Company-specific attributes

Much of the following section discusses the basics of establishing and working with intracompany, multidisciplinary teams. If you are familiar and experienced with this approach to problem-solving, you may wish to skip to Section 3.4, Define Company-Specific Attributes."... 

It is also useful to assure that internal (company specific) practices are adhered to in method development by making these considerations part of the MDRD. Based on the voice of the customer surveys, several technical and practical method attributes have been identified within our organization. 

The customer satisfaction measurement system must connect to the internal measures of a company and to external customer evaluations. To provide evidence, surveys can be performed to make possible a gap analysis (the gap is the difference between what the customer should experience and what the customer actually experiences). The data of actual-to-expected performance allow the application of advanced statistic techniques such as regression analysis to determine empirically the relative impact and/or importance of attributes and processes to customer satisfaction (the power of this technique and an example of its application are illustrated in Anton [1996]). To improve customer satisfaction, identifying the specific attributes and processing the most predictive of customer satisfaction decisions alxtut investment of resources will yield the greatest benefit. 

Section 8 of TSCA has made EPA and the industry aware of nitrosamine contamination in metalworking fluids. In one particular potentially significant notice of substantial risk (8E-1077-0 012), skin painting studies showed an increase above the expected normalincidence of tumors in the livers and lungs of mice with no unusual incidence of skin tumors. Due to the similarity between the observed effects and the mechanism of action of nitrosamines (i.e., the apparent systemic effect of the substance and organ specificity of the tumors), the company attributed the response to a nitrosamine contaminant in the fluid. 

The assessment of material quality normally starts with comparing a material s attributes to the specifications established by the purchasing company. Once the material satisfies established specifications, efforts are made to assess the stability of the product or intermediate manufactured with the material. Typically the determination of raw material process stability is made during the product development activities. Once a vendor or vendors have been selected, three distinct vendor lots of a given raw material will be purchased. Development batches of the product are then produced using these lots, and samples from the three batches are placed on stability. The thought is that if the materials from the three lots result in product with suitable stability profiles, the raw... 

Pure epoxy resins, so-called basic resins, are unsuited to building applications because of their high viscosity. Modifications are necessary to achieve the required viscosity, wettability, carbonate resistance, curing rate, cost reduction and numerous other properties. However, the modifiers must be chosen so as not to impair the other valuable attributes of the epoxy resins. For example volatile solvents are unsuitable for thick coatings, because any solvent retained in the cured system will reduce the mechanical and thermal properties and the corrosion resistance. The specific property needs for a particular application may be tailored to each system to maximise the remarkable potential of epoxy resins (Dow Chemical Company, undated c). 

Consider the example of Fig. 5.4a, which is a variation of the example presented previously. Here, the first source consists of only the three relational tables Public-Company, Public-Grant, and Contact, while the target consists of only the table Company. As before, the intra-schema lines represent schema constraints, and in the particular example are foreign key constraints. The red dotted inter-schema lines represent the correspondences. Note that the appearance of an attribute with the same or similar name in both schemas does not necessarily mean that the two attributes represent the same fact. For instance, consider the attributes symbol and id. Although in the companies world these terms may be used interchangingly, in the specific example, the lack of a line among them may be justified by a case in which the attribute id may represent the fiscal number of the company while the attribute symbol may be the symbol with which the company appears in the stock exchange. 

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