Competition/competitiveness metrics

The focus of a company is to be competitive in the marketplace and thus be profitable. A competitive supply chain has to provide customers with the expected or superior performance. But what does it mean to be competitive The competitiveness of a supply chain refers to two aspects of the supply chain (1) the link between a supply chain s choice of its competitive metric and the corresponding choice of its architecture and (2) the impact of competitors on a supply chain s performance. While successful firms in every industry often have unique capabilities, an important question for every firm is to adjust its supply chain architecture to remain competitive in the presence of a changing environment. 

With the acquisition of the Thomson plant and technology, and the constmction of their own plant in Lafayette, Indiana, in the late 1980s, the A. E. Stanley Manufacturing Company dramatically increased crystalline fmctose production. On the strength of a growing appreciation for crystalline fmctose s unique physical and functional properties, its competitive pricing, and its successful penetration of specific mainstream food appHcations, worldwide crystalline fmctose production grew to more than 50,000 metric tons by 1992. In the same time period, crystalline fmctose prices feU dramatically to ca... 

Whereas commercial production of castor oil existed ia the United States ia the 1800s, production shifted to tropical and subtropical countries ia the early 1900s. World War I, World War II, and the Korean conflict each iafluenced efforts to produce hybrid castor species and iacrease U.S. planting, and by the late 1960s, approximately 80,000 acres of castor were grown ia the United States produciag 29,500 metric tons of castor oil. U.S. production was competitive until 1972 when Federal price supports were withdrawn. U.S. production dropped almost to zero by 1974. 

A key lesson for The Home Depot over the past ten years has been the need to pay close attention to tracking performance along multiple dimensions. We now have many more metrics - and much more granular ones - in place than we did in the early years, allowing us to respond to competitive trends and address customer service issues more quickly. 

When The Home Depot was still a relatively new concept and the competition was less intense, growth came easily pretty much all we had to do was open new stores and customers would come. And, as long as we were growing fast and launching new stores without cannibalizing existing ones, we did not need to pay attention to most items below the sales line. So there was not much discussion of - or need for -performance metrics beyond sales. 

Palmquist, U. Ahlberg, E., Lovgren, L. Sjo-berg, S. (1999) competitive metal ion adsorption in goethite systems using in situ volta-metric methods and potentiometry. J. Coll. Int. Sci. 218 388-396... 

If the goal of the buy-out price is to mimic what would have happened under best-case competitive market conditions, then the price should be based on expected profits rather than sales or costs. Ganslandt, Maskus, and Wong (2001) used cost data to calculate the buy-out, which rewards effort rather than success. Gross sales are certainly an element of pharmaceutical appropriation, but the relevant market metrics are the net present value (NPV) of the cash flow or the NPV of the profit stream. The purpose of the buy-out price should be to restore the expected profits, and more particularly, the lost R D cost recovery. 

These results are important since they highlight that once biomass has been gasified to synthesis gas, the usual processing technologies can be used for chemical synthesis, which are well understood by the industry. As the efficiency of the gasification step is fairly competitive with coal, this may make the gasification of biomass a fairly viable option, but the other metrics developed in this book must be applied as well. 

Interrogation of the stereochemical course of the mechanism was obtained through submission of allylic ethers 208 and 210 (>95% ee) to reaction conditions (Scheme 7.58). The reaction of a 1 1 mixture of allylic ether 208 produced the allylic silane as a 1 1 mixture of diastereomers. Exposure of 210 to substoichio-metric amounts of copper triflate and cyclohexene silacyclopropane produced cfs-substituted allyl silanes 211 and 212 to reveal that C-Si bond formation occurs on the same face as the C-O bond that is cleaved. The loss of enantiopurity, however, indicates that the rate of allylic transposition is competitive with the insertion process. 

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