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With the globalisation of markets, firms are
continuously searching for ways to remain
competitive. In such an environment the
purchasing and management of raw materials,
supplies, parts, etc., has emerged as a critical area
for a firm to achieve its strategic goals. Purchasing
controls typically one‐quarter to one‐third of the
expenses incurred by the firm in manufacturing
its products. The objective of the article is to
identify and illustrate how different computer‐based
decision support tools/techniques could be
applied to various purchasing decisions. Through
in‐depth applications the potential improvements
in managerial effectiveness, increased user
involvement, and ease in problem solving are
highlighted.

A methodology is proposed for integrating managerial logic to control spares inventory.

The increasing number of certification schemes diminishes the utility of certifications as private regulation and creates several policy challenges. The undergoing efforts to help consumers verify the accuracy of information created by private regulation mechanisms such as certification are currently confronted with the complexities of certification and labeling systems and the difficulties in linking data points across various certification schemes. This paper presents the development of certification and inspection ontology to support smart disclosure of product information. This study proposes that the resulting ontology enables information integration and standardization thus supporting knowledge discovery and sharing by synthesizing information across disparate data sources that is valuable for informing data-driven policy formulation. The ontology also supports standardization of an agreed set of terms and semantics for currently fragmented certification and inspection schemes to support comparability across different certification schemes. The accuracy and consistency of the proposed ontology are verified by using current reasoning tools to run queries based on a set of predefined competency questions.