Evaluation of business processes using probability-driven activity-based costing

The design of business processes often ignores detailed consideration of service cost. With competitive market pressure, this has become a key factor for the service sector. The ideas discussed in this paper are a result of research into automating the re-engineering of business processes. This paper presents a methodology for estimating the cost of a process, crucial to the evaluation of the process, using a novel variation of activity-based cost estimation. The majority of the research in this project has concentrated on the service sector and these types of processes are used as examples.     

A coevolutionary model for promoting agricultural sustainability

This article presents a coevolutionary model of agricultural development that is based on observations from the environmental history of agriculture and the need for addressing development processes toward sustainability. It asserts that the challenge of agricultural sustainability can be fruitfully addressed within an analytical framework that consciously and explicitly considers agricultural development as consisting of processes of coevolution involving agriculture and the surrounding ecological and socioeconomic systems. Widening the processes to include strong interconnectedness with national and global systems with respect to off-farm resources and farm outputs has led to various agro-ecological problems. Strengthening local interaction and interconnectedness in a rural-urban context is found to be essential for developing a system of sustainable agriculture. Such development requires influencing many subsystems and implementing changes in production methods and land use as short-term responses to the problem, and technological development, resource allocation and changes in values as long-term responses. It also requires some sustainability principles and indicators in order to direct actions and to facilitate communications, which can be derived from the model. Applying the model on Swedish agricultural sustainability during the twentieth century reveals some, probably, important findings for “building” sustainable agriculture and lends support to the usefulness of the model.     

数据的质量、诊断和维修决策及其对利润的影响

全面质量维修(TQMain)是状态维修((CBM)出现的一种新概念。其目标不仅仅是要保持机器状态良好，而且要保持影响制造过程所有重要环节的状态良好。诸如：生产工艺、运转条件、员工能力、寿命周期费用(LCC)，以及质量控制系统。为此要组成一个综合的设备信息系统。重要的成果有：(1)利用更精确的诊断和预测技术进一步确定了延长轴承平均有效寿命的数据和指标。(2)为监控机器状态采集了影响振动信号的机器速度和负载变化数据。(3)利用振动频谱分析检测了曲轴的主轴承表面质量偏差。(4)求出了一台造纸机的维修利润每年约为3．58MSEK。主要结论是：实施连续改进和确保延长机器寿命和以竞争价格生产出高质量产品。确定和消除造成质量偏差和设备早期故障的原因以及扩大应用数据反馈技术是不可缺少的。还讨论了最近7年间为验证实现全面质量维修(TQMain)概念的需求和效益而进行过一些案例研究。