MERLOT Collection
MERLOT CollectionSelected resources from MERLOT
Works (64)
-
Courseware
Students of this course will develop a broad understanding of Lean/Six Sigma principles and practices, build capability to implement Lean/Six Sigma initiatives in manufacturing operations, and learn to operate with awareness of Lean/Six Sigma at the enterprise level. All course materials are organized around a common "single-point lesson" (SPL) format, with some of the SPLs provided by the instructor and guests and with some developed and delivered by student teams.
- Subjects:
- Computing, Data Science and Artificial Intelligence and Management
- Keywords:
- Quality control Six sigma (Quality control stard)
- Resource Type:
- Courseware
-
Courseware
This course covers the fundamental principles, practices and tools of Lean Six Sigma methods that underlay modern organizational productivity approaches applied in aerospace, automotive, health care, and other sectors. It includes lectures, active learning exercises, a plant tour, talks by industry practitioners, and videos. One third of the course is devoted to a physical simulation of an aircraft manufacturing enterprise or a clinic to illustrate the power of Lean Six Sigma methods. The course is offered during the Independent Activities Period (IAP), which is a special 4-week term at MIT that runs from the first week of January until the end of the month.
- Subjects:
- Management
- Keywords:
- Industrial efficiency Lean manufacturing Six sigma (Quality control stard)
- Resource Type:
- Courseware
-
Open (Access) Journal-Article
Short discharge time from hospitals increases both bed availability and patients and families satisfaction. In this study, the Six Sigma process improvement methodology was applied to reduce patients discharge time in a cancer treatment hospital. Data on the duration of all activities, from the physician signing the discharge form to the patient leaving the treatment room, were collected through patient shadowing. These data were analyzed using detailed process maps and cause-and-effect diagrams. Fragmented and unstandardized processes and procedures and a lack of communication among the stakeholders were among the leading causes of long discharge times. Categorizing patients by their needs enabled better design of the discharge processes. Discrete event simulation was utilized as a decision support tool to test the effect of the improvements under different scenarios. Simplified and standardized processes, improved communications, and system-wide management are among the proposed improvements, which reduced patient discharge time by 54 from 216 minutes. Cultivating the necessary ownership through stakeholder analysis is an essential ingredient of sustainable improvement efforts.
- Subjects:
- Health Sciences and Management
- Keywords:
- Hospitals -- Administration Process control Six sigma (Quality control stard)
- Resource Type:
- Open (Access) Journal-Article
-
Presentation
This video was recorded at CeGD eGovernance Academy Seminar Series (SEeHealth): The Roadmap from Concept to Practice, Ljubljana 2010. The key of mutual integration of health care institutions lies in their interoperability, gathering and common utilization of data by different applications. Seemingly, imperceptible and smooth applications' integration enables an efficient mutual linkage of all departments within a single health care institution as well as horizontal and vertical linkage of more health care institutions, all with the aim of improvement of health and quality of patient's life. Health care system quality improvement needs a continuous rationalization of resources funds, which leads towards optimization of business processes and availability of all necessary information in the shortest possible period. All necessary information and data on patients must be available independently on location or time of such a necessity. The greatest obstacles for interoperability represent heterogeneous applications. Such heterogeneity can be presented by the fact that they were written in various program languages, that they are intended for utilization at different types of computers or the fact that they use various communication networks and data transfer methods. IT managers in hospitals must decide how to contribute to cross‐organizational integration and what strategy and means to choose for achieving interoperability. If a system is poor in its interoperability, any increasing functions or little changes could stop its working properly. Interoperability must be ensured at technical, semantic and process levels but also in a legislative level, where all recommendations for legal and lawful solutions are given, which remove the most frequent obstacles – human and bureaucratic factors. The Oncology Institute of Vojvodina as a referent center for oncology and a center for medical informatics signed its own Integrated hospital and business information system. The information system at the IOV consists of the following modules: 1. hospital‐clinical IS 2. laboratory IS 3. pharmaceutical IS 4. radiological IS 5. invoicing (accounting) IS 6. business IS 7. managerial IS All of these modules are mutually optimally integrated, and their interoperability at the level of communicational protocols (HL7, DICOM, internal interface), semantics (the same code‐records, rules) and legislative level (the same accounting calculations) enables the user to see all these complex modules as one system. Thus, we created necessary preconditions for our integration into information society, which is a 21st century strategy at the state level.
-
Open (Access) Journal-Article
This work walks around the use of DMAIC methodology of six sigma to lessen the defect rate in sewing section of FCI (BD) LTD. Throughout five phases of DMAIC methodology, named Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control, this approach minimizes defects analytically. In different phases, different types of six sigma tools were exercised.
- Subjects:
- Management and Business Information Technology
- Keywords:
- Clothing trade Production management Six sigma (Quality control stard)
- Resource Type:
- Open (Access) Journal-Article
-
Others
IBUS 330 is a three-credit, upper-division core course for the BSBA degree and a prerequisite for all advanced International Business courses. In addition to providing an introduction to the field it also includes a major emphasis on culture. As a part of a multi-year process of continual development and improvement, the current course redesign of the writing component specifically addresses a major problem and criticism of online courses; namely the lack of any significant writing component in the curriculum. The continual development of writing and several enhancements to address the other major problems/criticisms of online mega courses is addressed in this report.
- Subjects:
- Management and English language
- Keywords:
- Business education
- Resource Type:
- Others
-
Presentation
This video was recorded at Workshop on Advanced IT Solutions and Competitiveness of SMEs, Lviv 2006. It is generally recognized that the competitiveness of SMEs in the present-day business environment ultimately relies upon effective implementation of the most up-to-date information technologies. However, the Ukrainian IT space is characterized with highly noticeable information gap between IT-saturated export-oriented software development companies and ordinary businesses or governmental agencies. The seminar has provided perfect platform for the interaction between local SMEs, communicating their IT needs, and IT service providers like Intellias, briefing on their enterprise-based IT offerings. The seminar has assembled insightful speakers from Ukrainian and international IT companies, as well as representatives from research institutions, consulting firms and IT experienced SMEs. The case studies from Western Ukrainian companies, possessing experience in implementation of IT solutions in industrial process, have illustrated emerging difficulties in aligning IT automated process with qualifications and professional level of the involved personnel. The practical aspects of introducing ERP systems for optimization of production process have been presented by Vitaly Pyasetsky (Lvivkholod public corporation) and Andriy Tsehelyk (Enzyme joint-stock company). The discussion has further focused on the international experience of the implementation of the information technologies as well as networking and partnership practices. Valuable contributions to the topic has been made by Maria-Luisa Sanseverino E4 Project Coordinator from Centro Ricerche Fiat and Patric Sitek from Bremen Institute of Industrial Technology and Applied Work Science. Particular emphasis has been placed on the E4 Project: Extended Enterprise Management in Enlarged Europe including collaboration initiatives and close involvement of the Eastern European enterprises within its framework. The discussion has been reinforced by the case study on Ivano Frankivsk business portal, assembling best practices from abroad business development agencies.
- Subjects:
- Computing, Data Science and Artificial Intelligence and Management
- Keywords:
- Ukraine Enterprise resource planning Small business Management information systems
- Resource Type:
- Presentation
-
Presentation
This video was recorded at 5th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), Athens 2006. We examine research issues that arise when most information items in an enterprise can be linked to each other via short paths, implicit or explicit. In such high-recall settings, the treatment of metadata management, indexing and ranking needs new attention. Additional issues arise as to the best way to handle updates to the connections, whether on or off the transaction path. Even traditional techniques, such as classification and clustering of documents, which stand to benefit from the extra information provided by the so-called network of meaning, need to be reexamined for how best to exploit the extra information. The talk ends with an examination of some promising avenues for using high recall as a driver for the next wave of business process automation
- Subjects:
- Computing, Data Science and Artificial Intelligence and Management
- Keywords:
- Management information systems Information resources management
- Resource Type:
- Presentation
-
Presentation
This video was recorded at 7th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), Karlsruhe 2008. The documentation of Enterprise Research Planning (ERP) systems is usually (1) extremely large and (2) combines various views from the business and the technical implementation perspective. Also, a very specific vocabulary has evolved, in particular in the SAP domain (e.g. SAP Solution Maps or SAP software module names). This vocabulary is not clearly mapped to business management terminology and concepts. It is a well-known problem in practice that searching in SAP ERP documentation is difficult, because it requires in-depth knowledge of a large and proprietary terminology. We propose to use ontologies and automatic annotation of such large HTML software documentation in order to improve the usability and accessibility, namely of ERP help files. In order to achieve that, we have developed an ontology and prototype for SAP ERP 6.0. Our approach integrates concepts and lexical resources from (1) business management terminology, (2) SAP business terminology, (3) SAP system terminology, and (4) Wordnet synsets. We use standard GATE/KIM technology to annotate SAP help documentation with respective references to our ontology. Eventually, our approach consolidates the knowledge contained in the SAP help functionality at a conceptual level. This allows users to express their queries using a terminology they are familiar with, e.g. referring to general management terms. Despite a widely automated ontology construction process and a simplistic annotation strategy with minimal human intervention, we experienced convincing results. For an average query linked to an action and a topic, our technology returns more than 3 relevant resources, while a naïve term-based search returns on average only about 0.2 relevant resources.
- Subjects:
- Computing, Data Science and Artificial Intelligence and Management
- Keywords:
- Software documentation Enterprise resource planning Ontologies (Information retrieval)
- Resource Type:
- Presentation
-
Presentation
This video was recorded at 11th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), Boston 2012. The New York Times committment to Linked Data began over 160 years ago. Starting in 1851, The New York Times has always catalogued its archival articles using a controlled vocabulary of people, places, organizations and descriptors. In 2009 The New York Times started publishing this vocabulary as linked data using semantic web standards. In 2011 The Times announced the launch of several RESTful Semantic APIs. And in late 2012 and early 2013, The Times will migrate its entire process for vocabulary management to a system designed around the principles of Linked Data. In my remarks, I will survey the history of Semantic publishing at The New York Times, outline our semantic strategy, detail the business-case for linked data at The Times and provide an in-depth explanation of our new vocabulary management system.
- Subjects:
- Computing, Data Science and Artificial Intelligence and Management
- Keywords:
- New York times Linked data
- Resource Type:
- Presentation