Engineering
Essays

When it comes to marketing, the action of selling something becomes more of an art. That is, it is up to the salesperson to persuade the buyer to purchase a certain object or service.

The Arnold Palmer Hospital (AHC) located in Orlando, Florida is considered one of the most efficient and patient-centric healthcare providers in the U.S. due to the customer satisfaction scores the facility receives and amount of patients the hospital sees on an annual basis. The AHC has been ranked fifth in patient satisfaction out of 5,000 hospitals and sees on average 1.5 million children and women annually. It is the fourth-busiest labor and delivery hospital in the U.S. and the largest neonatal intensive care unit in the entire Southeastern U.S. AHC has also put into place one of the most thorough and well-respected continuous improvement processes in the U.S. healthcare system. With the goal of 100% patient satisfaction, AHC has created an entire quality management and improvement organization which is now a critical part of its culture. Of the myriad of processes that AHC relies on to operate daily, one of the more problematic is the Labor & Delivery Check-In. This process is made more challenging by the continually changing status of the patient and her imminent delivery of a baby. Healthcare processes need to be contextually relevant and have comparable time and value durations as patients in order to contribute to patient satisfaction (Ahsan, Shah, Kingston, 2010). The AHC labor and delivery check-in process is one that is very complex with ample room for patient dissatisfaction given the highly intricate nature of eight different decision points. With so much complexity there is the potential for confusion in the Labor and Delivery check-in process and frustration on the part of patients. Clearly this process needs significant improvement as the initial analysis of the workflow is shown in the first part of this analysis. Following the initial analysis of the Labor and Delivery check-in workflow, the complication of dealing with a Caesarean-section birth is discussed. Third, if mothers were electronically checked in versus the manual process today, the workflows would change significantly. A second flowchart has been created to show the streamlined workflow as a result of the AHC choosing this alternative. For process re-engineering to be successful there needs to be a prioritization of customer-based goals first, followed by the selective use of technologies (Bertolini, Bevilacqua, Ciarapica, Giacchetta, 2011). The use of more automated means to check maternity patients in follows this best practices of business process reengineering (Bertolini, Bevilacqua, Ciarapica, Giacchetta, 2011).

The role of fat versus thin client/server architectures is evident in this paper which shows how effective the latter is in an engineering and design firm. The role of thick clients in CAD-intensive environments is analyzed in this paper, and recommendations for ensuring a high level of performance are also provided.

¶ … Soft Systems Techniques in the Preparation of Information Technology as a Systems Manager

The ability to select and recruit employees is the most costly decision any company will make. The intent of this analysis has been to show how the hiring process can be streamlined over time, including the adoption of more effective validity measures of hiring performance and long-term career management. There is also a series of examples of how to create an effective program for hiring in law enforcement over time as well.

Two profound fields of human opportunity are evolving of their natural accord toward what each believes to be more viable understandings of what it means to learn and to care about our enviroment. This piece reviews the trends in lifelong learning and those in the emergence of an ecological mindset to demonstrate their commonalities and how their similaries (along with the technological communication revolution) may make it more likely that both efforts will achieve their goals with a much happier outcome for us all.

How product design is applied in decision-making of that organization?

"Culture is more often a source of conflict than of synergy. Cultural differences are a nuisance at best and often a disaster." - Dr. Geert Hofstede

The website ontonline.org is invaluable in finding a wide variety of positions including those in Sustainability Management. This area is encompasses many engineering, logistics and operations areas within companies and is expected to be one of the highest growth areas of employment globally for the next several years (Welsh, 2009). Of the many jobs shown on the website, the one considered to have one of the brightest outlooks is the role of Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO). This is a senior-level position and that encompasses the engineering and scientific-based aspects of sustainability efforts including defining frameworks for evaluating the environmental impact of their organizations. The pay range for an average Chief Sustainability Officers average an impressive salary of $165,080 annually and often have over two decades of experience in this field. There are projected to be a need for over 112,000 new CSOs by 2018 according to the website onetonline.org. The career path to get a job as a CSO needs to include expertise in defining compliance and sustainability programs for reducing energy use, ensuring resource conservation and pollution reduction. Those that navigate their careers through compliance requirements of federal and state agencies will also have a significant advantage in getting to this position in their careers.

Both Compaq and DEC need to find a unified strategy direction to pursue, not keep fighting to see which programs or software platforms by business unit will survive or not. The case study is a classic example of what happens when IT infrastructure becomes more important than the strategic growth of a merged organization. The case also illustrates how powerful IT infrastructure and information flows are in creating an effective culture or not as well. If the management team had focused =more on IT initiatives that would unify and capture the best of both companies, there is a good chance they would still be independent today. Second, the lack of strategic vision and insight into just how profitable the B2O and mass customization strategies could have been is remarkable. Compaq and Dell could have integrated their supply chain, sourcing, manufacturing, product planning, product management and services strategies under a consolidated ERP system and attained higher growth that the fractionalized, disconnected organization they grew into did. The fact it took nearly 20 days to complete even a basic quote for enterprise systems within Compaq during this time period shows just how disconnected, disparate the IT architectures had become (Columbus, 2003). Compaq and DEC needed to use IT architectures to create a unified corporate culture supporting by strongly integrating product, marketing, service and long-term customer relationship strategies.