Despite having a strategic position in supporting the Indonesian economy, the productivity of SME’s is still suboptimal. The increase in the number of SME’s has not been followed by increased competitiveness due to various limitations experienced by this sector. In an effort to provide a comprehensive picture in improving the performance of food processing SME’s in developing countries such as Indonesia, the purpose of this study was to examine the function of product innovation, internet marketing, and brand identity in shaping competitive advantage having an impact on business performance. This research is focused on food processing SME’s in the city of Bogor. The number of samples used was 100 SME’s. The sampling method used the non-probability sampling method with a snowball sampling technique. The data obtained were analyzed using the Structural Equation Model (SEM). Based on the age characteristic of business actors, the majority of business actors were 40–50 years old, of which 52% had their final formal education at high school level. As many as 61% of respondents had attended business training. Based on the results of the Partially Least Square (PLS) SEM analysis, it was found that product innovation, internet marketing and brand identity all had a significant positive effect on competitive advantage and business performance. The influence of brand identity on competitive advantage had the greatest effect, with a value of 0.451. This study contributes to existing research by examining the determinants of the business performance of processed food SME’s through the holistic model offered. This research is innovative because the business raises new issues related to internet marketing by SME’s and investigates them empirically.
Smallholder cocoa producers often experience low productivity levels, partly due to their weak collaborative advantage (CA). CA enables businesses to optimize outcomes through effective collaboration within value chains. This paper aims at examining the effect of CA pillars (trust building, resource investment, and decision synchronization) on the productivity. This paper uses primary data of 406 samples from smallholder cocoa producers in Indonesia. The data is analyzed by using CDM (Crepon Duguet Mairesse) model that divides the CA process into three stages: effort, output, and productivity. In the first stage, our model shows that having motivation to collaborate positively affects collaborative effort expenditure to develop a CA. In the second stage, the study finds that the three pillars of CA have to some degree contributes to achieving a better access to finance, superior cocoa seeds, and cocoa processing technology for smallholder cocoa producers. In the third stage, acquiring the outputs of CA leads to productivity improvement. The findings underscore the significance of intangible factors in shaping robust Collaborative Advantage (CA) and influencing productivity. This enriches CA theory, which has traditionally focused primarily on tangible factors.
Surveys are one of the most important tasks to be executed to get valued information. One of the main problems is how the data about many different persons can be processed to give good information about their environment. Modelling environments through Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) is highly common because ANN’s are excellent to model predictable environments using a set of data. ANN’s are good in dealing with sets of data with some noise, but they are fundamentally surjective mathematical functions, and they aren’t able to give different results for the same input. So, if an ANN is trained using data where samples with the same input configuration has different outputs, which can be the case of survey data, it can be a major problem for the success of modelling the environment. The environment used to demonstrate the study is a strategic environment that is used to predict the impact of the applied strategies to an organization financial result, but the conclusions are not limited to this type of environment. Therefore, is necessary to adjust, eliminate invalid and inconsistent data. This permits one to maximize the probability of success and precision in modeling the desired environment. This study demonstrates, describes and evaluates each step of a process to prepare data for use, to improve the performance and precision of the ANNs used to obtain the model. This is, to improve the model quality. As a result of the studied process, it is possible to see a significant improvement both in the possibility of building a model as in its accuracy.
The range migration algorithm (RMA) is an accurate imaging method for processing synthetic aperture radar (SAR) signals. However, this algorithm requires a big amount of computation when performing Stolt mapping. In high squint and wide beamwidth imaging, this operation also requires big memory size to store the result spectrum after Stolt mapping because the spectrum will be significantly expanded. A modified Stolt mapping that does not expand the signal spectrum while still maintains the processing accuracy is proposed in this paper to improve the efficiency of the RMA when processing frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) SAR signals. The modified RMA has roughly the same computational load and required the same memory size as the range Doppler algorithm (RDA) when processing FMCW SAR data. In extreme cases when the original spectrum is significantly modified by the Stolt mapping, the modified RMA achieves better focusing quality than the traditional RMA. Simulation and real data is used to verify the performance of the proposed RMA.
This study considers the relationship between investment in the manufacturing and processing industries and economic growth in Vietnam. This study applies an autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model to reassess the long- and short-term relationships between industrial investment and economic growth from 1998 to 2023. It has been found that in both the long and short term, investments in this sector have a positive and significant effect on economic growth. The results further show that labor negatively affects growth in the long run, but is favorable in the short run. The verdict for the role of exports is that more evidence is required before any conclusive analysis can be conducted. Reinvestment in the manufacturing and processing industries for further economic growth is evident in the foregoing analysis. On the other hand, this research provides insight into the optimization of the utilization of resources and future sustainability by the government.
Rambutan (Nephelium lappaceum L.) was introduced to Mexico in 1959. Currently there is an estimated planted area of 835.96 ha and a production of 8,730.27 tons. The fruit is mainly consumed fresh, but quickly loses its external appearance due to dehydration and browning, which limits its commercialization, an alternative may be minimal processing and adjuvant treatments that extend the shelf life. The objective of this work was to evaluate the effect of coating with cactus mucilage (Opuntia ficus-indica), in the preservation of minimally processed rambutan stored at 5 °C, in two types of packaging. The rambutan was sanitized with chlorinated water (80 ppm), the epicarp was removed and batches were formed for each treatment. The factors were type of container (polyethylene bag and polystyrene container), coating (with and without coating) and time (0, 3, 6, 6, 10 and 12 d). The coating consisted of mucilage obtained from developing cladodes (15–21 cm), applied by dipping. All treatments were stored at 5 ℃. Total soluble solids (TSS), firmness (N) and color (L*, a*, b*, chroma and hue angle) were evaluated at each storage period. Also, 40 untrained judges (47% male and 53% female) evaluated sensory acceptability, consumption intention and acceptance/rejection. The results showed significant effect (p ≤ 0.05) of package type on firmness, chroma and hue angle. Coating had an effect on L* value and product acceptability. Consumption intention was higher, and was maintained for 10 days, in fruits with coating and packaged in polyethylene bags, stored at 5 ℃.
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