EMPAS 10 (2) 2018

Construction industry is considered as one of the most important sectors in Egypt. One of the major challenges faced by the industry, however, is the unavailability of suitable performance measurement systems for assessing companies’ performance. Modern performance assessment systems adopt a more universal approach to the measurement of construction company performance as opposed to the traditional project triangle. This paper aims to examine the practice of performance measurement in the Egyptian construction industry. Results show dominant role of in-house developed performance management systems as well as the use of KPIs as a method of performance assessment. The study further reveals that the highest importance is given to measures related to the time of project delivery, quality of works, clients’ satisfaction and profitability. Hence, the traditional project triangle of project’s success is the most prevalent approach to performance evaluation in the construction industry in Egypt. However, a shift towards a more holistic approach to performance assessment in larger companies was observed.

Keywords:
performance  measurement systems  construction  industry  Egypt 

The study aimes at identification of the difficulties in choosing the correct concept of the main building process. The use of a proper BIM design may help the user avoid mistakes and make the building process faster as well as less financial resource intensive. The authors focused on literature review, analysing the difficulties of the BIM design software technology in construction project planning. The biggest flaws in BIM design are inherent in three building process stages: 1) the preparation of a building investment project, and the analysis of the existing situation; 2) the preparation of the building execution technology project; 3) the existing standard processing and information collection in building exploitation period. The analysis shows a persistent need for a deeper BIM design research, to improve information interchange formats that would ensure as much design information saved as possible with ensured feedback. As well as in BIM design, the software packages must be improved by supplementing them with deficient tools or programme codes. After the research of BIM design software, it was determined that architectural, constructional and MEP programs work best interdependently and get analysed the most. These programs work best as they make the least number of mistakes when the model is created in one setting and has many tools. This type of design software data is kept internally, and they are converted into IFC or other information interchange format. Without changing the format, the data is not lost, and this is the reason behind fluent information interchange.

Keywords:
BIM  project  building process  difficulties 

We present formulation and heuristic solution of a container packing problem observed in a household equipment factory’s sales and logistics department. The main feature of the presented MIP model is combining several types of constraints following from the considered application field. The developed best-fit heuristic is tested on the basis of a computational experiment. The obtained results show that the heuristic is capable of constructing good solutions in a very short time. Moreover, the approach allows easy adjustment to additional loading constraints.

Keywords:
container packing  3D-packing problem  heuristics 

This article aims at identification of the main trends in scientific literature characterising urban smart mobility, on the basis of bibliometric analysis of articles published in the ISI Web of Science and Scopus databases. The study period was set from 2000 to 2017. Authors used a basic technique of the bibliometric analysis of the scientific literature characterising urban smart mobility with the support of the VOSviewer software. The analysis included the number of publications, citation analysis, research area analysis and the most frequent keywords. The analysis led to taking notice of current research trends dealing with the urban smart mobility. The core of the paper is a theoretical framework of research trends, which was developed through a review of scientific literature. The result of this paper is a map showing the existing relationships between key terms, research areas characterising publications dealing with the urban smart mobility and intelligent transport system (ITS). "Smart city" is probably the most "in vogue", debated and analysed concept among researchers and administrative/ governmental representatives from all over the world. This multidimensional concept is mainly based on smart technology structured around few major components: smart mobility, smart environment, smart governance, smart living, and everything that targets the people’s wellbeing. This work focuses on a hot topic – mobility because of its significant impact on the environment by pollution as well as living by requiring intelligent transport systems.

Keywords:
smart mobility  bibliometric analysis  urban intelligent transport system  urban mobility 

Strategic development and planning predetermine all the major fields of activities. Marketing activities are the key tool of communication with a company’s customers, suppliers and other stakeholders. Nowadays, short but informative presentation solutions are becoming more attractive and popular. Companies are using more visuals with a short text in their communication channels as well as in building strategies. One of the tools is the one-page strategic plan (OPSP). The research problem of the paper is how to develop a strategy in its compressed version for the organisation that can have a format which is easy-to-understand and communicate. The paper aims to propose the OPSP model for the Aarong company, which should include both the commercial and non-profit activities. As a research method, the case study of Aarong company was chosen, using the secondary data. The proposed OPSP for Aarong company clearly showed the connections of all key elements of a strategic plan. The practical implications of using the OPSP tool in the Aarong company are clearly visible in terms of synthesis of a complicated strategic plan and having an attractive form of the company strategy for the external communication.

Keywords:
strategic planning  one-page strategic plan  marketing strategy  non-profit  Bangladesh 

This paper describes the most important problems related to the management of intellectual property in startups. Startups have become an inseparable element of the innovative economy. Many of these companies base their development on intellectual capital and innovations. In this context, it is extremely important to legally secure the innovations and protect intellectual property. These activities can often be the decisive factor in the development of startups. This article aims to identify, analyse and evaluate the most important issues related to the management of intellectual property in startups. The first part of this paper presents the performed literature review, which mainly concerns the definition of innovation, the state of entrepreneurship in Poland, and the definition of a startup. The second part of the article deals with the main problems related to the management of intellectual property in startups. It is divided into three issues: underestimating the importance of intellectual property, the lack of intellectual property management strategies in startups and financial challenges of startups. The main results of the research indicate that many startups still have low awareness of what is intellectual property and what can be the consequence of using exclusive rights of others. The protection of intellectual property should become one of the elements of business strategies. However, startups find that the creation of the strategy and its implementation is rather expensive.

Keywords:
startup  intellectual property  strategy  management  entrepreneurship