Farhad Nabhani, Christian Josef Uhl, Florian Kauf and Alireza Shokri
The purpose of this paper is to present a new optimisation approach for product variance from the purchasing perspective.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to present a new optimisation approach for product variance from the purchasing perspective.
Design/methodology/approach
The research is based on a case study of a collaboration with a global acting automotive Tier 1 supplier, who produces steering systems for cars and commercial vehicles. A total of 116 different variants of three components of a car automotive steering system were analysed and evaluated. The data were gathered from 13 sub-suppliers for three different types of a steering system.
Findings
Unnecessary time, money, quality and technology can be saved through a greater understanding of such product variances. The results of the case study lead to a general method to optimise existing product variance and present cost improvements and a new key performance indicator to manage product variance out of the purchasing department.
Research limitations/implications
The research is based on a purchasing case study at a Tier 1 supplier of the automotive branch. The approach can be used for other company departments, e.g. logistics and for different industries than automotive.
Practical implications
A company can be successful and competitive when it meets the customer needs with a maximum on satisfaction without generating of waste. Unnecessary existing product variance is a kind of waste. The insights of this paper support the operative user and the strategic company management to reduce and improve unnecessary variance in different sections.
Originality/value
The structured analysis of product variance from the purchasing perspective and the key performance indicator “variance share” are new to company management. The research focuses on the management of existing variance out of the purchasing department which is a segment that has received limited academic attention in research to date.
Details
Keywords
Mohamed Hammami, Youssef Chahir and Liming Chen
Along with the ever growingWeb is the proliferation of objectionable content, such as sex, violence, racism, etc. We need efficient tools for classifying and filtering undesirable…
Abstract
Along with the ever growingWeb is the proliferation of objectionable content, such as sex, violence, racism, etc. We need efficient tools for classifying and filtering undesirable web content. In this paper, we investigate this problem through WebGuard, our automatic machine learning based pornographic website classification and filtering system. Facing the Internet more and more visual and multimedia as exemplified by pornographic websites, we focus here our attention on the use of skin color related visual content based analysis along with textual and structural content based analysis for improving pornographic website filtering. While the most commercial filtering products on the marketplace are mainly based on textual content‐based analysis such as indicative keywords detection or manually collected black list checking, the originality of our work resides on the addition of structural and visual content‐based analysis to the classical textual content‐based analysis along with several major‐data mining techniques for learning and classifying. Experimented on a testbed of 400 websites including 200 adult sites and 200 non pornographic ones, WebGuard, our Web filtering engine scored a 96.1% classification accuracy rate when only textual and structural content based analysis are used, and 97.4% classification accuracy rate when skin color related visual content based analysis is driven in addition. Further experiments on a black list of 12 311 adult websites manually collected and classified by the French Ministry of Education showed that WebGuard scored 87.82% classification accuracy rate when using only textual and structural content‐based analysis, and 95.62% classification accuracy rate when the visual content‐based analysis is driven in addition. The basic framework of WebGuard can apply to other categorization problems of websites which combine, as most of them do today, textual and visual content.
Details
Keywords
Florian Weber and Ulf Larsson-Olaison
Arising societal issues challenge corporate social responsibility. The purpose of this paper is to analyze how corporations account for arising issues under different…
Abstract
Purpose
Arising societal issues challenge corporate social responsibility. The purpose of this paper is to analyze how corporations account for arising issues under different institutional settings: the stakeholder oriented corporate governance model of Germany is hypothesized to produce a different response than the more state dominated Swedish welfare model.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper takes the reported CSR response of the largest corporations in Germany and Sweden, in relation to the 2015 European refugee crisis, as its case. In total, 157 annual reports are investigated by means of text analysis for statements in relation to the European refugee crisis.
Findings
Empirically, German corporations are more prone to communicate on this emerging issue, and deploying corporate resources to an emerging societal crisis. Based on that finding, this study concludes that the German model is more in line with international CSR-discourse than the Swedish.
Research limitations/implications
This study has implications for institutional theory perspectives on CSR accounting-related issues. By comparing two economies that would be characterized as “coordinated market economies” a somewhat different set of topics becomes apparent. Further considering country context could be useful when expanding the debate on CSR accounting.
Originality/value
This study is the first to empirically investigate corporate diplomacy with regard to the European refugee crisis. Besides others, corporations are important societal players. Therefore, corporations bear both, the obligation to deal with arising issues and the potential to participate in public opinion-forming with regard to those issues.