Michal Greguš

Servitization Strategies and Product-Service-Systems

This paper attempts to explain the concept of servitization in order to declare and emphasize its capabilities in being an influential strategy that provides competitive advantage in manufacturing industries. This is conducted by a detailed elaboration of its notion and origins in the literature as well as the characteristics and processes regarding value co-creation, which in turn is consolidated as fundamentals of servitization. Furthermore, the driving characteristics separated by general environmental trends, financial-, strategic-, as well as marketing-drivers are discussed in detail. The final part of the analysis refers to the classification of servitization and the actual options and alternatives of implementation.

Web intelligence in practice

Modern service enterprises are challenged by a strong competition and dynamically changing business environments. Consequently, the precision of the business requirements identification and rigorous planning regarding investments to information technologies play a key role in the implementation of new capabilities. As the business today is more and more powered by information that is unstructured, social and distributed via various channels, the multi-channel interaction is a reality. It means each customer generates more and more data. On the other hand, a customer is often flooded with a huge amount, mostly not relevant, advertising information. Companies are challenged to collect the data from the customer interaction, analyze it and prepare an intelligent recommendation for an agent or to feed relevant offers to the customer. Modern understanding of the unstructured information requires a fundamentally new approach using the technology to deliver insights, ideas, and an intuition into the rapidly growing and diverse data that customers deal with every day. A hot topic is to decrease the costs and increase the customer satisfaction. One of the sensitive areas is customers’ interaction via company’s contact web forms. This interaction consists mostly of questions or complaints. Accordingly, we describe in our paper a new approach for generating these contact forms using the textual analytics, processing of frequently asked questions and a rule-based system. We also present particular use-cases to illustrate how this approach works in practice.

Collaboration and Locality in Crowdsourcing

As novel forms of crowdsourcing emerge on the market, we emphasize that the important aspect of location-dependency is more complex than assumed and, thus, suggest a typology along two dimensions of locality: the first dimension refers to whether or not the crowdsourcees interact while being collocated or dispersed, the second dimension refers to the locality of the crowdsourcees in relation to the crowdsourcers locality (local vs. remote crowd). The resulting four types of crowdsourcing are underpinned by real-world examples. Potential advantages and challenges of the four types are discussed, particularly with respect to motivation and value. The suggested categorization shall provide the necessary basis for future research, as a systematic approach is essential to enable, yield and foster sustainability in a novel interdisciplinary research field like location-based crowdsourcing.

Servitization - Its Raise through Information and Communication Technologies

The main challenge about dealing with servitization arises from the fact that one has to consider several diverging research disciplines, comprising of service science, manufacturing and operations management equally. Besides, contemporary economic environments are influenced by rapid development of information and communication technologies in different spheres. Thus, the servitizing companies are increasingly confronted with several substantial challenges on the implementation of novel ICT applications, which in turn may be a promising approach to exploit its capabilities to generate competitive advantage. Accordingly, first we discuss the fundamental impact of emergent ICTs on business models and customer behavior. Next, we examine the dedicated implications on the servitization sourced from ICT capabilities. Besides, a brief overview of current implementations is given, which in turn needs to be further broadened. Finally, potentially-valuable research directions, since the paper is a primary step in our research on the ICT and servitization inter-relationing, are proposed.

On the deterministic computation of functional integrals in application to quantum mechanical problems

Abstract New approximate formulae for functional integrals with Gaussian measure in separable Frechet spaces are derived. As a special case, the integration with respect to the conditional Wiener measure is investigated. For conditional Wiener integrals a family of approximate formulae with weight is constructed. The quantum mechanical models, namely the linear and the inharmonic oscillators, are described. The efficiency of the formulas is demonstrated in the numerical comparison with the Monte Carlo method on lattice.

An Oscillation Criterion for Nonlinear Third-Order Differential Equations

Sufficient conditions for oscillation of a certain class of nonlinear third-order differential equations are found.

Practical Implementation of Private Cloud Based on Open Source ownCloud for Small Teams - Case Study

Various companies in the manufacturing, but also in non-manufacturing sector, research and public organization use technology based on Internet to share data among staff but also with customers or in collaboration with other companies. Depending on the requirements of individual companies widely differing demands are placed on the technology in terms of features, administration, as well as security and the cost of the solution usually considered as one of the key issues. Cloud promises lower costs, high availability and scalability and that in the long term. The essence of any choice in selecting cloud solutions for corporate environment is to recognize its purpose, scope of use and content that will be uploaded to the storage. The paper discusses the project of setting up your own private cloud solution based on the open software ownCloud.

Clinical experience of stereotactic radiosurgery at a linear accelerator for intraocular melanoma

Long-term results with linear accelerator LINAC-based stereotactic radiosurgery for intraocular uveal malignant melanoma were assessed. A retrospective study was carried out of patients with uveal melanoma after a 1-day session stereotactic radiosurgery at LINAC in Slovakia. In the period 2001–2015, a group of 150 patients with uveal melanoma (139 choroidal melanoma, 11 ciliary body melanoma) was treated. The median tumor volume at baseline was 0.5 cm3 (with range from 0.2 to 1.6 cm3). Tumors ranged in size from 2.4 to 20.8 mm in basal diameter and from 2.0 to 18.3 mm in thickness. The therapeutic dose was 35.0 Gy by 99% of dose volume histogram. Older age at treatment was correlated with the largest basal tumor diameter, tumor thickness, and TNM stage. The survival after stereotactic irradiation was 96% in 1 year, 93% in 2 years, 84% in 5 years, 80% in 7 years, and 53% in 11 years. In 20 (13.3%) patients, secondary enucleation was necessary because of complications (secondary glaucoma). Enucleation-free interval ranged from 1 to 6 years. The median age at death was lower (65.7 years) for patients who died from metastatic disease than for those who died from any other cause (75.0 years). Survival rates at 5-year intervals and the need for secondary enucleation because of complications after linear accelerator irradiation are comparable to other techniques.

Mobile technologies enabling collaborative services management

Business environment becomes harder and faster and needs more sophisticated technologies to enable simultaneous brainstorming, which means for collaboration team members more travelling and therefore increase in time and money. Besides, the massive development of the mobile technologies has been influencing extensively inter/intra enterprise collaborations. Accordingly, we attempt in this research to expose the implication of mobile technologies in organisations, especially for collaborative service management. Hence, we illustrate in our paper various benefits of using mobile technologies by companies. We also outline the different strategies of companies to use these technologies for better intra/inter collaborations. And, we conclude our paper with the suggestions of further developments in mobile applications for more efficient collaboration by the enterprises.

Implementation of Mass Transfer Model on Parallel Computational System

At present, parallel computational systems are being used more often for implementation of solutions of many phenomena. One of such phenomena is the mass transfer from one location to another that occurs in many porous building materials and the knowledge about this transfer is significant at least in civil engineering practice. In this paper, we consider a complex mass transfer diffusion model that involves beside water and water vapor, the air presence, and moreover, the phase transition of water to vapor or vice versa. The model was developed recently and its exact solution was found. In this paper, our intention is to implement this exact solution of the model on the parallel computational system HybriLIT. We suggest the sequential and parallel CUDA algorithms for the implementation of the solution. Thus, the speed-up of the parallel implementation is obtained and compared to the sequential implementation as a ratio of 44 s for sequential and 0.004 s for parallel implementation. GPU capacity is compared with total capacity used for problem solution on the sequential level. Input parameters of the problem are found so that the GPU capacity limits are reached.