Purpose – The proponents of balanced scorecard (BSc) claim that lead factors interrelate and their improvement ultimately leads to increased financial performance. The purpose of this paper is to use the underlying hypotheses of BSc in order to assess whether improvements that relate to learning and growth, internal processes and customers actually contribute to alterations of reported financial performance.Design/methodology/approach – A structured questionnaire was used and data were gathered from 90 leading Greek companies in relation to the progress they have experienced during a three‐year period regarding various activities that can be broadly classified as aspects of the three qualitative perspectives of BSc (i.e. the learning and growth perspective, the internal business and production process perspective, and the customer perspective). Published financial data were used in order to calculate several financial ratios for all sample firms for the same time period.Findings – The empirical data verif...

Performance parameters interrelations from a balanced scorecard perspective: An analysis of Greek companies

An Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system automates and integrates key business processes of an organization and provides information to the top management required for strategic decision making. The implementation of ERP systems in organizations is a challenging task. Apart from the technical factors associated with ERP implementation, various socio-technical factors are found critical during ERP implementation. This research is focused on exploring the most critical factors, either technical or socio-technical, which may contribute towards successful ERP implementation in organizations. Research findings are based on survey research conducted in public and private organizations in Pakistan. Before conducting the final survey, a survey instrument was validated using a pilot study. A sample for the pilot survey was selected using a random sample of 8 organizations. Initially, 24 factors were taken. However, after doing factor analysis only 14 factors were included in the final survey. For the final survey, questionnaires were sent to 202 Managers/Project Directors in organizations where ERP systems had already been implemented or the implementation of ERP was in a final stage. In response, 116 useable questionnaires were received with a response rate of 57.42%. The research findings showed that professional manpower, project scope definition, business process re-engineering, top management support and change management are the top most critical factors in an ERP implementation. The findings may be of interest for practitioners and a valuable contribution to the existing body of knowledge of ERP implementation.

Socio-Technical Factors Affecting ERP Implementation Success in Pakistan: an Empirical Study

This paper traces the origin and development of agile manufacturing. The industrial sectors which have embraced agility are today's winners in the competitive markets. This situation warrants the need of assessing the activities to be undertaken to acquire agility. For this purpose, this paper advocates the adoption of a 20 criteria agile model. In order to implement this model effectively, the agility level at which a company currently operates needs to be quantified. For this purpose, a quantification model incorporated with the 20 criteria agile model was adopted from literature and proposed after refinement. Applying this refined quantifying model in real time practice is a time consuming and tedious process. In order to overcome this difficulty, a decision support system named DESSAC (DEcision Support System for quantifying Agile Criteria) was developed. DESSAC was demonstrated to a group of competent personnel of an electronics switch manufacturing company situated in India. These personnel could op...

DESSAC: a decision support system for quantifying and analysing agility

Clickstream data is one of the most important sources of information in websites usage and customers' behavior in Banks e-services. A number of web usage mining scenarios are possible depending on the available information. While simple traffic analysis based on click stream data may easily be performed to improve the e-banks services. The banks need data mining techniques to substantially improve Banks e-services activities. The relationships between data mining techniques and the Web usage mining are studied. Web structure mining, has three types these types are web usage structure, mining data streams and web content. The integration between the Web usage mining and data mining techniques are presented for processes at different stages, including the pattern discovery phases, and introduces banks cases, that have analytical mining technique. A general framework for fully integrating domain Web usage mining and data mining techniques is represented for processes at different stages. Data Mining techniques can be very helpful to the banks for better performance, acquiring new customers, fraud detection in real time, providing segment based products, and analysis of the customers purchase patterns over time.

The integrating between web usage mining and data mining techniques

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to develop a decision support system (DSS) for multi grade fuzzy leanness assessment (MGFLA) (DSS‐MGFLA).Design/methodology/approach – The assessment of leanness gains vital importance. Due to the drawbacks associated with conventional approaches, fuzzy methods are gaining importance. In this context, multi‐grade fuzzy method has been used for leanness assessment. Since the computation is time consuming and error‐prone, a computerized DSS known as DSS‐MGFLA has been developed.Findings – DSS‐MGFLA enables the accurate evaluation of leanness. Besides assessing leanness, DSS also enables the identification of improvement areas. The DSS has been validated in an Indian relays manufacturing organization. Based on the validation, its practical feasibility has been ensured.Research limitations/implications – DSS‐MGFLA has been validated in a single manufacturing organization for its working feasibility. But the findings could be extended to similar manufacturing organization...

Jain Bajaj

Papers

Management Information System