By Steve Tracey📧 and Kusumal Ruamsook📧
In Supply Chain Xchange, June 7, 2024.
Contemporary supply chains have become more comprehensive as a result of economic globalization, and increased product and service complexity driven by ever-increasing consumer demand and expectations. Rising against this backdrop is the importance of supply chain compression. Literally defined as “the act of making something smaller or shorter,” compression can be a useful strategy for supply chain management (SCM) that potentially generates competitive advantages for companies. While compression-based exploits can be pursued across supply chain processes, doing so in the new product development (NPD) stage can provide a great opportunity to realize the value of compression strategies. Developing new products can often be time-consuming and resource intensive. By introducing 3D virtual prototyping and extended reality technologies, companies can make their new product development process more efficient, agile, and interactive.
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Enterprises are increasingly realizing the ability of digital technologies to create a competitive advantage in the procurement function. To date, digital technologies like analytics, artificial intelligence, and robotics process automation have been widely deployed in various procurement domains. Now, a much-hyped newcomer, blockchain, is swiftly gathering momentum. Blockchain has advanced significantly since its early application as the underlying technology of Bitcoin, expanding its field of possible applications. In particular, its ability to enable transparency, traceability, operational efficiency, and trust among users could potentially disrupt procurement operations. Supply chain executives cannot afford to ignore this promising, but yet-to-mature technology. However, blockchain’s novelty and dynamic innovations can make it hard to grasp how this evolving technology could be applied in the real world. To help procurement organizations catch the wave of blockchain technology, this article examines blockchain applications in digital procurement. It highlights areas of applicability and discusses how different blockchain utilities can be advantageously harnessed across procurement processes.
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are relevant technologies that have been a topic of conversation in the business field for several years. Many strides have been made to introduce these technologies into the consumer experience and the everyday lives of the modern American. With the current supply chain limitations causing issues for firms across the world, more companies are looking to find practical uses of AI and ML that will increase supply chain efficiency and decrease costs. This thesis looks to gain a better understanding of the history and principles of AI and ML while also highlighting specific examples of use cases within firms’ supply chains. With the prevalence of research into AI and ML, a major portion of this paper contains a literature review of documents concerning the progress of AI and ML as well as examples of companies that have relevant use cases for these technologies. After an extensive literature review, this thesis contains an analysis of several conducted interviews with supply chain professionals who have considerable experience working in AI and ML. These interviews helped gain insight into real-world experiences with AI and ML in supply chain and the risks that had to be mitigated to successfully transition a process with these systems.
Recently, diffusion processes in social networks have attracted increasing attention within computer science, marketing science, social sciences, and political science. Although the majority of existing works focus on maximizing the reach of desirable diffusion processes, we are interested in deploying a group of monitors to detect malicious diffusion processes such as the spread of computer worms. In this work, we introduce and study the 
Animal behavior usually has a hierarchical structure and dynamics. Therefore, to understand how the neural system coordinates with behaviors, neuroscientists need a quantitative description of the hierarchical dynamics of different behaviors. However, the recent end-to-end machine-learning-based methods for behavior analysis mostly focus on recognizing behavioral identities on a static timescale or based on limited observations. These approaches usually lose rich dynamic information on cross-scale behaviors. Here, inspired by the natural structure of animal behaviors, we address this challenge by proposing a parallel and multi-layered framework to learn the hierarchical dynamics and generate an objective metric to map the behavior into the feature space. In addition, we characterize the animal 3D kinematics with our low-cost and efficient multi-view 3D animal motion-capture system. Finally, we demonstrate that this framework can monitor spontaneous behavior and automatically identify the behavioral phenotypes of the transgenic animal disease model. The extensive experiment results suggest that our framework has a wide range of applications, including animal disease model phenotyping and the relationships modeling between the neural circuits and behavior.
Gamification has been shown to encourage contributions of user-generated reviews (word-of-mouth, WOM) in various domains, including travel and leisure related platforms (Foursquare, TripAdvisor), e-commerce (Amazon), and auctions (eBay). WOM contributors write reviews about products/services provided by business venues and WOM consumers read reviews and use them to form attitudes and make purchase decisions. Gamification elements such as points and badges, awarded to WOM contributors for various reasons, and displayed to WOM consumers, have a dual role in WOM context. First, points awarded for user contributions help motivate WOM contributors to increase their participation. Second, badges awarded to users for visiting business venues signal prior experience or competence, and they help determine how WOM consumers perceive WOM contributors and form their judgments based on the reviews. While the first role of gamification (i.e., motivating users) has been widely studied, the impact of WOM presented along with gamification elements on the perceptions and behavior of the target audience, WOM consumers, has not been examined. This is important to businesses that are looking to attract customers. Drawing on social psychology literature, we show that gamification symbols signaling experience that accompanies WOM leads to perceptions of positive WOM contributors as more competent. This leads to important changes in behavioral outcomes such as willingness to visit/buy and willingness to recommend the reviewed outlets.