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Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) aims to analyze possible impact upon manufacturing process and availability of products, and also study the environmental considerations and potential influence during entire life cycle ranging from procurement, production and utilization to treatment (namely, from cradle to tomb). Based on high‐density polyethylene (HDPE) pipe manufacturing of company A, this case study would involve evaluation of environmental influence during the production process. When the manufacturing process has been improved during “production process” and “forming cooling” stage, it is found that capital input on “electric power” and “water supply” could be reduced, thus helping to sharpen the competitive power of company A, and also ensure sustainable economic and industrial development in accordance with national policies on environmental protection.

Due to the global economic effect, Taiwan’s small and medium‐sized enterprise (SME) is much threatened by China. Since remarkable advances have being made in information technology, taking competition advantage for an enterprise has become a very important issue when facing rigorous global competition. However, the business of the enterprise starts with finding the customers’ demands, and ends with fufilling customers’ demands. Therefore, in order to increase competition advantage for SME, the customer management must be effectively strengthened, especially by increasing customer satisfaction and maintaining good relationship with the customer. This is the key for an enterprise leading to success. The purpose of this study is aiming to discussing the relationship analysis between customer and SME by viewing the four aspects of customer relationship management (CRM), which are relation marketing, customer service, customer value, and customer satisfaction. Moreover, this research will perform an empirical analysis on CRM for a typical small and medium‐sized company so as to grasp its real definition and enterprises’ demands. The conclusions will be drawn from our literature survey and practical experience as well as site investigation. Recommendations are evolved from discussing the interaction between customers and enterprises in improving their constructing factors and increasing benefits and values.

Any business activities may have impact on environmental to a certain extent. Enterprises must find appropriate approaches to measure the impact on these environmental aspects, which can be used as the basis to direct enterprises’ efforts to improve the environmental impact. The method used to evaluate significant factors in life cycle assessment standards is the one most commonly used by enterprises in general to measure environmental impact. By this method, the decisive factors of each environmental aspect are given scores according to the preset scoring standard of the organizaion. The scores are added up for each aspect and ranked to assess major environmental apsects. The drawback of this assessment method, that is, it ignores the degree to which each of these factors affects the environment, results in poor credibility. Therefore, this study attempts to solve some qualitative problems by applying to fuzzy theory, in particular, by identifying appropriate fuzzy numbers through fuzzy sets and membership function. Moreover, the study seeks to obtain a crisp value in the process of defuzzifization in order to make up for the shortfall of the original method in dealing with relative weight of decisive factors and thus increase its applicability and credibility. The department of light production of an electronics company is used as an example in this study to measure environmental aspects by employing both the traditional significant factor method and the fuzzy environmental impact assessment model proposed in this study. Based on verification and comparison of results, the model proposed in this study is more feasible as it reduces partiality in decision‐making by taking the relative weights of decisive factors into consideration.

In the Knowledge‐based Economic Era, all of the enterprises are facing global competitive pressure. The activities of knowledge accessing, codifying, and application will ogviously become the main inner function on enterprise operation. Knowledge will be the primary competitive advantage; therefore, he who wants to hold the competitive advantage should do the knowledge management (KM) very well. In this study, we cconstruct the research dimensions and variances by the successful factors of KM, which had been practiced very well by big enterprises inside and outside our country, and which was recommended by the related scholars. In order to approach the differences between big enterprises and small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) towards implementing KM, this study takes the way of questionnaire investigation to do empirical analysis and to construct the model of KM by path analysis. The study found out when implementing KM, SMEs should highlight “leadership”, “library‐architecture”, and “corporate culture” these three aspects, while “information technology” and “performance evaluation” these two aspects show no remarkable influence. It shows that he who wants to construct KM might not too overweight on information technology to build the KM system. Therefore, we suggest when implementing KM enterprises should reinforce the corporate culture by sharing, organized KM process, learning environment for all employees, and highly authorization by top managers in order to reach the expectant success of KM. The result of this study offers practical thinking directions to reach the expectant success for the policy makers in SMEs, who are accessing to or evaluating to implement KM.

In recent years, the labor consciousness is gradually valued. During the process of pursuing sustainable operation, the enterprises treat occupational hazard risk as the waste of cost. The purpose of OHSAS 18000 occupational security and health management system is to systematically establish the business managerial measures in terms of occupational security and calamity prevention. This research proceeded with questionnaire analysis with respect to the relationship between the OHSAS 18000 system implementation and competitiveness in Taiwan’s industries. The research result revealed that there was significant relationship between Taiwan firms’ execution of OHSAS 18000 system and industry competitiveness. Thus, the enterprises can decide the proper managerial plans according to the result of their own risk evaluation to prevent the happening of accidents and reduce the operational cost. They can thus completely control business occupational hazard risk through “systematic” management.

The objective of this study is to evaluate the equipment risk before and after SEMI S2‐93A implementation, thus providing a guideline for safety improvement. Semiconductor Plant A located in Taiwan’s Hsinchu Science Based Industrial Park with 147 manufacturing machines was used for risk assessment. The study was carried out in three steps. First, a preliminary hazard analysis was conducted. A detailed process safety evaluation was conducted (Hazard and Operability Study, HAZOP); and finally, the equipment risk comparison before and after Semiconductor Equipment Manufacturing Instruction (SEMI S2‐93A) implementation. The preliminary hazard analysis results showed high risk in 21.77 per cent of the manufacturing machines under risk assessment at Plant A. The largest percentage existed in the Diffusion Department. The machine types specified by the hazardous work site review and inspection according to Article 26 of Labor Inspection Regulation (the machines that use such chemicals as, SiHi, HF, HCL, etc. and that are determined to be highly hazardous through preliminary hazard analysis) were added to the detailed process analysis and evaluation. In the third part of this evaluation, the machines at Plant A used for detailed process safety assessment were divided into two groups based on the manufacturing data before and after 1993. The severity, possibility, and actual accident analysis before and after SEMI S2‐93A implementation were compared. The semiconductor Equipment Manufacturing Instruction (SEMI S2‐93A) implementation can reduce the severity and possibility of hazard occurrence.

Due to the advancement of technology and rapidly changing environment of the market, the life cycle of high‐tech products is becoming shorter. The enterprise must constantly innovate and select correct development strategy of new product in order to respond to customers’ demands for upgrading operational performance of industry. Development of new product is the critical activity for enterprise’s survival and growth. This research focuses on the effects of Taiwan high‐tech companies’ introduction of innovative activity and development strategy of new product on development performance of new product for analysis and exploration. The result findings reveal that: (1) High execution degree of innovative activity has positive effect on the implementation of development strategy of new product; (2) The companies with better implementation of development strategy of new product reveal better development performance; (3) The companies with higher degree of execution of innovative activity and better execution of development strategy of new product reveal better development performance of new product.

When facing the global severe competition, the enterprises all try their best to upgrade the quality, reduce the costs to reach the goal of customer satisfaction. Motorola was the earliest firm creating the term Six Sigma (6 σ); GE was the enterprise successfully fulfilling Six Sigma. The success of these two firms revealed the prominent effects and became the worldclass model enterprises. The main purpose of promoting Six Sigma activity was to reduce the possible defects in the business process to the least through designing and monitoring business process in order to reach the goals such as the best quality and efficiency, the lowest costs, the shortest circular process time, maximum profits and customer satisfaction. This research used the Six Sigma technique to improve the business process of ceramics manufacturing plant and find out the major factors of slower core task time by the analytical process of Process Mapping, Pareto Chart, Simul8 simulation software and figures and proposed the improvement measures. Through the confirmation of the case companies, it successfully reduced the core process time and the organizational costs and increased the capacity.

During IC inspection, which includes the two parts of Mark and Lead, the deviation of IC on the tape occurring in high speed movements usually generates light reflection effect, which in turn causes errors in IC recognition as measured by machine vision system. this research filters the light reflection effect by developing standard components, identifies the correct position of IC Lead, hence fixes the measurement errors or non‐measurability caused by light reflection, avoids the resulting discontinued operation of measuring system, and improves the productivity.

This research topic evaluates the effectiveness and importance of environmental protection in the 21st century in light of the increasing demand on the earth’s natural resources and the pressures on economic and industrial development to provide dynamic power. As the world and our fellow citizens become more conscious of environmental protection, companies are under greater pressure whilst pursuing economic growth. Therefore, domestic manufacturers have been devoting efforts to promote environmental management. This research conducts survey using questionnaires on the operational performance of the manufacturers who have ISO 14000 series accreditation and certification. The survey considers five dimensions/functions within a manufacturer, financial management, human resource management, production management, and marketing management. A total of 35 indices are used for analysis of the effects that the location, history, industry, number of employees, amount of capital, and revenue may have on the performance. This research targets the manufacturers approved of ISO 14000 series certification by Environment Adminstration Association. The statistical methods deployed are descriptive statistics, T‐test, and single factor analysis of variance used for analysis. The conclusions reval that a certain level of performance has been achieved in every dimension. After T‐test, all the indices have reached a significant level. The indications are that ISO 14001 benefits all manufacturers the level of benefits however varies from company to company.