Customer Approach Research Articles

Cad Development - User Custom Drafting Extensions

Many companies use Computer-Aided Design & Drafting (CADD) systems to create design drawings. Using CADD design as a replacement of the manual drafting method is only a fraction of its potential. The work that is done repeatedly can be in most cases performed automatically through customization. Customization of standard CAD packages can significantly increase productivity. The custom functions and programs can extend the capabilities of CAD packages to perform a wide range of drafting tasks. The paper discusses a customization strategy intended to facilitate completion of some repetitive drafting tasks in mechanical drafting process. One way to extend the capabilities of AutoCAD is by creating and using blocks. Blocks are useful for creating repeated content, such as standard components. The Dynamic Blocks feature enables user to modify blocks by adding parameters, actions, constraints that increase the versatility and power of the blocks. The paper presents two examples in creating and using dynamic blocks in order to save time and get maximum benefits of AutoCAD features. The first example shows a way to manage bolted joints drawing process by defining parameters and actions to the joint standard components. The second one presents a way to define and use a dynamic block with parametric design for radial ball bearings. The customization approach presented, developed for basic AutoCAD package, is intended for automating quite common tasks in mechanical design drafting. The major advantage of customization is the significant increase of drafting productivity.

Challenges in Reducing Readmissions: Lessons from Leadership and Frontline Personnel at Eight Minority-Serving Hospitals

Hospitals that serve minority patients have higher readmission rates than other hospitals and, as a result, receive higher penalties under the federal government's Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program. A study was conducted to determine how minority-serving hospitals are responding to federal readmissions policy and whether they face specific challenges as they work to reduce readmissions. In-depth case studies were created for eight minority-serving hospitals, selected to reflect a range of geographies and sizes. Semistructured interviews with hospital leaders and frontline personnel focused on knowledge of readmission rates and prioritization of readmission reduction, strategies to reduce readmissions, barriers to reducing readmissions, and opinions about federal readmissions policy. Each hospital had only a general awareness of its performance on readmissions metrics but placed a high priority on reducing readmissions, largely spurred by federal readmissions policy. Respondents reported that socioeconomics, rather than race alone, was a key factor in readmissions reduction. The hospitals followed a similar progression in strategies to reduce readmissions-moving from working on the discharge process to creating customized approaches to transitional care to, finally, focusing more on building community supports and resources. Salient barriers to reducing readmission rates included scarce resources, the variety of patient needs, limited ability to influence care in the community, and a misalignment of financial incentives. Among eight hospitals serving a high proportion of minority patients, the findings uncovered the importance of addressing issues specific to the patient population and community and reaching outside the walls of the hospital to implement programs that improve outpatient access and management.

Subsea Needs To Make the Right Connections

Guest editorial The subsea market is one of the fastest-growing sectors of the international oil and gas industry, involving the development and deployment of some of the most advanced technology ever created in increasingly inhospitable environments. Where once a water depth of 500 m or 1000 m was considered an industry challenge, many technologies are being designed for or can now operate at 3,000 m. And depths of 4000 m and 5000 m may not be too far away. More shallow regions will continue to be extremely important as subsea installations migrate to deeper depths for economic and environmental reasons. More and more subsea processing benefits all offshore production where the lack or the removal of permanent structures becomes the norm and all production is tied back to floating systems or directly to shore. The drive to place technology and equipment on the seabed as close as possible to the hydrocarbon source will continue. In the next few years, this trend could result in the emergence of production systems similar or more advanced than those coined as “subsea villages” or “subsea factories,” which may incorporate full processing capabilities. As these subsea centers continue to grow, so too does the size and scale of the systems now being considered. Every “village” or “factory” needs chemicals, communications, information, and power. The question of how that will be delivered to these subsea centers of the future is a key factor that needs to be considered in the early stages of development. However, when the industry refers to subsea “systems,” umbilicals and cables appear to be an afterthought. Most subsea equipment suppliers and operators seem to believe these are purchasable, off-the-shelf products. Contrary to this belief, umbilicals and power cables have become increasingly more complex and require a more customized approach to design and connectivity. These products should be at the forefront of an operator’s vision when it comes to powering the future systems. In his June 2014 JPT column, SPE President Jeff Spath wrote: “The power and the value of integration across several product lines, within a single company, could not be more evident than in subsea systems. Over time, contracting methods for subsea systems have changed from a best-in-class approach—with operators buying Christmas trees, manifolds, and controls from different suppliers and providing the integration and interface management internally—to a more likely scenario in which entire systems are being procured from a single supplier.” I could not agree more because providing products for more technically challenging systems cannot be done discretely without unacceptable cost escalation.

Text mining of news-headlines for FOREX market prediction: A Multi-layer Dimension Reduction Algorithm with semantics and sentiment

In this paper a novel approach is proposed to predict intraday directional-movements of a currency-pair in the foreign exchange market based on the text of breaking financial news-headlines. The motivation behind this work is twofold: First, although market-prediction through text-mining is shown to be a promising area of work in the literature, the text-mining approaches utilized in it at this stage are not much beyond basic ones as it is still an emerging field. This work is an effort to put more emphasis on the text-mining methods and tackle some specific aspects thereof that are weak in previous works, namely: the problem of high dimensionality as well as the problem of ignoring sentiment and semantics in dealing with textual language. This research assumes that addressing these aspects of text-mining have an impact on the quality of the achieved results. The proposed system proves this assumption to be right. The second part of the motivation is to research a specific market, namely, the foreign exchange market, which seems not to have been researched in the previous works based on predictive text-mining. Therefore, results of this work also successfully demonstrate a predictive relationship between this specific market-type and the textual data of news. Besides the above two main components of the motivation, there are other specific aspects that make the setup of the proposed system and the conducted experiment unique, for example, the use of news article-headlines only and not news article-bodies, which enables usage of short pieces of text rather than long ones; or the use of general financial breaking news without any further filtration.In order to accomplish the above, this work produces a multi-layer algorithm that tackles each of the mentioned aspects of the text-mining problem at a designated layer. The first layer is termed the Semantic Abstraction Layer and addresses the problem of co-reference in text mining that is contributing to sparsity. Co-reference occurs when two or more words in a text corpus refer to the same concept. This work produces a custom approach by the name of Heuristic-Hypernyms Feature-Selection which creates a way to recognize words with the same parent-word to be regarded as one entity. As a result, prediction accuracy increases significantly at this layer which is attributed to appropriate noise-reduction from the feature-space.The second layer is termed Sentiment Integration Layer, which integrates sentiment analysis capability into the algorithm by proposing a sentiment weight by the name of SumScore that reflects investors’ sentiment. Additionally, this layer reduces the dimensions by eliminating those that are of zero value in terms of sentiment and thereby improves prediction accuracy.The third layer encompasses a dynamic model creation algorithm, termed Synchronous Targeted Feature Reduction (STFR). It is suitable for the challenge at hand whereby the mining of a stream of text is concerned. It updates the models with the most recent information available and, more importantly, it ensures that the dimensions are reduced to the absolute minimum.The algorithm and each of its layers are extensively evaluated using real market data and news content across multiple years and have proven to be solid and superior to any other comparable solution. The proposed techniques implemented in the system, result in significantly high directional-accuracies of up to 83.33%.On top of a well-rounded multifaceted algorithm, this work contributes a much needed research framework for this context with a test-bed of data that must make future research endeavors more convenient. The produced algorithm is scalable and its modular design allows improvement in each of its layers in future research. This paper provides ample details to reproduce the entire system and the conducted experiments.

Employee Adaptive Behavior in Service Enactments

This study deepens understanding of the causal patterns of factors stimulating employees to perform adaptive behaviors in service encounter situations. Drawing on motivation literature and configuration theory, this study develops and tests research propositions based on a sample of 228 employees from the insurance industry. Findings from fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis indicate three configurations of employee personal characteristics and work perceptions explain employee adaptive behavior. This article contributes to the literature by providing new insights into the causal pattern of factors stimulating customization approaches in service situations. Based on these findings, this article discusses implications for service management.

The Use of Balanced Scorecard to Support Achievement of Business Plan in Digestive Endoscopy Center, 2013

Background: Digestive Endoscopy Center, Cipto Mangunkusumo Hospital was established in 2011 in which the concept was developed as center of excellence (CoE). The business plan was created based on safety and patient satisfaction, fast, accurate, quality and one stop services. 2013 is the 2nd year in Digestive Endoscopy Center business plan development and it is expected to increase in many aspects. The aim of this study is to measure the performance of business plan in Digestive Endoscopy Center.Method: This study was conducted from April-December 2013 with quantitative method and cross sectional studies on 76 subjects and also used secondary data from endoscopy’s reports. The balanced scorecard contains 4 measurements, such as financial approach, customer approach, internal process approach, and learning and growth approach. Results: The financial approach resulted that income from 2 types of patients (cash and insurance) were increased in 2013. The customer approach resulted a high satisfaction rate with mean 4.69 of 5 for patient satisfaction and the employee satisfaction increased in 2013 (mean: 3.88 of 5) and in 2010 (mean: 3.64 of 5). Internal process approach was measured using facilities and infrastructure discovered is increased too. Learning and growth approach resulted that accumulation of trainings, achievement of target of the trainings was increased.Conclusion: The achievement of bussiness plan has been evaluated using balanced scored card and showed that there is a balance on the financial approach, customer approach, internal process approach, and learning and growth approach.Keywords: business plan, digestive endoscopy center, balance scorecard

Madurez, capacidad y autonomía.

Assessing the ability of human beings to make autonomous moral decisions is arguably one of the most complex issues in the field of clinical bioethics. The use of adequate tools is an important part of this process, but not the only one, and sometimes even not decisive. It is necessary to be prudent and wise in taking this type of decisions, weighing the participation of children in the decision-making process, and making comprehensive and customized approaches that take into count all the elements that characterize the autonomous decisions of individuals.

Reconfigurable Adder Architectures for Low Power Applications

The growing design complexity has attracted the designs with Reconfigurable fabrics, where adaptable fabrics are utilized to solve the computational problems. Reconfigurable computing provides the flexibility in arriving at the problem specific architectures which helps in improving the performance due to custom approach. In this paper, a flexible reconfigurable architecture with different adder variants like Ripple Carry, Carry Look-ahead, Carry Select and Carry Bypass adders are implemented to form dynamically reconfigurable Hybrid adder architectures. Such hybrid architectures are utilized for the applications where design constraints are only for low power or high performance or the low area or sometimes a balanced design metrics. The design was modelled using Verilog HDL and synthesized in Synopsys Design Compiler by mapping to TSMC 65nm technology node. Standard ASIC design methodologies are considered to bench mark the results. The proposed architecture enables the designer to perform efficient Design Space Exploration. The design can be made adaptable to any of the reconfigurable processor and a similar improvement can be obtained. The proposed architectures results in 18-54% reduced power consumption when designed with various combinations of reconfigurable adder architectures and also accounted for 14-44% of area reduction.

Assessment of Service Skills in the Companies Providing with Leisure Facilities: Research in Customer Approach

Abstract On the plane of human capital theories –staff is considered being the most significant resource in a company. The implication is that a company has to take care of employees’ competence, their approach towards work, perception and assumption of responsibility, liabilities to a company, etc. Such an approach towards staff is particularly meaningful for service companies, the employees of which are indentified not only with the very company, but also with the service by customers. Consequently, the employees, oriented towards a customer, can become a meaningful condition of competitive advantage (L. Bagdonienė, 2008). Service is more and more influencing companies’ business. The process of service skills is a significant and complex element of customer service culture development. According to L. Žalys (2002) it can be described as endless and constantly going on in the certain stages process, which possesses distinctive operation technologies. Good relationship with customers and their loyalty is built exactly under the development process of customer service, as it is one of the sales service staff functions. Development process of customer service: to satisfy customers’ needs and requirements. Significant organizational culture is directed towards customer service based on corresponding organizational rules and procedures, practical skills and abilities. The level of the service process depends on the professionalism of the service staff taking care of a customer, communication, responsibility, responsibility and competences. For the assessment of service there are additionally applied two criteria: solution of service problems, and company’s policy in solution of service problems. In the research related to the formation and management of service skills, there are researched assessment criteria for service skills: external image/outlook of the companies, which provide with leisure service, locations and working hours, information about service and their prices, delivery of service, service staff’s appearance, staff’s qualification and attention to constant customers.

From mental health to the host microbiome: Looking at the forest not just the trees in wound healing (337.1)

The pathophysiology of acute and chronic wounds continues to be an area of active investigation. However, little is known about the interplay between transcript and epigenomic alterations and augmentations in wound healing. Further, research is lacking in identification of genotypic signatures that may lead to customized approaches to treatment. Additionally the interplay between the endogenous and the acquired microbiome may have great impacts on wound phenotype, healing, and scarring. The prokaryotic‐host interaction may play a substantial role in determining the quality and speed of wound repair. Studies examining 57 patients after burn injury show that stress system activation contributes to burn‐related pain, itch and healing. Identification of patient specific transcript signatures may lead to early identification of problematic wounds and customizable treatment. Similarly in animals and patients exposed to stress and subsequently exhibiting symptoms of PTSD immunosuppression and perturbations in pathways relating to wound healing are consistent and persist over time. Understanding the influence of these multi‐system changes could lead to the early identification of patients that need more aggressive care in order to prevent chronic non‐healing wounds that have poor healing quality. Host prokaryotic bio‐burden is being examined to determine the cutaneous microbiome and how it is altered by traumatic wounds. Experiments in burn patients and animals examining phenotypic alterations of benign microbes after injury show that virulence factor production is altered. The resulting PAMPs and DAMPs interact directly with cutaneous cells causing an innate immune response that not only leads to augmentation in inflammatory response but induces differential regulation of multiple pathways responsible for wound healing and scar.

The co-production approach to service: a theoretical background

The paper develops a theoretical background on the co-production approach as an extension of operations management principles, in which co-production function assumes well-defined functional form with the input presence of both firm and customers. The co-production approach not only views a customer as a co-producer, but also conducts strategic trade-offs between a firm and customers in service systems. Moreover, the value and the process of value co-creation are also explored under the co-production approach. The experimental study with a hypothetical service system indicates that the co-production function is feasible under economic and institutional considerations, and the co-production approach generalizes both the firm approach and the customer approach. Furthermore, the co-production approach creates many rich opportunities for future research on service operations management.

The Effects of the Service Environment on Perceived Waiting Time and Emotions

AbstractBecause customers’ experience of waiting for service may negatively affect their behavioral approach toward the service organization, improving the service environment may also improve their waiting experience. This study examined the different effects of environmental elements on the perceived waiting time route and the emotional route. We surveyed 326 customers of a leading fast‐food chain restaurant in Taiwan during rush hour. We found that the emotional route is a stronger predictor of customer approach behavior than the perceived waiting time route. Moreover, the explained wait and perceived crowding directly affect both the perceived waiting time route and the emotional route. The effect of the design factor on the customer behavior approach is significant in the emotional route, but it is not significant in the perceived waiting route. In addition, perceived crowding has the strongest effect on the perceived waiting time route, and the explained wait has the strongest effect on the emotional route.

Cultural Awareness and Personal Customization of Gestural Commands Using a Shamanic Interface

Gesture-based interfaces to control systems using full body or upper torso motions are becoming more common, particularly in the entertainment industry but increasingly in other domains. These interfaces may represent significant hurdles for individuals with motion or balance impairments. Even for non-impaired users, commands which are not readily represented by body mimicry require users to learn new non-intuitive gestures for adding layers of complexity in commands. In this paper, a reflection and clarification of these challenges is presented, based on some sample usage cases. Then a possibly solution path is presented, resorting to an idea originating in a science fiction novel, the shamanic interface imagined by Daniel Suarez. A reflection on its feasibility and on possible paths towards its creation is presented, as well as the possible impacts to render gesture-based interfaces more accessible to all and potentially easier to learn due to enhanced cultural awareness. The basic idea presented in this reflection paper is that the creation of a concern-separation layer between the gestures being executed by the users and their interpretation by computing systems can contribute both to the access by users with special needs and to all users in general, by enabling customized approaches to gesture-based control.

Modular route bus design – A method of meeting transport operation and vehicle manufacturing requirements

This research examines the problem of route bus specification and vehicle manufacturability. In order for bus operators to provide transport services, a range of vehicle configurations must be available from bus manufacturers, generating variety which has a negative impact on the manufacturing process. Larger part inventories, uncontrolled labour tasks and more troublesome maintenance are known impacts of this variety. This research identifies the functional necessities in route bus interior design and reduces the problems in bus manufacture and operation caused by specification diversity by proposing a modularised system of bus design. In particular, it makes recommendations as to how bus configuration should be carried out, ensuring an optimum mix of operational and manufacturing needs: 1.Determine user needs before the bus specification process.2.Designs to be developed by the manufacturer in response to user needs.3.This design should be standardised where possible, as suggested by the user needs.4.Where user needs dictate product variations, apply a mass customisation approach to accommodate these needs.The recommendations are communicated in design proposals for a modular bus interior, demonstrated by four cases designed to meet the present status quo of bus interior design and predictions for the future of the field.

Volumes cibles en radiothérapie des adénopathies cervicales de primitif inconnu : état des lieux et pistes vers une approche sélective raisonnée sous l’égide du Refcor (Réseau d’expertise français des cancers ORL rares)

The treatment of carcinomas of unknown primary revealed by cervical lymphadenopathy is based on neck dissection and nodal and pan-mucosal irradiation to control the neck and avoid the emergence of a metachronous primary. The aim of this review was to assess diagnostic and therapeutic approaches and criteria that may be used for a customized selective approach to avoid severe toxicities of pan-mucosal irradiation. A literature search was performed with the following keywords: cervical lymphadenopathy, unknown primary, upper aerodigestive tract, cancer, radiotherapy, squamous cell carcinoma, variants. The diagnostic workup includes a head and neck scanner or MRI, (18F)-FDG PET CT, a panendoscopy and tonsillectomy. Squamous cell carcinoma represents over two thirds of cases. The number of metastatic cervical nodes, nodal level, and histological variant (associated with HPV/EBV status) may determine the primary site origin and might be weighted for the determination of radiation target volumes on a multidisciplinary basis. A selective customized approach is relevant to decrease radiation toxicity only if neck and mucosal control is not impaired. Although no recommendation can yet be made in the absence of sufficient level of evidence, the relevance of systematic pan-mucosal irradiation appears questionable in a number of clinical situations. Accordingly, a customized selective redefinition of target volumes may be discussed and be prospectively evaluated in relation to the therapeutic index obtained.

Application of the Rigid Finite Element Method for Modelling an Offshore Pedestal Crane

Abstract In offshore pedestal cranes one may distinguish three components of considerable length: a pedestal, a boom and a frame present in some designs. It is often necessary in dynamical analyses to take into account their flexibility. A convenient and efficient method for modelling them is the rigid finite element method in a modified form. The rigid finite element method allows us to take into account the flexibility of the beam system in selected directions while introducing a relatively small number of additional degrees of freedom to the system. This paper presents a method for modelling the pedestal, the frame and the boom of an offshore column crane, treating each of these components in a slightly different way. A custom approach is applied to the pedestal, using rigid finite elements of variable length. Results of sample numeric computations are included.

Evaluation framework for social media brand presence

Social media have transformed the traditional marketing communication, resulting in companies evolving their customer approach and integrating social media into their marketing strategies. Although numerous examples of using social media platforms for marketing purposes exist, and despite the various efforts from the companies and the general popularity of the medium, measuring the effectiveness is elusive. An approach towards overcoming these challenges is examination of the activities undertaken by the companies and the consumers’ responses to them in the form of measurements and use of analysis tools. To contribute in this direction, we propose an evaluation framework that allows companies to perform social media analytics through continuous monitoring of the content and activities on their social media marketing channels, and to measure the effectiveness of social media utilization for marketing purposes. We describe the specific methods and illustrate the application of the proposed approach using a Facebook brand page case study. Finally, we discuss the benefits it brings to the companies.

Phage Cocktails and the Future of Phage Therapy

Viruses of bacteria, known as bacteriophages or phages, were discovered nearly 100 years ago. Their potential as antibacterial agents was appreciated almost immediately, with the first 'phage therapy' trials predating Fleming's discovery of penicillin by approximately a decade. In this review, we consider phage therapy that can be used for treating bacterial infections in humans, domestic animals and even biocontrol in foods. Following an overview of the topic, we explore the common practice - both experimental and, in certain regions of the world, clinical - of mixing therapeutic phages into cocktails consisting of multiple virus types. We conclude with a discussion of the commercial and medical context of phage cocktails as therapeutic agents. In comparing off-the-shelf versus custom approaches, we consider the merits of a middle ground, which we deem 'modifiable'. Finally, we explore a regulatory framework for such an approach based on an influenza vaccine model.

A high-fidelity cell lineage tracing method for obtaining systematic spatiotemporal gene expression patterns in Caenorhabditis elegans.

Advances in microscopy and fluorescent reporters have allowed us to detect the onset of gene expression on a cell-by-cell basis in a systematic fashion. This information, however, is often encoded in large repositories of images, and developing ways to extract this spatiotemporal expression data is a difficult problem that often uses complex domain-specific methods for each individual data set. We present a more unified approach that incorporates general previous information into a hierarchical probabilistic model to extract spatiotemporal gene expression from 4D confocal microscopy images of developing Caenorhabditis elegans embryos. This approach reduces the overall error rate of our automated lineage tracing pipeline by 3.8-fold, allowing us to routinely follow the C. elegans lineage to later stages of development, where individual neuronal subspecification becomes apparent. Unlike previous methods that often use custom approaches that are organism specific, our method uses generalized linear models and extensions of standard reversible jump Markov chain Monte Carlo methods that can be readily extended to other organisms for a variety of biological inference problems relating to cell fate specification. This modeling approach is flexible and provides tractable avenues for incorporating additional previous information into the model for similar difficult high-fidelity/low error tolerance image analysis problems for systematically applied genomic experiments.

Equity in Care: Picking Up the Pace

Eliminating disparities in healthcare is a goal of every American hospital. Despite our best efforts, we know that race, ethnicity, and language preference continue to affect the chance that patients will receive the care they need and the outcomes they deserve. For example, Hispanic adults with diabetes are far less likely to receive recommended preventive services and African American women are more likely to die after they are diagnosed with breast cancer than are their white counterparts. Because each hospital comprises and serves a unique community, increasing both the collection and the use of race, ethnicity, and language preference (REAL) data is an essential part of achieving equity in care for all Americans. With good data, hospitals can test the validity of their assumptions about the quality of care they provide. That care may be ideal, but without measurement, it is impossible to know. With careful measurement, every provider can document whether differences in outcomes and opportunities exist so it can improve the quality of care delivered by implementing customized approaches using evidence-based care. Supporting hospital efforts to eliminate disparities is one reason the American Hospital Association is a founding partner in the National Call to Action to Eliminate Health Care Disparities. With our partners, the American College of Healthcare Executives, Association of American Medical Colleges, Catholic Health Association of the United States, and National Association of Public Hospitals and Health Systems, we set out to achieve three interrelated goals: increase collection of REAL data, increase cultural competency training, and increase diversity in leadership. We have set up the Equity of Care website (http://www.equityofcare.org) to help hospitals, health systems, clinicians, and others improve the quality of care for each and every patient by sharing resources and best practices. We believe that most healthcare providers are moving in the right direction and that many are taking important steps to make care more equitable. But given the speed of change in our communities, we feel that this process must be accelerated, and information sharing is an important way to facilitate that. Healthcare providers must begin with a basic understanding of the population trends in the community they serve. American communities are undergoing huge demographic changes that may not immediately appear in the patient population of a given provider--but most surely will in the future. For the first time last year, most babies born in the United States were nonwhite. As health insurance coverage increases, each provider will be challenged to provide the best possible care to a unique patchwork of patient populations with different beliefs, lifestyles, family structures and support, and healthcare experiences. Planning for equitable care involves developing ongoing relationships with community organizations that can support providers' efforts to build cultural competency in delivering that care. Providers must anticipate community needs to, for example, ensure access to those with no or limited English proficiency or to develop patient education materials that consider differences in both language and culture. With careful measurement of REAL data, quality indicators, and patient outcomes--and using that information to constantly improve the quality of the care for each patient and for the community at large--providers will position themselves for future success. Measures of clinical quality and patient experience have increased significantly in recent years, and they are driving improvements across the board. But overall national quality measures cannot be readily broken down by race, ethnicity, and language preference. Recently, the Institute for Diversity in Health Management surveyed hospitals and found that 81 percent of hospitals collect REAL data, but only 18 percent used these data for quality interventions. …