Increasing sales volume in mass business through inbound contact center

Field lab: Consulting lab

Infraventus-internationalizing a renewables business to Kenya

Infraventus – Internationalizing a Renewables Business to Kenya Infraventus is a renewable energy development company, with a consolidated experience, since 1988, in developing, constructing and operating projects mainly in Portugal, but also in other countries: Spain, Poland, France, Australia, Finland and Panama, and is now regarding Kenya as a possible destiny. Kenya is the biggest economy of East Africa, with a growing GDP around 5% and a low level of electric grid coverage thru its territory, 33% of national access to electricity. Kenya energy policy is intended to promote the investment in renewables; wind and sun are existing resources in good measures. Kenya is an interesting destiny to Infraventus, but has many risks. The objective of this dissertation is to evaluate the possible advantages of this investment and risks and propose recommendations about how to mitigate them considering alternative entry mode

The future of airline business models:

This research is titled “The Future of Airline Business Models: Which Will Win?” and it is part of the requirements for the award of a Masters in Management from NOVA BSE and another from Luiss Guido Carlo University. The purpose is to elaborate a complete market analysis of the European Air Transportation Industry in order to predict which Airlines, strategies and business models may be successful in the next years. First, an extensive literature review of the business model concept has been done. Then, a detailed overview of the main European Airlines and the strategies that they have been implementing so far has been developed. Finally, the research is illustrated with three case studies

A business plan for a new mobile application to the consumer foodservice industry

The Portuguese consumer foodservice industry is experiencing a boost in technology adoption, driven by significant changes in consumer behavior and business dynamics, due to mobile increasing penetration. Accordingly, the present work project consists on developing a business plan for meeting an identified opportunity in the technological foodservice landscape. Therefore, this report is divided into three sections, each of which addressing different objectives: (A) External Environment, providing key external insights that support the opportunity; (B) Strategy Formulation, establishing a strategic direction; and (C) Action Plan, determining an implementation plan for starting the business

Performance of the Vitek 2 system software version 5.03 in the bacterial identification and antimicrobial susceptibility test: evaluation study of clinical and reference strains of Gram-positive cocci

Introduction. The genera Enterococcus, Staphylococcus and Streptococcus are recognized as important Gram-positive human pathogens. The aim of this study was to evaluate the performance of Vitek 2 in identifying Gram-positive cocci and their antimicrobial susceptibilities. Methods. One hundred four isolates were analyzed to determine the accuracy of the automated system for identifying the bacteria and their susceptibility to oxacillin and vancomycin. Results. The system correctly identified 77.9% and 97.1% of the isolates at the species and genus levels, respectively. Additionally, 81.8% of the Vitek 2 results agreed with the known antimicrobial susceptibility profiles. Conclusion. Vitek 2 correctly identified the commonly isolated strains; however, the limitations of the method may lead to ambiguous findings.

Fostering e-participation sustainability through a BPM-driven semantic model

According to a recent Eurobarometer survey (2014), 68% of Europeans tend not to trust national governments. As the increasing alienation of citizens from politics endangers democracy and welfare, governments, practitioners and researchers look for innovative means to engage citizens in policy matters. One of the measures intended to overcome the so-called democratic deficit is the promotion of civic participation. Digital media proliferation offers a set of novel characteristics related to interactivity, ubiquitous connectivity, social networking and inclusiveness that enable new forms of societal-wide collaboration with a potential impact on leveraging participative democracy. Following this trend, e-Participation is an emerging research area that consists in the use of Information and Communication Technologies to mediate and transform the relations among citizens and governments towards increasing citizens’ participation in public decision-making. However, despite the widespread efforts to implement e-Participation through research programs, new technologies and projects, exhaustive studies on the achieved outcomes reveal that it has not yet been successfully incorporated in institutional politics. Given the problems underlying e-Participation implementation, the present research suggested that, rather than project-oriented efforts, the cornerstone for successfully implementing e-Participation in public institutions as a sustainable added-value activity is a systematic organisational planning, embodying the principles of open-governance and open-engagement. It further suggested that BPM, as a management discipline, can act as a catalyst to enable the desired transformations towards value creation throughout the policy-making cycle, including political, organisational and, ultimately, citizen value. Following these findings, the primary objective of this research was to provide an instrumental model to foster e-Participation sustainability across Government and Public Administration towards a participatory, inclusive, collaborative and deliberative democracy. The developed artefact, consisting in an e-Participation Organisational Semantic Model (ePOSM) underpinned by a BPM-steered approach, introduces this vision. This approach to e-Participation was modelled through a semi-formal lightweight ontology stack structured in four sub-ontologies, namely e-Participation Strategy, Organisational Units, Functions and Roles. The ePOSM facilitates e-Participation sustainability by: (1) Promoting a common and cross-functional understanding of the concepts underlying e-Participation implementation and of their articulation that bridges the gap between technical and non-technical users; (2) Providing an organisational model which allows a centralised and consistent roll-out of strategy-driven e-Participation initiatives, supported by operational units dedicated to the execution of transformation projects and participatory processes; (3) Providing a standardised organisational structure, goals, functions and roles related to e-Participation processes that enhances process-level interoperability among government agencies; (4) Providing a representation usable in software development for business processes’ automation, which allows advanced querying using a reasoner or inference engine to retrieve concrete and specific information about the e-Participation processes in place. An evaluation of the achieved outcomes, as well a comparative analysis with existent models, suggested that this innovative approach tackling the organisational planning dimension can constitute a stepping stone to harness e-Participation value.