Utility providers are under pressure from all sides to reduce costs, while improving availability, reliability, safety and sustainability: and as economies battle to recover from the 2008-2010 recession, utility company spending and results will be under closer scrutiny than ever to deliver more performance for less. This book explores the new techniques which are being used by leading utilities While relevant to everyone regulating, supplying or working in the utility sector, this book is important for us all. As the assets employed by utilities account for 5% of global GDP the cost of replacing our aging utility infrastrucutrue is unaffordable. However, utility services are essential to civilisation. Without clean water, safe sewerage and reliable power, economies collapse and societies are prey to darkness and disease. This book answers the key question of how utilities can select the right goals, organisational design, culture and engineering tools, whch allow them to manage their complex asset bases and deliver truly excellent performance. With 37 case studies and 50 diagrams, it illustrates the snakes and ladders that leading utilities have experienced on the path to excellence.

Jon-Arild Johannessen examines the history of knowledge management in order to highlight the contributions that the discipline can make to twenty-first-century strategic challenges.

Academic finance has had a remarkable impact on many financial services. Yet long-term investors have received curiously little guidance from academic financial economists. Mean-variance analysis, developed almost fifty years ago, has provided a basic paradigm for portfolio choice. This approach usefully emphasizes the ability of diversification to reduce risk, but it ignores several critically important factors. Most notably, the analysis is static; it assumes that investors care only about risks to wealth one period ahead. However, many investors—-both individuals and institutions such as charitable foundations or universities—-seek to finance a stream of consumption over a long lifetime. In addition, mean-variance analysis treats financial wealth in isolation from income. Long-term investors typically receive a stream of income and use it, along with financial wealth, to support their consumption. At the theoretical level, it is well understood that the solution to a long-term portfolio choice problem can be very different from the solution to a short-term problem. Long-term investors care about intertemporal shocks to investment opportunities and labor income as well as shocks to wealth itself, and they may use financial assets to hedge their intertemporal risks. This should be important in practice because there is a great deal of empirical evidence that investment opportunities—-both interest rates and risk premia on bonds and stocks—-vary through time. Yet this insight has had little influence on investment practice because it is hard to solve for optimal portfolios in intertemporal models. This book seeks to develop the intertemporal approach into an empirical paradigm that can compete with the standard mean-variance analysis. The book shows that long-term inflation-indexed bonds are the riskless asset for long-term investors, it explains the conditions under which stocks are safer assets for long-term than for short-term investors, and it shows how labor income influences portfolio choice. These results shed new light on the rules of thumb used by financial planners. The book explains recent advances in both analytical and numerical methods, and shows how they can be used to understand the portfolio choice problems of long-term investors.

Hands-on guidance for creating competitive advantages through strategy realization How can your supply chain create competitive advantages and help achieve business goals? Drawing from the author's abundant research and analysis, this resourceful book shows how aligning the supply chain design with business strategy helps build competitive capabilities, prioritize capital investments, and takes your firm beyond the industry best-practices to create competitive advantages, not just competitive parity. Summarizing the current literature on business and supply chain strategies, this book provides path-breaking new direction to build your own winning supply chain strategy. Real-life cases show how this strategy alignment has produced results for the most successful companies and how it can be achieved in your firm. An overview of the concepts of business strategy, the current thinking on supply chain strategy and why it is inadequate to drive competitive advantage through supply chain design Process for establishing your own supply chain strategy to build competitive advantage The place of technology in creating business capabilities in modern corporations and why managing technology should be a core competence and an integral part of strategy planning Step-by-step direction and examples for creating strategy alignment and designing a supply chain that goes beyond supporting your operations Case studies including Wal-mart, Cemex, Kmart, HP, Dell, and others Consolidating the lessons learned along with implementation guidance, Supply Chain as Strategic Asset is the must-read road map for designing a supply chain that will be vital in achieving your business goals.

It is important for those studying and practicing in real estate and property management to learn to manage property assets effectively, to be able to provide their companies with effective property and facilities solutions. This book raises the awareness of how real estate management can support business, transform the workplace and impact upon people and productivity, ensuring that costs are minimized and profit maximized. Written for advanced undergraduate students on property related courses, it provides them with a rounded understanding by aligning the subject with estates management, facilities management and business strategy. Case studies and action plans provide real insight and make this book an essential reference for those at the start of their careers in real estate and facilities management.

Engineering Asset Management discusses state-of-the-art trends and developments in the emerging field of engineering asset management as presented at the Fourth World Congress on Engineering Asset Management (WCEAM). It is an excellent reference for practitioners, researchers and students in the multidisciplinary field of asset management, covering such topics as asset condition monitoring and intelligent maintenance; asset data warehousing, data mining and fusion; asset performance and level-of-service models; design and life-cycle integrity of physical assets; deterioration and preservation models for assets; education and training in asset management; engineering standards in asset management; fault diagnosis and prognostics; financial analysis methods for physical assets; human dimensions in integrated asset management; information quality management; information systems and knowledge management; intelligent sensors and devices; maintenance strategies in asset management; optimisation decisions in asset management; risk management in asset management; strategic asset management; and sustainability in asset management.

This book covers each step in the asset allocation process, addressing as many of the relevant questions as possible along the way. How can we formulate expectations about long-term returns? How relevant are valuations? What are the challenges to optimizing the portfolio? Can factor investing add value and, if so, how can it be implemented? Which are the key performance drivers for each asset class, and what determines how they are correlated? How can we apply insights about the business cycle to tactical asset allocation? The book is aimed at finance professionals and others looking for a coherent framework for decision-making in asset allocation, both at the strategic and tactical level. It stresses analysis rather than pre-conceived ideas about investments, and it draws on both empirical research and practical experience to give the reader as strong a background as possible.