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Governmental institutions must cooperate with other organizations across institutional boundaries to achieve high-quality service offerings. The required cooperation may lead to complex networks, including several of the thousands of public administrations in the many federal layers of a single country. This paper aims to address the key challenge of the proper management of the information exchange between networked actors, which is generally conducted by means of forms.

Following the design science research paradigm, this research develops a method that assists in the design and maintenance of forms in public administrations.

Discussions in the project’s focus groups add evidence to the researchers’ expectation that the method developed in this study improves the quality of forms while reducing the effort required for their design and maintenance.

This paper includes an evaluation of the approach based on qualitative feedback from the project’s stakeholders, although the implementation of the workflows and procedures is subject to future work that evaluates the approach in a variety of practical settings.

The method developed in this paper allows public administrations and legislative authorities to design and manage forms in a cooperative way. Software developers can assume the existence of information structures. The approach extends the BOMOS standardization framework to the operational level.

The main contribution of this paper is the development of a novel method that will change how information exchange is managed in public administrations.

The International Chemical Company, Columbian Chemicals Company based in Atlanta, Georgia, recently opened its European Central Laboratory at Avonmouth, England. A £1.25 million investment, it is believed to be the most up‐to‐date facility of its kind servicing the interests of all users of carbon black throughout Europe.

Estimating product cost at the design stage, often referred to as product costing, is vitally important in the product configuration process in the mass customization paradigm. There are three research streams in this field: analogous, statistical, and analytical methods. However, in a mass customization environment, these methods suffer the drawbacks of poor accuracy, low‐agility and an undesirable degree of detail. It is imperative to develop an efficient framework for product costing in mass customization. The paper aims to address these issues.

Activity‐based costing (ABC) becomes a new trend in product costing which alleviates the shortcomings discussed above. However, the complexity of ABC probably increases in mass customization with a high degree of variety. In this research, a framework is formalized for product costing in mass customization, in which a generic activity definition is proposed to simplify and catalyze ABC practice in high‐variety production. Moreover, an activity dictionary with a hierarchical structure is developed to bring commonality and modularity to the storage and retrieval of activity data.

A generic activity‐dictionary‐based method for product costing in mass customization is developed.

The method proposed for product costing provides valuable cost data for product specifications, as well as the activities to create them. Therefore, a product configuration solution can be financially evaluated and optimized.

Based on the methodology proposed, a prototype system has been developed and implemented in a computer‐assembling company.

This paper alleviates the negative impact of activity variety on product costing.

Increased annual precipitation and more frequent episodes with heavy precipitation are expected in Norway due to climate change. The purpose of this paper is to use two case studies to investigate effects of precipitation on the amounts of faecal indicator bacteria and parasitic protozoa (Cryptosporidium and Giardia) loaded to surface waters from catchment areas exposed to different faecal sources.

In the first case study, the loads of faecal indicator bacteria and Cryptosporidium and Giardia, were investigated in relation to precipitation in a stream from a small valley where cattle and sheep are grazed. In the second case study, historical data (monthly values from 2004‐2009) regarding faecal coliforms and water flow in five tributaries (urban and rural) of a lake used as a drinking water source, were used for calculating loads of faecal indicator bacteria. These loads were evaluated in relation to historical data on precipitation. Additional sampling during/after rainfall, including analysis of samples for Cryptosporidium and Giardia, was performed.

The study visualises how heavy rainfall may increase the load of faecal microorganisms and potential pathogens in Norwegian water sources.

This study provides supplementary information about microbial contamination (including by parasites) of Norwegian surface waters during or after rainfall. This is useful input for decision making regarding protection of vulnerable water sources and for risk assessments. Data are also provided for evaluation of water treatment needs for Norwegian municipalities and waterworks responsible for providing safe drinking water under future climatic conditions.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the development of a product model that is created from the existing products of a small made‐to‐order furniture company.

The methodology is based on process mapping of the manufacturing of existing and catalogued products and transforming the process maps to operation flow diagrams. Analysis of the diagrams revealed the basis of a product model by sorting large number of parts into two object classes: carcasses and accessories. The production times of these parts were measured by time study methods and populated to a database of standard times. The product model was validated by aggregating the production times for products manufactured over a period and compared against the total available resources.

After validating and adjustments for abnormal circumstances, the product model formed the basis for the development of a production scheduling and control system that assisted the company to achieve 30 per cent productivity improvement.

Made‐to‐order businesses are generally small companies with a large number of product designs that are influenced by customers. Individual customisation of every production order makes it almost impossible to employ traditional standard times data for scheduling and capacity planning.

Since every order and product is different, production planning in a made‐to‐order manufacturing environment is often managed in an ad hoc fashion with little computerised scheduling support. The methodology described in this paper is a practical approach to develop a systematic process that can enable small companies to migrate to a computer aided manufacturing environment without substantial disruption to their normal business.