The paper is concerned with investigating relationships between labor productivity and information and communication technology (ICT) components such as the use of enterprise resource planning (ERP), e-commerce and customer relationship management (CRM) software, and the number of ICT specialists at the country level. The proposed approach uses a neoclassical framework of growth accounting and a translog production function to examine the impact of ICT components on labor productivity in the transition and developed economies of the European Union (EU). Our findings show the positive and significant influence of selected ICT components on labor productivity in EU countries. Moreover, the results indicate that the impact of ERP, e-commerce and CRM software on labor productivity is greater in transition economies than in developed economies of the EU.

The paper investigates the use of intelligent systems to identify the factors that significantly influence the duration of new product development. These factors are identified on the basis of an internal database of a production enterprise and further used to estimate the duration of phases in product development projects. In the paper, some models and methodologies of the knowledge discovery process are compared and a method of knowledge acquisition from an internal database is proposed. The presented approach is dedicated to industrial enterprises that develop modifications of previous products and are interested in obtaining more precise estimates for project planning and scheduling. The example contains four stages of the knowledge discovery process including data selection, data transformation, data mining, and interpretation of patterns. The example also presents a performance comparison of intelligent systems in the context of variable reduction and preprocessing. Among data mining techniques, artificial neural networks and the fuzzy neural system are chosen to seek relationships between the duration of project phase and other data stored in the information system of an enterprise

Currently used decision support systems allow decision-makers to evaluate the product performance, including a net present value analysis, in order to enable them to make a decision regarding whether or not to carry out a new product development project. However, these solutions are inadequate to provide simulations for verifying a possibility of reducing the total product cost through changes in the product design phase. The proposed approach provides a framework for identifying possible variants of changes in product design that can reduce the cost related to the production and after-sales phase. This paper is concerned with using business analytics to cost estimation and simulation regarding changes in product design. The cost of a new product is estimated using analogical and parametric models that base on artificial neural networks. Relationships identified by computational intelligence are used to prepare cost estimation and simulations. A model of product development, production process, and admissible resources is described in terms of a constraint satisfaction problem that is effectively solved using constraint programming techniques. The proposed method enables the selection of a more appropriate technique to cost estimation, the identification of a set of possible changes in product design towards reducing the total product cost, and it is the framework for developing a decision support system. In this aspect, it outperforms current methods dedicated for evaluating the potential of a new product.

Improving the efficiency of maintenance processes is one of the goals of companies. Improvement activities in this area require not only an appropriate maintenance strategy but also the use of a new approach to increase the efficiency of the process. This article focuses on using Six Sigma (SS) to improve maintenance processes. As an introduction, the generations of SS development are identified, and traditional and advanced analytical tools that can be useful in SS projects are reviewed. As part of the research, an example of the implementation of the SS project in the maintenance process using the DMAIC and selected advanced analytical methods, such as PCA and logistic regression, was presented. The PCA results showed that it was enough to have seven main components to keep about 84% of the information on variability. In developed logistic regression explained the impact of the individual factors affecting the availability of the machines. The identified factors and their interactions made it possible to define maintenance activities requiring improvements.