This paper studied the problem of determining the optimal inventory level to meet the customer service target level in a situation where the customer demand for each branch of a nationwide retailer is uncertain. To this end, ISR (In-Stock Ratio) was defined as a key management indicator (KPI) that can be used from the perspective of a nationwide retailer such as Samsung, LG, or Apple that sells goods at branches nationwide. An optimization model was established to allow the retailer to minimize the total amount of inventory held at each branch while meeting the customer service target level defined as the average ISR. This paper proves that there is always an optimal solution in the model and expresses the optimal solution in a generalized form using the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker condition regardless of the shape of the probability distribution of customer demand. In addition, this paper studied the case where customer demand follows a specific probability distribution such as a normal distribution, and an expression representing the optimal inventory level for this case was derived.

Social media have been proved as a tool for social branding, but not as a tool for return on investment (ROI) generation. The ultimate goal of any business activities is to generate ROI; therefore, businesses should know what social media practices actually increase their ROI. Researchers in the computer science and engineering areas have attempted to create a systematic model/statistical method to quantify data collected from social media to generate meaningful consumer and market trends and ROI (Zeng, Chen, Lusch, & Li. 2010). This process is called Social Media Intelligence (SMI) or Social Media Analytics (SMA). Researchers have not been yet successful in developing an effective analytical system for social media data to generate ROI. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to explore which social media practices would affect ROI based on SMA process with key techniques used to analyze the indicators in social media (i.e., Key Performance Indicators; KPIs) that show the effectiveness of a company in achieving its business objectives. This study is an exploratory research to determine the nature of a problem in the SMI, to gain further insight, and to show opportunities in the subject area. The result shows that using crawling, topic modeling and social network analysis techniques, businesses could collect and monitor right KPIs depending on their social media goals (e.g., number of followers for awareness, number of link clicks for engagement, number of lead magnets for conversion). After then, using the techniques to analyze the KPIs (e.g., opinion mining, sentiment analysis, etc. for the understand stage), businesses would be able to identify/predict consumer demands and market trends. Based on this prediction, businesses need to visualize the result to customers by executing right marketing strategies (e.g., effective viral marketing, personalized Call-To-Action, customized product/service, direct relationship establishment, frequent communication, establish long relationship, etc.). This study could contribute to the field by presenting the effective KPIs and techniques organized based on the SMA stages and social media goals and could provide the industry a right tool and a direction for their social media promotional practices.

This paper analyzed twenty-six production-related KPI(Key Performance indicator) factors of business diagnosis, such as personnel, equipment, materials, operations and quality affecting company business competition to 186 small machinery manufacturers in 2010. Also, we explained the concept of Business Positioning and divided research subjects into four Business Positioning Groups formed break-even point ratio & fixed cost ratio to sales and then we compared between the 4 groups using Logistic Regression analysis by SAS statistical software package. The objective of this study is two-fold. The first is to find out production-related KPI factor of superior Business Positioning Group. The second is to suggest improvement ways for small manufacturers in order to get better profitable Business Positioning.