Shi-Ming Huang

Short survey: Taxonomy and survey of RFID anti-collision protocols

Due to the limitless possibilities and low cost, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems are used in a variety of applications to uniquely identify physical objects. The operation of RFID systems often involves a situation in which numerous tags are present in the interrogation zone of a single reader at the same time. The tags can collide and cancel each other out, leading to retransmission of tag IDs that results in wastage of bandwidth and an increase in the total delay. Besides, readers physically located near one another may interfere with one anothers operation. Such reader collision must be minimized to ensure the current operation of the RFID system. The main focus of this paper is to survey the collision resolution protocols for multi-access communication and the algorithms that calculate how to minimize reader-to-reader interference. A comparative view of surveyed protocol was concluded for the collision problem in RFID systems.

Critical factors in adopting a knowledge management system for the pharmaceutical industry

– The objective of this study is to discuss the critical success factors involved in implementing a knowledge management system (KMS), in order to enhance a firms competitiveness, while keeping costs to a minimum., – Based on field studies and a literature review, this study outlined 32 variables in the implementation of a KMS. The research targets were on members of the Taiwan Pharmaceutical Marketing and Management Association (TPMMA). Out of the 355 questionnaires sent, 98 valid questionnaires were returned, resulting in a valid return rate of 27.6 percent., – After completing the statistical analysis, seven factors were determined to be critical: a benchmarking strategy and knowledge structure; the organizational culture; information technology; employee involvement and training; the leadership and the commitment of senior management; a learning environment and resource control; and evaluation of professional training and teamwork., – This paper chooses members of TPMMA as research targets; thus, to apply this study to other than pharmaceutical industries requires further research., – Strategy and organizational culture are important in the adoption of a KMS. This study has determined that the pharmaceutical industry has paid special attention to benchmarking strategy. Adopting a KMS can be easy with a core department to maintain proper function of the system. However, companies should utilize the intangible assets available through a KMS to attain full participation from the employees to ensure the success of implementing an effective KMS., – This paper identifies critical factors in adopting a KMS for the pharmaceutical industry. That can offer pragmatic indication for those companies intent on introducing a KMS.

Assessing risk in ERP projects: identify and prioritize the factors

Various figures have stated that ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems have become one of the largest IT investments in recent years. The implementation of ERP system, however, is not an easy task. Previous research reports unusually high failure in ERP projects, sometimes jeopardizing the core operation of the implementing organization. The most famous case is FoxMeyer filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Further, ERP systems appear to present unique ongoing risks due to its uniqueness. In this study, we used a Delphi method to identify potential ERP projects risk factors, and constructed an AHP‐based framework to analyze and then prioritized the ERP projects risk factors. The result reveals that some important risk factors deserve more attention during the implementation of ERP projects.

An empirical study of relationship between IT investment and firm performance: A resource-based perspective

The resource-based view of the enterprises generally attributes superior financial performance to organizational resources and capabilities. Firm-specific IT resources are classified as IT infrastructure, human-IT resources, and IT-enabled intangibles. This paper empirically examines the association between IT investment and firm performance. Results indicate that firms with high levels of IT infrastructure and human-IT resources have a strong positive relationship with IT-enabled intangibles, but not with firm performance. In addition, IT-enabled intangibles are strongly positively correlated with firm performance. The relationships between IT investment and corporate IT capability are also examined. The results suggest that IT investments have begun to show results, indicating that they can make a positive contribution to firm IT infrastructure. However, the various measures of IT investment do not appear to have a positive relationship with human-IT resources, and IT-enabled intangibles. Although IT investment is likely to improve organizational IT infrastructure, but the IT-enabled intangibles is the key factor to effect the business performance, and the human-IT resource is a driving force for the IT-enabled intangibles.

A hybrid financial analysis model for business failure prediction

Accounting frauds have continuously happened all over the world. This leads to the need of predicting business failures. Statistical methods and machine learning techniques have been widely used to deal with this issue. In general, financial ratios are one of the main inputs to develop the prediction models. This paper presents a hybrid financial analysis model including static and trend analysis models to construct and train a back-propagation neural network (BPN) model. Further, the experiments employ four datasets of Taiwan enterprises which support that the proposed model not only provides a high predication rate but also outperforms other models including discriminant analysis, decision trees, and the back-propagation neural network alone.

Balancing performance measures for information security management: A balanced scorecard framework

Purpose – To provide useful references for manufacturing industry which guide the linkage of business strategies and performance indicators for information security projects.Design/methodology/approach – This study uses balanced scorecard (BSC) framework to set up performance index for information security management in organizations. Moreover, BSC used is to strengthen the linkage between foundational performance indicators and progressive business strategy theme.Findings – The general model of information security management builds the strategy map with 12 strategy themes and 35 key performance indicators are established. The development of strategy map also express how to link strategy themes to key performance indicators.Research limitations/implications – The investigation of listed manufacturing companies in Taiwan may limit the application elsewhere.Practical implications – Traditional performance measurement system like return on investment, sales growth is not enough to describe and manage intang...

Migrating Legacy Information Systems to Web Services Architecture

Web services-based systems with Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) are widely accepted as one of the possible solutions for an enterprise information system to retain/keep its old legacy systems. Using this aforementioned architecture, enterprise information systems tend to be more flexible and agile to fit into the capricious business environment, and thus, will be easier to be integrated with other additional applications. The purpose of this manuscript is to propose a migrating solution to convert the architecture of the legacy system into SOA with a systematic approach. This proposed methodology is different from other traditional object-oriented approaches, which migrates the system to have a services-oriented focus without incorporating general objected-oriented (OO) or functional oriented feature. In this study, a case study and information capacity theory were employed to verify/validate that this approach is indeed an effective and a practicable one.

Planning enterprise resources by use of a reengineering approach to build a global logistics management system

Theoretically and ideally, enterprise resource planning (ERP) seeks to streamline and integrate operation processes and information flow within a company. Practically, ERP system implementation involves a much broader scope and in‐depth consideration within an organization as a whole. Concurrently, in response to this need for resource optimization, the impact of globalization has caused the emergence of a new business operation format, global logistics management (GLM). This pertains to the overall management system of a corporation’s undertaking of worldwide market distribution, product design, customer satisfaction, production, procurement, logistics, suppliers and inventory. Suggests building an ERP as the backbone for implementation of a GLM system, while minimizing the impact of changes by use of information system reengineering technology (ISRT). Proposes a novel development framework that applies ISRT and ERP to developing a GLM system to economize on the system implementation cost and minimize the impact of changes within the corporation as a whole.

Process efficiency of the enterprise resource planning adoption

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the performance of business processes, operational process efficiency and profitability of enterprise resource planning (ERP) pre‐ and post‐adoption in the long term. The paper also aims to examine the factors of ERP supplier types and firm size in Taiwan.Design/methodology/approach – The paper measures business process (structure capital value added and operational expense ratio), process efficiency (account receivable turnover and inventory turnover) and profitability (continuing operating income and net profit margin) of pre‐ and post‐adoption ERP. First, the overall samples are tested. Second, ERP performances are compared, classified as large, medium and small. Finally, the ERP performances, classified as international and local supplier, are compared using the Wilcoxon rank test.Findings – The results show that the business process, process efficiency, and profitability increase in the fourth or fifth years. This shows that the benefits of ERP are ev...

An empirical investigation on learners' acceptance of e-learning for public unemployment vocational training

Public vocational training is one of the major tasks for the modern government to solve the unemployment problem. The e-learning technology has been seen as a potential solution. However, we cannot confirm whether learners would like to accept e-learning systems. Unfortunately, most of the e-learning research focuses on the platform development. Without the real user acceptance, the implementation of the new technology will be difficult. This study focuses on the user acceptance investigation for the e-learning technology in public unemployment vocational training. The Technology Acceptance Model is adopted for this empirical study. The result shows that most of the public vocational training learners will accept the e-learning technology and the content usefulness is a major factor to impact the learner adoption decision. It suggests that the government e-learning project should focus on the content designed with a standard format (such as SCORM), but not put most budget on the e-learning platform infrastructure.