Refine
Year of publication
- 2019 (25) (remove)
Document Type
- Book chapter (21)
- Journal article (2)
- Conference proceeding (1)
- Anthology (1)
Is part of the Bibliography
- yes (25)
Institute
- ESB Business School (25) (remove)
Publisher
- Hochschule Reutlingen (25) (remove)
It has not yet been possible to achieve the desired aim of decoupling economic growth from global material demand. Small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) represent the backbone of most industrialized economies. Although material efficiency is of vital importance for many SMEs, few of them actually treat it as their top priority. There is a cornucopia of tools and methods available which can be used for material efficiency purposes. These, however, have gained little ground in the SME-field. This work deals with the enabling factors for material efficiency improvements in manufacturing SMEs and projections towards aspects of supply chain and circular economy. A multi-disciplinary decoupling approach for manufacturing SMEs and an implementation roadmap for further practical development are proposed. The approach combines appropriate complexity of technology and socio-economic considerations. It enables a connection of existing methods and the implementation of established information technologies.
The aim of this paper is to show to what extent Artificial Intelligence can be used to optimize forecasting capability in procurement as well as to compare AI with traditional statistic methods. At the same time this article presents the status quo of the research project ANIMATE. The project applies Artificial Intelligence to forecast customer orders in medium-sized companies.
Precise forecasts are essential for companies. For planning, decision making and controlling. Forecasts are applied, e.g. in the areas of supply chain, production or purchasing. Medium-sized companies have major challenges in using suitable methods to improve their forecasting ability.
Companies often use proven methods such as classical statistics as the ARIMA algorithm. However, simple statistics often fail while applied for complex non-linear predictions.
Initial results show that even a simple MLP ANN produces better results than traditional statistic methods. Furthermore, a baseline (Implicit Sales Expectation) of the company was used to compare the performance. This comparison also shows that the proposed AI method is superior.
Until the developed method becomes part of corporate practice, it must be further optimized. The model has difficulties with strong declines, for example due to holidays. The authors are certain that the model can be further improved. For example, through more advanced methods, such as a FilterNet, but also through more data, such as external data on holiday periods.
Angesichts großer globaler Herausforderungen wie z.B. dem Klimawandel befindet sich die Entwicklungszusammenarbeit im Wandel und sieht sich zunehmend der Frage ihrer Wirksamkeit gegenübergestellt. Dieser Beitrag diskutiert, welchen Beitrag Sustainable Entrepreneurship zu einer Verbesserung ihrer Wirksamkeit leisten kann. Im Rahmen dessen wird zunächst die Ethik Albert Schweitzers und ihre Bezüge zu Konzepten der Nachhaltigen Entwicklung beleuchtet und im nächsten Schritt kriteriengeleitet diskutiert, inwieweit Albert Schweitzer als Prototyp eines Sustainable Entrepreneurs bezeichnet werden kann und was dies für die Konzeption und Ausrichtung der Entwicklungszusammenarbeit bedeuten könnte. Ebenso wird diskutiert, inwieweit Nachhaltige Entwicklung, insb. die Nachhaltigkeitsziele der Vereinten Nationen (SDG) als Orientierungsrahmen für die Entwicklungszusammenarbeit dienen kann. Ausgehend von dem Befund, dass für Sustainable Entrepreneurs die Finanzierung ihrer Aktivitäten ein erheblicher Engpassfaktor darstellt, wird diskutiert, inwiefern Sustainable Finance-Instrumente dazu beitragen können, die Finanzierungsbedingungen für Sustainable Entrepreneurs und damit den Impact ihrer Aktivitäten zu verbessern. Abschließend wird anhand eines aktuellen Fallbeispiels der Impact aufgezeigt, den Sustainable Entrepreneurs, die nach dem Vorbild Albert Schweitzers agieren, erzielen können.