Benjamin Yen

Toward an analytical approach for effective Web site design: A framework for modeling, evaluation and enhancement

Effective website design is critical to the success of electronic commerce and digital government. We consider website designs as structural problems and propose a conceptual framework for classifying different design scenarios into generic categories. We describe each generic design category using objective and constraints, and map it to a specific graph model analyzable or solvable analytically. By modeling website designs using well-defined structures and established analytical methods, our framework allows systematic and quantitative design evaluations and improvements. The proposed framework can complement existing practices by enhancing the design process and quality with increasing ease of analysis, implementation and continuous improvement.

Migrating Procurement onto the Internet

The emergence of advanced technology and the Internet leads to a trend for companies to migrate onto or to publicize themselves on the Internet as a business norm. Such migration involves business reengineering in procurement processes, which would result in pros and cons such as procurement time and cost saving, and resistance to change respectively for both buyers and sellers. This paper presents the migration of procurement onto the Internet, highlighting the ways in which business processes can be changed with the necessary technical requirements, and the possible pros and cons are encountered during the migration. An industrial example is used to illustrate the corresponding evolution as a result of electronic commerce (EC) deployment.

Internet scheduling environment with market-driven agents

This paper describes a new generation scheduling paradigm, the Internet scheduling environment. It is formed by a group of Internet scheduling agents which share computational resources to solve scheduling problems in a distributed and collaborative manner. We propose a migration scheme to transform existing standalone scheduling systems to Internet scheduling agents that can communicate with each other and solve problems beyond individual capabilities. To coordinate computational resource collaboration among agents, we introduce the market-based control mechanism in which self-interested agents initiate or participate in auctions to sell or buy scheduling problems. Efficient allocation of computational resources is achieved through the auctions. This paper also describes a prototype Internet scheduling environment named LekiNET, which is migrated from LEKIN/spl reg/, a flexible job shop scheduling system. The experiments on the LekiNET testbed demonstrate that the agent-based market-driven Internet scheduling environment is feasible and advantageous to future scheduling research and development.

Personalization of information access for electronic catalogs on the web

Abstract To attract and keep people at a web site is one of the major challenges in electronic commerce. More advertising, providing more useful information, or designing more flashy pages cannot prevent the Internet surfers from getting lost in the huge amount of information, especially the electronic catalogues. One solution is to customize the website for each for individual user through the analysis of preferences and interests in the user profile. The site should be able to customize itself on information content, information organization and information display. Information collection, analysis, and customization form a process to improve and customize the web site for each user, without Webmaster interference in normal operation. In this paper, a Personalized Electronic Catalogue (PEC) System is proposed to synthesize the customization of information content, organization, and display for electronic catalogs. An industrial application is used to demonstrate the improvement of information access for electronic catalogs.

The design and evaluation of accessibility on web navigation

Web sites have been deployed to create and sustain business competitiveness in a trend of emerging Web technologies and growing e-commerce. One critical success factor of e-commerce is the ability to allow information to be retrieved from a Web site in an efficient and effective manner. Such ability, being determined by both the Web site structure and the Web page organization, can be measured in terms of accessibility and popularity of Web pages. The relationship between accessibility and popularity of web pages is dynamic in nature and can be analyzed to enhance a Web design. Having observed the lack of means to measure information retrieval of a Web site, this paper purports to introduce a guideline to evaluate Web page accessibility based on several structural-based accessibility models where an innovative accessibility-popularity (A-P) analysis is deployed to measure and, thereby, to modify a Web structure. Both push (i.e. demand driven) strategies and pull (i.e. design driven) strategies are incorporated into such guideline. Further, accessibility models are analyzed and compared in order to identify appropriate applications for each model. The paper is concluded by a summary of future directions of the accessibility models.

Towards effective Web site designs: a framework for modeling, design evaluation and enhancement

Effective Web site design is critical to the success of e-commerce. Therefore, the evaluation and enhancement of a Web site design is of great importance. In this vein, accessibility is important and has been examined by a lot of researchers from different points of views. By and large, Web site accessibility is a structural problem and may be analytically investigated using mathematical approach. We propose a framework for representing real-world design problems as generic Web site designs, which then can be mapped into accessibility models analyzable or solvable using established analytical techniques. The framework consists of generic design and graph models, with the necessary mapping. We describe a generic Web site design using its objective and constraints, which correspond to important design requirements. By representing design problems using well-defined structures and rigorous analysis methods, this framework measures Web site accessibility using systematic and quantifiable approaches rather than qualitative ad-hoc practice. Hence, the framework facilitates the overall Web site design process, enhances design quality, and increases ease of analysis, implementation and continuous improvement.

The migration of electronic commerce (EC): from planning to assessing the impact of EC on supply chain

It has been an increasing trend for companies to migrate their businesses onto or publicize themselves on the Internet. Business process reengineering (BPR) is applied to migrate the business processes of the supply chain onto the Web. Such migration may cause some of the processes merged together, minimized or transformed into other processes within a supply chain. Therefore, careful planning for such migration with technical requirements is necessary. This paper starts with the review of related research on BPR, migration of supply chain onto the Internet, and the impact analysis of the migration. A thorough overview of how BPR can change each process of the supply chain onto the Internet is discussed. The main contribution of this paper is a framework of the electronic commerce (EC) impact on the supply chain and the measurement of impact. An industrial example is used to illustrate the evaluation as a result of EC deployment.

Analysis of RFID Adoption in China

Radio-frequency identification (RFID) is an emerging technology for automatic data capturing, enabling real time information visibility. It promises great potentials in many industries to improve logistics operational efficiency, to help reduce inventory, and to automate asset/item track and trace, etc. The RFID adoption in China is a highly concerned topic as China has become a world manufacturing center. In this paper, we have presented an overview for Chinas current RFID adoption status. Based on Rogerss DOI theory, a methodology is developed for analyzing RFID adoption in China. With this methodology, Chinas RFID adoption status is identified, and ways to speed up the rate of adoption are also suggested.

Design and evaluation of improvement method on the Web information navigation - a stochastic search approach

With the advent of fast growing Internet and World Wide Web (WWW), more and more companies start the electronic commerce to enhance the business competitiveness. On the other hand, more and more people surf on the Web for information gathering/processing. Due to unbalanced traffic and poorly organized information, users suffer the slow communication and disordered information organization. The information provider can analyze the traffic and uniform resource locator (URL) counters to adjust the organization; however, heterogeneous navigation patterns and dynamic fluctuating Web traffic make the tuning process very complicated. Alternatively the user may be provided with guidance to navigate through the Web pages efficiently. In this paper, a Web site was modeled as a Markov chain associated with the corresponding dynamic traffic and designated information pages. We consider four models: inexperienced surfers on guidance-less sites, experienced surfers on guidance-less sites, sites with the mean-length guidance, and sites with the known-first-arc guidance (generalized as sites with dynamic stochastic shortest path guidance). Simulation is conducted to evaluate the performance of the different types of navigation guidance. We also propose a reformulation policy to highlight the hyperlinks as steering guidance. The evolution on complexity and applicability is also discussed for the design guideline of general improvement methods. The paper concludes with the summary and future directions.

CONSTRUCTING AN E-SUPPLY CHAIN AT EASTMAN CHEMICAL COMPANY

Craig Knight, Asia Pacific Digital Business and Customer Services Manager of Eastman Chemical Company, was given a mandate to sell Eastmans philosophy for an integrated electronic supply chain, otherwise known as the Integrated System Solution (ISS), to its business partners in the region, and to encourage adoption. Having invested in a state-of-the-art technical architecture that would support interconnectivity with all parties along the supply chain, Eastman was keen to realise the full benefits to be gained from an integrated e-supply chain on a global scale. Following numerous rounds of discussion with key business partners in the Asia Pacific region, some progress had been made. Nagase & Co., Ltd. of Japan had agreed to adopt ISS connections with Eastman, but had some reservations regarding the extent of integration. Although the benefits of integration were proven, suppliers, customers, distributors and other interested parties were faced with numerous limitations and considerations that would have significant implications on their established business processes and even the shaping of their corporate strategy. Adoption was not a simple choice. Craig understood these shortcomings and was making every effort to ease the adoption process by identifying the longer-term benefits to Nagase and other business partners of applying XML technology to their businesses.