Sabri Erdem

Business Intelligence Applications in Retail Business: OLAP, Data Mining & Reporting Services

As a result of todays competitive business environment, companies have been trying to improve the utilization of funds effectively in their budgets for information technology investments. These companies retrieve more information with the same set of resources by means of business intelligence methods. According to Rubin (Chabrow, 2004) IT budgets are not simply declining or levelling off, rather, companies are shifting from a pure cost-cut mode to a model that emphasises agility and efficiency. Tremendous daily growth of the company data requires more funds and investment for establishing the technologies and infrastructure necessary for gathering fast and crucial information that supports the decision making process. This necessity gave birth to various business intelligence methods, which mainly aim to process mass amount of collected data from their existing application, and represent it in a way with which companies can apply to their daily competitive decisions.This application primarily concerns the implementation of business intelligence for a retail business company. The aim is to implement built-in business intelligence solutions of the Microsoft SQL Server that holds the commercial information of the company for the past three years. The customer company has already been using Microsoft products. The key items used for analyzing data are sales, momentary inventory and logistics information.The application can be grouped in five main areas: Building the data warehouse, constructing OLAP cubes, applying data mining algorithms on OLAP cubes, representing the results in reports with reporting services, and implementation.

Work Stress and Emotional Exhaustion in Nurses: The Mediating Role of Internal Locus of Control

Background: Burnout is a major problem for nursing. There is a strong relationship between work stress and emotional exhaustion. Although studies report a negative correlation between the internal locus of control and emotional exhaustion and work stress, the number of studies available on the subject is limited. Purpose: This study intends to examine the extent to which the relationship between work stress and emotional exhaustion is mediated by nurses’ internal locus of control. Methods: The study adopted a cross-sectional survey design. The data were analyzed using structural equation modeling techniques. The study sample consisted of 347 nurses who worked in a university hospital in Izmir, Turkey and who agreed to participate in the study. The Work-Related Strain Inventory was used to evaluate the nurses’ work stress level, Maslach Burnout Inventory was used to evaluate their emotional exhaustion levels, and the Locus of Control Scale was used to evaluate the internal locus of control. The variables of the study were based on the Neuman Systems Model. Results: Work stress was positively related to internal locus of control (β = .21, p < .001), which was, in turn, negatively associated with emotional exhaustion (β = −.03, p > 0.1). Internal locus of control was negatively related to emotional exhaustion (β = −.14, p < .001). Work stress is directly (β = .87, p < .001) and indirectly related to emotional exhaustion (mediated by internal locus of control β = .84, p < .001). Work stress is directly (β = .87, p < .001) and indirectly related to emotional exhaustion (mediated by internal locus of control, β = .84, p < .001). Conclusion: Although the relationship between emotional exhaustion and work stress was mediated, the impact of internal locus of control was limited. It is recommended that different variables be included in future studies so that they can mediate the relationship between work stress and emotional exhaustion.

Leading the Strategic Decision-Making Process: Conceptual Frameworks

Leading the strategic decision-making process is a crucial issue in organizations. The success of the process is closely related to the experiences and special skills of the managers as well as to the culture and the structure of the organizations and environmental factors. Such a decision-making process requires improved cognitive, behavioral, and analytical skills from managers. This chapter investigates those success factors of the strategic decision-making process emphasized in the current literature and proposes two conceptual frameworks based on the factors for top managers that would help them to track the causality and the performance of their organizations within this scope.

Extreme Value Theory in Finance: A Way to Forecast Unexpected Circumstances

EVT works on extreme affairs and those affairs are generally classified as outliers. Although in some analyses it is preferred to exclude extreme events, oppositely EVT directly focuses on extreme events and analyze them. Financial data also contain outliers due to crashes, breaks and peaks. Since extremal events are more commonly seen in financial data than many other data types and excluding of those results in under or overestimation, academicians and financial institutions utilize EVT especially in risk management as a contributing function to Value-at-Risk. Additionally, distribution characteristics of financial data which do not fit normal distribution are other major points to use EVT. The finance literature on EVT indicates the EVT does the best especially in fat-tail modeling and extremal event analysis.

Supporting Healthcare Executive Managers’ Decisions Through Dashboards

Information visualisation plays an important role for executives in order to drive business effectively and efficiently. Dashboard design, which is one of the best tools of visualization to meet the information needs at adequate levels, is becoming more important parallel to advances in information processing technologies. This study aims to provide a conceptual framework for developing a dashboard for executives. Healthcare management was chosen to demonstrate the methodology of research design, data gathering and visualisation examples. Results show that the study is applicable to other areas as well to meet the information requirements of top and mid-level managers.

Developing a new product via modern QFD: an application for bedding of laboratory animals

Laboratory animals play a crucial role in early testing of new drugs or methods in medical sciences such as pharmacology and surgery. Since the primary concern of medical scientists is to look for scientific medical outputs only, other factors regarding animal welfare such as environmental factors, feeding and bedding need to be considered to insure that the living conditions of laboratory animals is comfortable and healthy. The purpose of this study is to develop a bedding material for laboratory animals by implementing the basic steps of the Modern QFD methodology which is a new area of research for these kinds of products. Our findings show that Modern QFD can be effectively implemented in developing a new bedding material for laboratory animals. This study is a new implementation for determining the needs of laboratory animals using such a method and is an example of a unique case in the QFD domain.

HASTANE MEDİKAL SARF MALZEMELERİNDE PARTİ BÜYÜKLÜKLERİNİN BELİRLENMESİNE YÖNELİK BİR UYGULAMA

Hastaneler icin tibbi malzemeler baslica gider kalemleri arasinda olup, malzeme yonetimi politikalarinin bu masraf kalemleri uzerinde dogrudan etkisi bulunmaktadir. Bu calismada, hastalarin tedavilerinde kullanilan malzemeler arasinda sutur grubundaki tibbi malzemelerin parti buyuklerinin belirlenmesi amaciyla yontemler arasi karsilastirmali bir politika analizi yapilmistir. Calismada hastanelerin faaliyetlerini etkili ve kesintisiz bir sekilde surdururken, hizmet uretiminde kullanilacak olan malzemelerin tedarikinde ve stoklanmasinda hastanenin minimum maliyete katlanmasina imkân saglayacak olan parti buyuklugu belirleme yontemlerinden hangisinin veya hangilerinin daha etkin olabilecegine iliskin bulgulara ulasilmistir. Dinamik programlama yaklasimi ve sezgisel algoritma esasli malzeme yonetim politikalarinin, geleneksel yontemlerden cok daha etkin oldugu mevcut veriler isiginda ortaya konulmustur. Elde edilen sonuclar hem stoklanabilme potansiyeline sahip diger malzeme gruplari hem de diger hastaneler icin genellenebilir olma ozelligi tasimaktadir

Market Value Chain Efficiency in Turkey: Application of DEA to the Pre- and Post-2001 Financial Crisis

This paper examines the market efficiency of Istanbul Stock Exchange (ISE) listed non-financial firms from 2000 through 2002. A four-stage data envelope analysis (DEA) is developed to measure the performance of firms before and after the 2001 financial crisis. At each stage, production, profititability, marketability and overall efficiencies are measured. The findings show that firms are more efficient at the profitability stage than at other stages. However, the 2001 financial crisis eroded profitability efficiency. Overall, ISE listed firms experienced diseconomies of scale so that many firms were not able to transform production into sales and therefore earnings efficiently, particularly during the crisis period.