Hon& of America has developed a comprehensive approach to teaching the principles of lean
production to its suppliers. The centerpiece of these efforts is a program called BP (for ?Best process?,
?Best Performance ?, ?Bs Practice?), in which a crossfunctional…

Organizations must establish processes for managing knowledge across boundaries because of the specialized and task-dependent forms of knowledge required to deliver products and services. To address this challenge an integrative framework is developed that identifies and integrates the value of…

by Robert J. Grochowski., Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Civil Engineering, 1988., Includes bibliographical references.

his dissertation analyzes how local knowledge improves environmental decisions. The premise is that controlling pollution and addressing public health disparities are not problems that professionals alone can solve. Concerned lay publics, especially low-income populations and people of color that experience…

There is a great need among educators for a way to quickly assign teams in large or distance learning classrooms in a manner superior to random assignment or student self-selection. Forming teams based on knowledge of students' characteristics is too…

The Telematics Industry faces tremendous challenges for growth. Regardless of the efforts and investment from vehicle manufacturers and suppliers, telematics has not been that profitable industry that many analyst forecasted five years ago; a 40 billion industry by 2003. This…

This study presents a theoretical model for predictions of near-shore hydrodynamic characteristics and the local sediment transport rate along long, straight beaches. The wave may be periodic or random, the beach may be plane or barred, and the bed may…

by Kimberly G. Waters., Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2002., Includes bibliographical references (p. 45-46).

Conversational interfaces have received much attention as a promising natural communication channel between humans and computers. A typical conversational interface consists of three major systems: speech understanding, dialog management and spoken language generation. In such a conversational interface, speech recognition…

The activity of designing and developing large, complex, discrete, physical, and engineered products faces the challenges in the physical product system, the organization of people, and the larger systems in which the product resides-the natural and societal systems. This thesis…