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The purpose of this paper is to summarize an information technology (IT) initiative at Hilti Corporation that began with a local IT need and ended with the global transformation of the company’s customer service processes and infrastructures. The authors highlight 12 lessons learned from the transformation, which Hilti referred to as the Global Contact Center (GCC) program.

The authors analyze Hilti’s GCC program based on first-hand experience. Hilti applied an innovative, wave-like implementation approach that facilitated a fast roll-out, fostered peer-to-peer knowledge transfer, and helped to overcome reluctance to change.

The analysis of Hilti’s approach to its new customer service management reveals a number of simple, yet, critical lessons learned regarding leveraging IT-driven business value through global process transformation.

The case report can help researchers to further theorize about IT-enabled process transformation. The GCC program resulted in significant improvements in the performance and quality of customer service processes and enabled transparent reporting and performance measurement on a global scale.

Overall, the GCC case provides an illustrative example of successful process transformation at the global level that also demonstrates implementation challenges. As such, the case report can help practitioners in planning and executing similar projects toward customer service excellence.

Hilti’s GCC case not only provides fresh insights into a successful process transformation. As it focusses on customer service, it also concerns an application area that has received little in the way of attention from process transformation research.

This paper aims to identify the winning combination of innovation capabilities for selected Brazilian agribusiness firms along different value chain links.

Adopting a quantitative approach, the authors analyzed the relationship between innovation capabilities and innovative performance of 300 agribusiness firms through a multi-regression technique.

The results showed that transaction, management and development capabilities can improve agribusiness firms’ performance in underdeveloped value chains.

For future research, the authors recommend analyzing further links such as traders and retailers to find the innovation capability for the entire agribusiness value chain.

Upstream firms should adopt new management techniques and tools, efficiently using their resources, while downstream firms should absorb and transform new technologies into products and processes.

The authors suggest formulating public policies that propose the recombination of innovation capabilities to organize agribusiness firms and avoid commodity-oriented market dependence.

The literature on agribusiness explains innovation at the chain level, based primarily on scientific advancements rather than on innovation at the firm level. In this sense, this study provides empirical evidence that can help boost innovation in agribusiness firms.

Widespread concerns about excessive use of mobile instant messaging (MIM) have inspired research in different disciplines. However, the focus thus far tends to be on diagnostics and cognitive predictors. There is little understanding from the socio-technical perspective to capture the drivers of excessive use of MIM. To address this research gap, the authors aim to enrich existing literature by adopting a social structure and social learning model (SSSLM) to understand the excessive use of MIM. The authors argue that excessive MIM use is developed and reinforced in highly interactive online communication, through a social learning process.

The authors conduct a cross-sectional online survey to validate our proposed research model on excessive use of mobile instant messaging (MIM). 368 valid responses are obtained from active MIM users in China.

The results suggest that highly interactive MIM creates a technology-based social structure that facilitates the social learning process of excessive technology use. The influence of perceived interactivity of MIM on excessive MIM use is mediated by a series of contextualized social learning factors. Furthermore, the influences of perceived interactivity on social learning factors are moderated by MIM use experience.

The authors contribute to literature in related fields by highlighting the crucial role of social learning in facilitating excessive technology use. The authors contribute to the social structure and social learning model by contextualizing it into the context of excessive MIM use. Design guidelines are provided with a purpose to inhibit excessive use of MIM.

This paper reviews existing business process (BP) modeling languages that are widely used in the industry as well as recent research work on modeling and analysis of BPs in the service-oriented environment and Internetware-based software paradigm. BPs in such environment are different from traditional BPs due to loose coupling of partner services, dynamic and on-the-fly selection of partners and run-time process adaptability. The unique characteristics of these BPs require formal modeling of the requirements and constraints in each phase of their life cycle, including design phase, implementation and deployment phase and execution phase.

The paper first provides a categorization of typical user requirements in each phase of the BP life cycle. Then a detailed comparison of the selected languages with respect to their requirement modeling and analysis capabilities in each of the identified categories is provided. The paper also discusses new requirements engineering research challenges arising from future software needs and emerging trends in software engineering in the context of Web-services-based BPs and Internetware.

There is a need to have a framework that provides support for user requirements modeling and analysis for all the phases of BP life cycle in an integrated manner. Such a framework would be useful not only in resolving the inconsistencies between requirements across phases but also in addressing the issues related to BP evolution due to changes in user requirements over time. Moreover, with the Internet of things (IoT) adoption in BPM, there is a need to have an integrated environment that provides support for capturing the resilience requirements of enterprise BPs as well as the mobility constraints of the underlying IoT devices.

This paper reviews existing BP modeling languages and frameworks and discusses the new requirements engineering research challenges arising from future software needs and the emerging trends in BP management in the service-oriented environment and Internetware-based software paradigm.

When a railway emergency occurs, it often leads to unexpected consequences, especially for trains of higher speed and larger passenger flow. Therefore, the railway emergency plan, a pre-established plan to deal with emergencies, plays an important role in reducing injuries and losses. However, the existing railway emergency plans remain as plain-text documents, requiring lots of manual work to capture the important regulations. This paper aims to propose a visualized, formal and digital railway emergency plan modeling method based on hierarchical timed Petri net (HTPN), which is also of better interpretability.

First, the general railway emergency plan was analyzed. Second, the HTPN-based framework model for the general railway emergency plan was proposed. Then, the instantiated model of electric multiple units rescue emergency plan was built by ExSpect, a Petri net simulation tool.

The experiments show that the proposed model is more digital and of better readability, visualization and performability, and, meanwhile, can generally conform to the practice well, offering a promising reference for future analysis of the optimization of railway emergency plans.

This study offers a promising reference for future analysis of the optimization of railway emergency plans.

Power consumption is a top priority in high-performance asynchronous circuit design today. The purpose of this study is to provide a spatial correlation-aware statistical dual-threshold voltage design method for low-power design of template-based asynchronous circuits.

In this paper, the authors proposed a statistical dual-threshold voltage design of template-based asynchronous circuits considering process variations with spatial correlation. The utilized circuit model is an extended Timed Petri-Net which captures the dynamic behavior of the asynchronous circuit with statistical delay and power values. To have a more comprehensive framework, the authors model the spatial correlation information of the circuit. The authors applied a genetic optimization algorithm that uses a two-dimensional graph to calculate the power and performance of each threshold voltage assignment.

Experimental results show that using this statistically aware optimization, leakage power of asynchronous circuits can be reduced up to 3X. The authors also show that the spatial correlation may lead to large errors if not being considered in the design of dual-threshold-voltage asynchronous circuits.

The proposed framework is the scheme giving a low-power design of asynchronous circuits compared to other schemes. The comparison exhibits that the proposed method has better results in terms of performance and power. To consider the process variations with spatial correlation, the authors apply the principle component analysis method to transform the correlated variables into uncorrelated ones.

In this volatile and increasingly fast-revolving world, it has become crucially important to monitor, measure and manage nation image and its dynamic changes in real time. However, few studies have been conducted on a model to measure the image and/or its changes. The purpose of this paper is to find an economically affordable methodology to measure nation image and its changes online in real time.

The study took an approach to build dynamic ontology that may reflect to change nation image in real-time. With it, the authors attempted to measure nation image in real time.

Among many social media, the authors found that Wikipedia is particularly suitable for the purpose of measuring nation image. An ontology of nation image was built from the keywords collected from the pages directly related to the big three exporting countries in East Asia, i.e. Korea, Japan and China. The click views on the pages of the countries in two different language editions of Wikipedia, Vietnamese and Indonesian were counted.

The study confirms the objective: the data from a social media service, Wikipedia, may work very well as an economically affordable real-time supplement to offline nation image indices that are currently used.

The process of creating complex models often requires different modelling methods and tools to be integrated. This paper provides a concise description of an object‐oriented environment for creating composite models. The proposed approach is based on using simulation abstractions as basic model building blocks. The basic environment is built up of a Prolog interpreter, SIMLIB and object‐oriented Petri nets.

Describes the ongoing development of a Petri‐Net‐based machine tool failure diagnosis system. The described system incorporates condition monitoring systems and expert system‐based diagnostic tools. Brings these together with the Petri‐Net monitoring system to form an integrated fault location and rectification package and an associated maintenance management system.

This paper approaches collaborative governance reform as an empirical phenomenon. The purpose of this paper is to gain insights about the systemic and grassroots level conditions for collaboration, observed from the viewpoint of organisational culture. In this paper, the authors ask what constitutes collaborative development culture in local government organisations?

The research design is founded on secondary use of quantitative data; a survey targeted to Finnish local government organisations (n=172). The authors analyse what factors the different groups, managers, professionals and politicians consider important for collaborative development culture and how they assess their local government organisations in this regard.

According to the results, enabling and supporting management, local government personnel’s input and ability to seek external partners are essential for creating a collaborative development culture. Interestingly, despite the recognition of deterring factors by the respondents the results highlight that the supporting and driving factors are more important for creation of collaborative culture, giving an optimistic message to actors trying to enhance collaborative development culture in local government organisations.

The authors examine the collaborative governance reform in a critical way, from the viewpoint of organisational culture. Through the study, it is possible to better understand the reality and readiness for collaboration of local governments in this respect. This is a valuable aspect for increasing both theoretical and practical understanding of the so-called collaborative governance.