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An extensive search of the literature showed no data on the payback times associated with moving to a total quality management (TQM) style of management. Given the company‐wide nature of the undertaking, and the fact that TQM conversion is generally considered to be a long‐term, difficult process, this finding was unexpected. A survey of manufacturing companies showed that the initial investment associated with shifting to TQM was recouped in one year for 42.3 per cent of the responding companies. Payback times were two years or less for 65.4 per cent of the companies and three years or less for 80.8 per cent of the companies. All companies that reported quantitative data expected their TQM efforts to be profitable eventually, if not already so. Thus, despite the substantial training, reorganization and systems modification costs, initial TQM investments are being paid back within a time frame similar to that for other large financial undertakings. The lack of financially unfavourable TQM programmes among the survey respondents suggests that the probability of financial success is high.

This paper aims to examine the relationship between aspects of a country’s institutional environment and entrepreneurial investors’ overall rate of return.

Specifically, monetary stability and property rights are tested against both entrepreneurs’ and angel investors’ expected financial returns and payback periods, respectively. Data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor survey including years 2004 through 2006 and encompassing 50 countries are aggregated and examined using random coefficient multilevel modeling.

We find that strong property rights encourage both angel investors and entrepreneurs to invest in new ventures with longer payback periods and encourage angel investors to invest in ventures with lower expected financial returns.

This suggests that one key to increasing entrepreneurial investment in a country is to guarantee strong property rights. Therefore, both entrepreneurs seeking funding and countries seeking entrepreneurs should incorporate property rights issues into their decision-making.

This finding moves the “attracting entrepreneurs” conversation beyond the typical tax-abatement, infrastructure building, business cluster recommendations prevalent in academic and professional literature and points to one of the more fundamental reasons entrepreneurial “cultures” develop some places, but not others.

The tightening competition and performance pressure in companies often leave no time or space for the assessment of business impacts of different investments and projects. In addition, in many cases the assessment may be challenging and there is no experience available to undertake it. Despite that companies often commit to different projects and investments without careful planning and vision of the costs it may cause. The purpose of this paper is to create a decision support system in order to facilitate and increase the assessment of business impacts of different investments concerning to machine-to-machine (M2M) systems.

The created decision support system is composed of cost-benefit analysis including several investment decision methods. In order to deepen the understanding on it, the system was applied to two cases from the M2M business.

During the study it was found that different financial metrics might give contradictory results when deciding whether to undertake an investment. In addition, a significant finding was how much some variables may have significance to the eligibility of an investment than others. The study also gave understanding how long payback time can be and how risky the investments might be in different M2M applications.

The study describes the created decision support system and it is applied to two different M2M applications. The system provides a comprehensive combination of different financial metrics, which will help any manager make decisions whether an investment is eligible or not.

Introduces the cash curve, a tool for monitoring the payback on innovation that has proved helpful in decision‐making, planning, analysis, and communication. The cash curve graphically plots cumulative cash flow over time.

Describes the four “S” factors that have a direct impact on cash payback of innovation: start‐up costs or pre‐launch investment, also called start‐up or sunk costs; speed, or time to market; scale, or time to volume and support costs

The cash curve clarifies many of the managerial challenges, assumptions and trade‐offs that often get hidden when looking at spreadsheets of annual cash flows and projections.

Shows managers how to use the cash curve to monitor what the payback will be if the assumptions they have made are right. This allows them to make a plan based on those assumptions, understand the impact of each assumption, determine which ones are most critical, test the ones with the biggest impact. With this perspective, the process can be managed, not simply reacted to.

Demonstrates how to use the cash curve to address the fundamental challenge of innovation – to achieve the required cash payback by managing the overall process with the understanding that payback can come quite directly and quickly, but also that it may take longer, be much less certain, or come back to the company only indirectly, via other products and services.

An appropriate space allocation among different residence types gives higher profitability and liquidity for cash flow management in real estate projects for developers. Thereby, a balance between debt and equity should be kept for capital formation in developers where high level of cost, profit and risk exists. The purpose of this paper is to provide cash flow optimization under debt and equity financing while providing an appropriate space allocation of residence types via synchronous consideration of profitability and liquidity.

A novel optimization methodology that includes project financing, optimization and experimental design modules is proposed. The first module, project financing, considers the flexibility of utilizing one or both of debt financing and equity financing when making capital. The optimization module addresses space allocation among different residence types for a construction while maximizing profitability and liquidity using two mixed-integer linear programming models in a pre-emptive manner. The experimental design module assesses the effects of decisive parameters within the methodology via multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA).

The proposed methodology is applied to a real-life residential project in Istanbul. The optimization module yielded 42.5% profitability via the first linear programming model and 2.2% trade-off between liquidity and profitability while minimizing the payback period by the second linear programming model. Meanwhile, MANOVA results showed that profit per square meter and sale rate trends are the most prominent factors considering their significant effects on net present value and payback period.

To the best knowledge of the author, related papers focused only on profitability under equity financing. Liquidity (as an objective) and equity financing (as a financing method) have not been handled. Hence, this paper not only performs profitability and liquidity-oriented cash flow optimization under debt and equity financing but also optimizes space allocation of residences for the first time.

This paper aims to compute demand, consumption and other avoidance saving by replacing existing geysers with split and integrated type air source heat pump (ASHP) water heaters, to prove the potential of both ASHP water heaters in both winter and summer by virtue of their coefficient of performance (COP) during the vapour compression refrigeration cycles and to demonstrate that despite the viability of both split and integrated ASHP system, the latter exhibits a better performance in terms of its COP and achievable savings and load factor.

This research emphasised the use of the data acquisition system housing various temperature sensors, power metres, flow metre, ambient temperature and relative humidity sensor to determine electrical energy consumption and useful thermal energy gained by the hot water in a geyser and storage tanks of residential ASHP water heaters. The load factors, average power and electrical energy consumptions for the 150 L high-pressure geyser, a 150 L split and integrated type ASHP water heaters were evaluated based on the controlled volume (150, 50 and 100 L) of daily hot water drawn off.

The results depicted that the average electrical energy consumed and load factors of the summer months for the geyser, split and integrated type ASHP water heaters were 312.3, 111.7 and 121.1 kWh and 17.9, 10.2 and 16.7 per cent, respectively. Finally, the simple payback period for both the split and integrated type ASHP water heaters were determined to be 3.9 and 5.2 years, respectively. By the application of the Eskom’s projected tariff hikes over the years, the payback periods for the split and integrated ASHP water heaters could be reduced to 3.3 and 4.1 years, respectively.

The experiments were conducted in a controlled outdoor research facility as it was going to be of great challenge in conducting both experiments simultaneously in a specific home. The category of the different types of ASHP water heaters was limited to one due to the cost implication. The experiment was also conducted at a single location, which is not a full representation of all the ambient conditions of the different regions of South Africa.

The experiments were done with a specific controlled volume of hot water drawn off from each of the three hot water heating devices. The experiments was structuring controlled to a specific volume of hot water drawn off and at specific period of the day and hence to not cater for random drawers and intermittent drawn off.

The findings help to assure homeowners that irrespective of the type of ASHP water heaters installed in their residence, they can be guarantee of year-round performance and a favourable payback period provided their hot water consumption is over 200 L per day. Also, although the split type ASHP water heater performed better than the integrated system the cost of installation and maintenance will be higher in a split type in comparison to the integrated type. Finally, by successful implementation of either of the ASHP water heaters the home owner can substantially save of his hot water bill.

The experimental design and methodology is the first of its kind to be conducted in South Africa. The results and interpretation were obtained from original data collected from the set of experiments conducted. Also, the authors are able to show that the introduction of back up element in an ASHP unit to run simultaneously with the vapour compression refrigeration cycles of the ASHP can reduce the COP of the overall system.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze a successful sustainability program run by an owner that has invested $23 million, received rebates of $10 million, accrued over $9 million of savings and has won top scores in LEED and Energy Star. Other owners planning to invest in energy conservation and sustainability can apply the lessons learnt to overcome common barriers.

This case study is based on project information supplied by the owner and structured interviews with the operational team. The projects are analyzed based on drivers and payback characteristics. Finally, the case study puts Adobe Systems' results within the context of the industry by matching it to the challenges identified in other reports.

The results show that 40 percent of projects are initiated by operation management personnel. The projects with the biggest savings are supported by third-party incentives. Only 10 percent of projects are evaluated by simulation and account for 12 percent of annual savings. Energy Star plays a crucial role for benchmarking performance and should be run annually. LEED EB is valuable when expending conservation efforts beyond energy aspects to sustainability. Performance benchmarking is a crucial step to determine the potential and priority of energy improvements.

The findings are based on the three towers in San Jose, California.

Building owners can incorporate the methodologies applied to evaluate these successful projects into their buildings. Facility managers can leverage the findings to present the advantages of recertification and commissioning.

A detailed project analysis, from a leader in practice, shows the importance of the local building operations team in sustainability and energy conservation.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate a farm manager’s personal characteristics (personality, age, education, objectives, experience, etc.) as drivers of debt payback success and rates. Traditionally bankers have used historic business statistics, and equity levels, to assess loans and credit worthiness. It is hypothesised that a managers’ personal characteristics are likely to be a better predictor of future debt payback performance.

The literature was searched to isolate the managers’ personal variables likely to determine debt payback. The information led to defining a quantitative model based on the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) which was hypothesised as determining payback rates where a choice was available. A postal random stratified survey of NZ owner operator farm managers provided the data to test the model and define its parameters using regressions, structural equation modelling and statistical comparisons.

The modelling results make it clear a manager’s personal characteristics are highly correlated with debt payback and, logically, are very likely to be the drivers. Four random effects equations and a comparison of high- and low-debt payback managers led to this conclusion.

Bankers should use the managers’ personal characteristics, as defined in the regressions, alongside traditional measures when assessing farm business loan requests. This approach is opposite to the traditional methods using mainly historic data.

The use of the TPB in assessing debt payback is a new and novel approach showing how enduring personal characteristics can be used in assessing proposals, and particularly, entrepreneurs’ adventurist investments in situations where historic data are not available.

As an organization's ability to innovate cost‐effectively becomes evermore important so too does its need to develop a provocative metrics culture that both complements and reinforces its prototyping culture. In this extract from Serious Play: How the world's best companies simulate to innovate — a book Tom Peters says he wishes he had written — Michael Schrage shows how prototypes are stimulating new thinking about and new practices in innovation metrics.

Energy-efficient retrofitting of existing buildings is an inexpensive way of reducing energy consumption and mitigating climate change impacts. The purpose of this study is to examine electricity savings and carbon dioxide (CO₂) emission reduction potentials of energy-efficient retrofit measures for surveyed two large shopping malls in India.

A techno-economic model was developed to estimate the electricity savings achieved due to energy-efficient retrofit measures in shopping malls that were surveyed in 2017. Alternative scenarios were constructed based on capital cost and cost of conserved energy (CCE) value for retrofit measures: cheapest replacement, best available technology and best value for money. The life-cycle electricity and CO₂ emission savings and payback period for end-use retrofit measures were evaluated.

The estimated average electricity savings were around 39–56% for various retrofit measures across all three scenarios while the average CO₂ emission reductions were around 50–125 kt-CO₂. Retrofits to light-emitting diode lights and air conditioners with inverter technology offered more life-cycle electricity savings. Paybacks for most lighting end-use measures were estimated to be within 1.5 years while for most space conditioning end-use measures were between 1 and 4 years.

The primary survey-based comprehensive research makes an exclusive contribution by estimating life-cycle electricity savings and CO₂ emission reductions for energy-efficient retrofit measures of lighting and space cooling end-use appliances for existing shopping malls. The present research methodology can also be deployed in other types of commercial buildings and in residential buildings to estimate electricity savings from energy-efficient retrofit measures.