Supply Chain Management (SCM) ist in der arbeitsteiligen und globalen Welt eine wesentliche Aufgabe der Unternehmensführung. Der Aufbau des eigenen Lieferantennetzwerkes und die Abstimmung der Aktivitäten zwischen den wesentlichen Partnern des Netzwerkes bestimmen die Möglichkeiten, seine wettbewerblichen Ziele zu erreichen und zu sichern. Der Forschungsstand zum Inhalt und zu den Konzepten des Supply Chain Managements ist leider nicht sehr förderlich. Es gibt kaum eine Disziplin, die derart vielfältig definiert und unterschiedlich ausgestaltet wird wie diese. Das Spektrum reicht vom SCM als neue Bezeichnung für eine lieferanten- bzw. materialbezogene unternehmerische Funktion (z.B. Logistik oder Einkauf) bis hin zum Ersatz für integrierte Unternehmensführung. Demzufolge ist der breite Konsens zu den gemeinsamen Grundbausteinen und Konzepten eines Supply Chain Managements und deren Erfolgsstrategien kaum zu finden. Dieses Buch unternimmt den Versuch, einen Konzeptrahmen für ein Supply Chain Management zu schaffen und zu erläutern, der die funktionalen Fachdisziplinen des Unternehmens, d.h. Produktion, Einkauf, Logistik, nicht infrage stellt, sondern das Supply Chain Management als eigenständige und nutzenstiftende Disziplin herausstellt und erläutert.

Companies are either proactively driving the digital transformation or are forced to digitalize by markets and eco-systems. In order to identify the status about the digital transformation of sales in practice and to get deeper knowledge about treated areas in sales and challenges on the path of digitalization, in-depth interviews of sales executives and managers of more than 50 internationally operating companies in three countries Germany, Finland and Austria were conducted in this research. The results show that one major goal for companies is to accelerate digitizing processes as digitalization helps to work more efficiently. Access to systems is necessary, hence investments in digitalization are seen as sustainable and absolutely essential. Digital tools lead to adaptions in the sales process as with support sales processes and sales management. Accelerated also by the COVID-19 crisis, face-to-face customer visits have been reduced even more and online meetings have increased as the speed of response has become more and more important. Finally, the necessary skill set of a sales force has to be adapted, which has to be further researched in the future, having support of higher education institutions being the order of the day. Companies have realized that a good sales pitch does not necessarily need to be in person, due to the new virtual technology.

KI und maschinelles Lernen sind in aller Munde, gerade im Marketing – aber gilt das auch für den B2B-Bereich? Welche konkreten Einsatzmöglichkeiten gibt es?

The aim of this work is to analyze the reports on cluster headache attacks collected online in the citizen science project CLUE with respect to the effectiveness of drugs taken during the attacks. The collection of data within the framework of citizen science projects opens up the possibility of investigating the effectiveness of acute medication on the basis of a large number of individual attacks instead of a simple survey of patients.

As known for a decade, cold boot attacks can break software-based disk encryption when an attacker has physical access to a powered-on device, including Android smartphones. Raw memory images can be obtained by resetting a device and rebooting it with a malicious boot loader, or—on systems where this is not possible due to secure boot or restrictive BIOS settings—by a physical transplantation of RAM modules into a system under the control of the attacker. Based on the memory images of a device, different key recovery algorithms have been proposed in the past to break Full-Disk Encryption (FDE), including BitLocker, dm-crypt, and also Android’s FDE. With Google’s switch from FDE to File-based Encryption (FBE) as the standard encryption method for recent Android devices. However, existing tools have been rendered ineffective. To close this gap, and to re-enable the forensic analysis of encrypted Android disks, given a raw memory image, we present a new key recovery method tailored for FBE. Furthermore, we extend The Sleuth Kit (TSK) to automatically decrypt file names and file contents when working on FBE-enabled EXT4 images, as well as the Plaso framework to extract events from encrypted EXT4 partitions. Last but not least, we argue that the recovery of master keys from FBE partitions was particularly easy due to a flaw in the key derivation method by Google.

In contrast to the common habit of taking full bitwise copies of storage devices before analysis, selective imaging promises to alleviate the problems created by the increasing capacity of storage devices. Imaging is selective if only selected data objects from an image that were explicitly chosen are included in the copied data. While selective imaging has been defined for post-mortem data acquisition, performing this process live, i.e., by using the system that contains the evidence also to execute the imaging software, is less well defined and understood. We present the design and implementation of a new live Selective Imaging Tool for Windows, called SIT, which is based on the DFIR ORC framework and uses AFF4 as a container format.

Photocatalytic disintegration is a novel approach to eliminate pollution. The method utilizes the semiconductor titanium dioxide to degrade organic molecules in the presence of ultraviolet (UV) light. In this study, it is shown how the capabilities of several types of catalyst designs degrade the non-polar substance diesel fuel and the polar substance methylene blue. The floating design of foam glass coated with titanium dioxide could reduce the concentration of diesel fuel by 329 mg/L in 16 h; the submerged designs for coated glass fiber and coated steel grit could reduce methylene blue concentration by 96.6% after 4 h and 99.1% after 6 h, respectively. It could be shown that photocatalysis is a promising cost- and energy-efficient method for managing air and water pollution. It can be established as a low-technology method without requiring the use of a conventional source of energy, given an adequate amount of sun hours, or as an additional cleaning stage in water treatment plants using UV-LEDs.

Distributed Hash Table (DHT) protocols, such as Kademlia, provide a decentralized key-value lookup which is nowadays integrated into a wide variety of applications, such as Ethereum, InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), and BitTorrent. However, many security issues in DHT protocols have not been solved yet. DHT networks are typically evaluated using mathematical models or simulations, often abstracting away from artefacts that can be relevant for security and/or performance. Experiments capturing these artefacts are typically run with too few nodes. In this paper, we provide Locust, a novel highly concurrent DHT experimentation framework written in Elixir, which is designed for security evaluations. This framework allows running experiments with a full DHT implementation and around 4,000 nodes on a single machine including an adjustable churn rate; thus yielding a favourable trade-off between the number of analysed nodes and being realistic. We evaluate our framework in terms of memory consumption, processing power, and network traffic.

During gasification and/or pyrolysis of wooden biomass, charcoal is formed as a solid intermediate or product. In CO2- and H2O-rich atmospheres at high temperatures, a high specific surface area of several 100 m2 per gram of charcoal may be reached. Common biomass gasifiers aim at a charcoal conversion of 100 %. Up to now, the option of a subsequent usage of the charcoal for adsorption of tar compounds has rarely been considered but is an interesting option to produce a clean syngas in a downstream adsorption unit. Experimental studies show an adsorption capacity of up to 0.4 g of tar per gram of charcoal using naphthalene as a model substance for tar. Respective adsorption isotherms, breakthrough curves in a fixed-bed adsorber, and a kinetic breakthrough model are presented.