Jiun-Yan Shiau

The application of balanced scorecard in the performance evaluation of higher education

Purpose – The Taiwanese higher education sector is presently facing a significant challenge with regard to supply and demand. The purpose of this paper is to examine how, in this scenario, the balanced scorecard (BSC) can be used for performance evaluation as a strategic management tool.Design/methodology/approach – This study is based on a case study that should carry appropriate mission and vision. With the existing resources and targets, five major strategic themes are constructed, including an adequate financial structure, an accord with customer expectations, an excellent learning environment, organisational learning and management, and high quality staff.Findings – To achieve strategic themes it is necessary to propose specific and effective strategic targets. To evaluate progress and performance towards these strategic themes and targets, quantified performance measure indicators (PMIs) must be established in a specific and simple manner that allows all staff members to understand the orientation o...

A distributed change control workflow for collaborative design network

Collaborative product development is becoming more valuable because of the increasing coordination and management complexity of organizational information, responsibilities, schedules, deliverables, product information, and business process. As outsourcing and globalization increase the number of design chain participants, a collaborative product development speeds up the decision-making of trusted partners, employees, suppliers, and customers in design chains. Due to continuous changes in design projects, delays in product developments are common. Thus, a change control workflow is needed among design chain participants for product development. A distributed change control workflow for design network is therefore proposed in this study. This type of workflow is a two-layer approach derived from the principles of configuration management and routing algorithm. It has been validated that the consistencies of designs from each participants in design chain is maintained by applying the proposed distributed change control workflow.

A warehouse management system with sequential picking for multi-container deliveries

The separation of picking and packing processes of a warehouse management system usually brings extra storage buffers and relatively longer operating time. This paper develops a hybrid algorithm to generate a picking sequence for combining picking and packing operations. The algorithm includes three elements: container selection, loading configuration, and loading/picking sequence. A generic warehouse management system with the proposed sequential order picking function for a tea factory in central Taiwan has been implemented to demonstrate the elimination of storage buffers and the reduction of operation time.

Multi-agent negotiation based on price schedules algorithm for distributed collaborative design

Collaborative design is a common practice in modern product development. Companies specializing in different disciplines, which are often geographically separated, work together to develop solutions for the benefit of overall design. In such inter-organizational collaboration, participants hiding individual skills and design rationales is highly desirable. To fulfill this requirement, this study proposes a negotiation mechanism based on a price schedules decomposition algorithm originally developed in economics. The mechanism searches for globally optimal designs, where no participant is necessary to own full knowledge of the entire design space. This paper also applies multi-agent system technologies to realize a secure environment for automating distributed collaborative design. A test scenario of distributed tolerance allocation in assembly design validates the proposed mechanism.

Product configuration for engineering change decision

There is nothing permanent except change. The only constant is change. Many engineering changes must be communicated to a broad range of stakeholders. The process is often labor intensive, paper laden, and error prone. Product data management (PDM) system and configuration management theory are the most popular system and theory for handling engineering changes today. In practice, when utilizing a product data management system, a planned effectivity must be filled in each engineering change request (ECR) during analyzing and evaluating phase of an engineering change. A change effectivity decision may be required to identify all of the required actions, the responsibility, and the timing from detail design phase to production phase in the life cycle of the product. This paper presents a specific product configuration, which is called engineering change decision bill of materials (ECD-BOM). The procedure for generating such a product configuration from product data management system is also provided. Import states of such product configuration into an advanced planning and scheduling (APS) system, planned effectivity of approved changed configuration items are then computed.

Developing taxonomy and model for security centric supply chain management

Security management of modern supply systems raise challenges to various aspects of Supply Chain Management (SCM) researches, demanding an integrated and holistic solution framework. In this paper, we concentrate on two fundamental instruments to support the pursuit of a Security centric Supply Chain Management (SecSCM) mission. Firstly, the security taxonomy within the SCM context provides a comprehensive knowledge map of relevant artifacts and issues for players to communicate and collaborate in this special field. Ultimately, it supplies building blocks for qualitative modelling required by security management. Secondly, security management in SCM seeks practical computation and analysis capabilities, thus requiring a migration from qualitative models to quantitative models. We utilise dependency modelling as the bridging facility and probabilistic modelling as the inference engine in our solution to deal with complexity and uncertainty dominant in SecSCM. In addition, we explore the proposition within essential application of healthcare supply chain security management. Noticing the enormous challenge presented by the new research mission, we emphasise identifying and examining generic issues and potential solutions, rather than particular problems or algorithms with limited usage and significance.

Issue resolution for conceptual design using AHP

This paper presents a methodology for issue resolution in conceptual design. Conceptual design is the preliminary phase of design in which both well-defined problem specifications and high level design solutions are developed. It has been shown that eighty five percent of the lifecycle costs are determined during the conceptual design phase in the development of a product. Generally there are three modules: problem definition, issue resolution, and conceptual formation in the architecture of conceptual design. Problem definition generates a problem description, a set of requirements, and/or a set of design constraints. After the problem is defined, consultation with professionals may be necessary to find out the actual corresponding issues for the design. A more objective approach for convincing participators of the correctness of the chosen issues is to use data. After the design issues are identified the conflicts among them need to be resolved in the issue resolution module. The proposed approach provides a methodology for designers to determine the solutions to the appropriate issues that fit in with the problem definition and improves the efficiency of conceptual design process. It is based on an intuitively appealing methodology, the analytic hierarchy process (AHP). Our approach has been applied to magnesium alloys industry for the conceptual design of WIP containers. The conflicts among the identified issues are resolved successfully after applying it. The real world case demonstrates the practicability and efficiency of the proposed methodology.

An Aspect Oriented Configuration Identification Model for Incremental Development

Configuration management is the process of identifying, tracking, and controlling changes to hardware/software configuration items that define needs, evaluate technical and cost feasibility of systems and establish functional requirements. The lack of a static component configuration during each increment in incremental development causes trouble to manage the integrity of those valued hardware/software product outputs. This paper presents an aspect oriented configuration identification to derive a static configuration in incremental development. The discipline and approach for identifying a static structure and its related configuration items are described and tested with a warehouse management system, developed with an incremental development. They are the first functions of hardware/software configuration management activities, which enable a configuration management compliant system, such as product data management (PDM) system, in an incremental development.

Optimal replenishment policy for hi-tech industry with component cost and selling price reduction

Due to rapid technological innovation and global competitiveness, the component cost, the selling price and the demand rate of Hi-tech industries (such as computers and communication consumers products) usually decline significantly with time. From a practical viewpoint, there is a need to develop a replenishing policy with finite horizon when the component cost, the selling price and the demand rate are reduced simultaneously. A numerical example and sensitivity analysis are carried out to illustrate this model. Two cases are discussed in this study: Case A considers fixed replenishment interval, Case B considers varying replenishment interval. From Case A, the results show that decreasing component cost leads to smaller replenishment interval. However, decreasing sensitive parameter of demand leads to larger replenishment interval. When both the component cost and the sensitive parameter decline-rates decrease simultaneously, the replenishment interval decreases. The solutions by Case A and B are sub-optimal and optimal respectively. The net-profit percentage difference between Case A and B is 0.060% approximately, while the computational process of Case A is easier than that of Case B.

CASE STUDY: APPLYING DATA MINING TO DEFECT DIAGNOSIS

One of the defects during the re-flow soldering in printed circuit boards is the defect of tombstone. It is a chip component that has partially or completely lifted off one end of the surface of the pad. Tombstones may be caused by several factors. In this paper, a description of the problem is presented with the factors that cause tombstones. Data mining approaches are presented to identify the factors that are significant. Data was collected over a period of one year to study this problem. Results are presented with suggested improvements.