decision making quality, estimation efficiency and accuracy.

Context The selection and adoption of open source software can significantly influence the competitiveness of organisations. Open source software solutions offer great opportunities for cost reduction and quality improvement, especially for small and medium enterprises that typically have to address major difficulties due to the limited resources available for selecting and adopting a new software system. Objective This paper aims to provide support for selecting the open source software that is most suitable to the specific needs of an enterprise from among the options offering equivalent or overlapping functionality. Method This paper proposes a framework for evaluating the quality and functionality of open source software systems. The name of the framework is EFFORT (Evaluation Framework for Free/Open souRce projecTs). It supports the evaluation of product quality, community trustworthiness and product attractiveness. The framework needs to be customised to the analysis of software systems for a specific context. Results The paper presents the customisation of EFFORT for evaluating Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) open source software systems. The customised framework was applied to the evaluation and comparison of five ERP open source software systems. The results obtained permitted both the refinement of the measurement framework and the identification of the ERP open source software system that achieved the highest score for each chosen characteristic. Conclusion EFFORT is a useful tool for evaluating and selecting an open source software system. It may significantly reduce the amount of negotiation conducted among an enterprise’s members and reduce the time and cost required for gathering and interpreting data. The EFFORT framework also considers the users’ opinions by introducing relevance markers associated with the metrics and questions in the data aggregation process.

The aim of this study is to encourage enterprises to participate in information security and raise awareness of information security. We have analyzed the economic effect of an enterprise’s performance through an ISMS certification system and proposed a plan to facilitate information security activities. We investigate an increase in enterprise value and information security industry activation, and utilized an enterprise’s financial statement for economic effects, including creation of a measurement formula. We also conducted a survey to collect practical data. As a result of analysis, the enterprise, which implemented ISMS, has caused approximately $22,000 increase in enterprise value on average, and created 2.47 people of employment annually. In addition, the number of ISMS certification cases will increase at a rate of 100%.