Heiko Thimm

• PhD Computer Science
• Professor (Full) at Pforzheim University of Applied Sciences

Public pollution registers such as the European Pollutant Release and Transfer Register (E-PRTR) play a vital role in promoting environmental transparency and accountability. While pollution rankings at various levels-regions, countries, industry sectors,and cities-are widely used, limited research has focused on analyzing the temporal dynamics of...

Environmental disclosure in business has been researched. However, only a few projects have addressed disclosures in connection to the companies' obligations to follow environmental laws, standards, and regulations which is the main objective of the field of corporate environmental compliance management (CECM). This article describes the basis of a...

The constantly growing body of global environmental legislation necessitates that corporate environmental compliance managers frequently assess the relevance of new regulations and regulation revisions for each of their sites. Companies are pressured to streamline and automate this crucial task through digital workflows and specialized IT-based ass...

Die hohe Regelungsdichte des Umweltrechts und die permanente Zunahme neuer Vorschriften stellt Unternehmen vor große Herausforderungen bei der Aufrechterhaltung der Umweltrechtskonformität. Neue Vorschriften müssen auf ihre Relevanz für die Unternehmensstandorte bewertet werden, was ohne geeignete IT-Unterstützung eine aufwändige und fehleranfällig...

In the last decades the highly active area of environmental legislation has produced a vast amount of text documents that contain laws and regulations enacted by various types of rule setters. This large body of legal text documents is still growing with an increasing speed. In order to assure compliance with the regulations, today, corporate speci...

In this work, more than 340 of the largest manufacturing companies from China, Europe, Japan, and the United States are analysed to measure the extent of their environmental website disclosure from multiple perspectives, to explore determining factors of disclosure and to investigate whether disclosure correlates to scores of environmental performa...

Even though corporate sustainability management has become a major topic of research and of the business world, its digitalization is still in an infancy stage. One of the reasons for this situation is the fact that domain-specific abstractions, which are a major underpinning of digitalization in general, have so far received very little attention....

Environmental management concerns are being made available at corporate websites. The websites disclose the organization's communication capabilities and content related to environmental management. The increasing momentum of the climate change debate, the rising interest of stakeholders in environmental issues, growing openness of corporations, th...

This work contributes to the exposure of the current state of environmental disclosure through an empirical transnational study of 344 websites of large production companies from China, Europe, Japan, and the USA. The focus of the investigation is on four formative indices based on variables covering observation of disclosure extent of environmenta...

During recent years, energy management has evolved to be an important corporate work area. Despite the new business opportunities for software vendors and user companies that arise from this work area, most ERP systems still only offer limited functionality for energy management. This article attempts to demonstrate these opportunities by a descrip...

Companies are expected to comply with environmental laws and regulations. They also face increasing stakeholder interest in information about environmental compliance management efforts. Corporate websites serve today’s enterprises as an important medium for voluntary environmental disclosure. However, relatively little research has addressed the t...

The concept of ‘Environmental Management' includes the responsibility to ensure that the company complies with environmental laws and regulations. Because this responsibility is not only exercised towards authorities, but also towards the stakeholders, and because growing environmental awareness is combined with the growing development of ICT, some...

Environmental disclosure in business has been researched. However, only a few projects have addressed disclosures in connection to the companies’ obligations to follow environmental laws, standards, and regulations which is the main objective of the field of corporate environmental compliance management (CECM). This article describes the basis of a...

Companies need to follow environmental laws, standards, and regulations which is the main objective of the work field of corporate environmental compliance management (CECM). Stakeholder expectations and other reasons lead to a growing extent of environmental disclosure on corporate web sites. To which extent is CECM information available at today’...

During recent years energy management has evolved to an important corporate work area. Despite the new business opportunities for software vendors and user companies that arise from this work area, so far, most ERP systems still only offer limited functionality for energy management. The article attempts to demonstrate these opportunities by a desc...

During recent years, energy management has evolved to be an important corporate work area. Despite the new business opportunities for software vendors and user companies that arise from this work area, most ERP systems still only offer limited functionality for energy management. This article attempts to demonstrate these opportunities by a descrip...

Für die Aufgabenstellungen des betrieblichen Energiemanagements werden bislang nur von wenigen ERP-Systemen Anwendungsfunktionalitäten angeboten. Um ihrer bisherigen Rolle als unternehmensweite Datendrehscheibe auch zukünftig gerecht zu werden, müssen ERP-Systemhersteller die Anforderungen eines zeitgemäßen betrieblichen Energiemanagements adressie...

In order to comply with the ever growing body of environmental protection regulations, companies need to perform a multitude of knowledge-intense tasks such as relevance assessments for new regulations or revisions, tasks to determine compliance enforcement measures, and documentation tasks for compliance audits. The careful completion of these tas...

An Eco Learning Factory is currently being established at an academic institution with the goal to investigate energy management approaches for SME production companies. The article describes a novel conceptual data model and energy data management approaches that are being developed for this factory. The implementation of these approaches is based...

Environmental regulations presuppose a complex set of corporate obligations to enforce legal compliance. The obligations may over-challenge companies in general but in particular manufacturing companies for many different reasons. This includes the inherent difficulties to recognize early signs for potential compliance violations, limited experienc...

From Energy Management Systems, we expect comprehensive information about energy streams that can be used to improve the energy efficiency. Due to their inherent demand for high energy, such systems are especially demanded by production companies. The companies also look for novel optimization approaches that based on comprehensive energy data lowe...

Corporate environmental compliance managers are required to perform and supervise a set of com-plex tasks. It can be expected that the growing density of environmental regulations will contribute to even more challenges for compliance managers in the near future. As a result, companies are increas-ingly pressured to improve the efficiency of their...

The obligation to conform to environmental regulations requires from companies a set of diverse tasks. A classification of these tasks into central tasks, collaborative tasks, and departmental tasks is proposed and corresponding examples are described. Then, an overview is given of state-of-the-art ICT support approaches for central tasks that are...

Companies are obligated to assure that at any time they comply with all relevant regulations in all relevant subject areas of environmental law. Because this requires compliance management activities that are largely performed by humans, one needs to consider that a company, due to human errors, may unintentionally violate environmental regulations...

Today’s companies are able to automate the enforcement of Environmental, Health and Safety (EH&S) duties through the use of workflow management technology. This approach requires to specify activities that are combined to workflow models for EH&S enforcement duties. In order to meet given safety regulations these activities are to be completed corr...

It is possible to streamline corporate Environment, Health, and Safety (EH&S) duties through the use of workflow management technology. This approach requires a specification of workflow models that among others are composed of activities. A domain-specific workflow meta data model is proposed. The model consists of modelling concepts for the detec...

We expect economic benefits from companies with good company websites. However, only little is known about the real effects of good websites on company success. Based on data about 1,000 small and medium-sized European production companies in Germany and Denmark a study is conducted in order to uncover correlations between economic indicators and t...

It is possible to streamline Environmental, Health and Safety (EH&S) duties through the use of workflow management technology. This approach requires to specify workflow models which among others consist of activities. In order to meet given safety regulations these activities are to be completed correctly and within given deadlines. Otherwise, act...

It is the ultimate goal of corporate environmental compliance management to assure that the company complies with all relevant legal regulations. Among other factors of success this requires to be aware of events that can cause non-compliance. However, risk management has so far gained only little attention in the environmental compliance research...

It is the ultimate goal of environmental compliance management to assure corporate compliance with givenregulations. Theworkprocesses that arerequired to fulfill andmaintain compliance areusually complexand long running processes that arecomposed of many interdependent humanleadactivities. Errors of human work activities andalso material and equipm...

Corporate environmental compliance management is as a work area were specialists are requested to do everything that is needed to assure compliance with given environmental protection regulations. This includes expert judgements of the relevance of regulations for the company and the preparation of ad hoc proofs of the company’s positive compliance...

To validate a survey of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), we tested the similarity between respondents and nonrespondents using traditional methods of supplemental data collection. Additionally we also applied mixed methods by enhancing the survey data with data obtained by a novel unobtrusive method: observation of company websites. The w...

It is the ultimate goal of environmental compliance management to assure corporate compliance with given regulations and to prepare possibilities for ad hoc proofs of the company’s positive compliance status. The awareness of events that can cause a negative compliance status is a key factor of successful environmental compliance management. Howeve...

In Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) the environmental compliance management practice is often based on relatively rudimentary work structures and IT solutions with inherent limitations for business process efficiency. Due to the growing complexity of environmental regulations and related corporate obligations - that when violated may resul...

The Open Data movement signifies availability and access to data as a prerequisite for the exercise of individual democratic rights. Data are now Big Data with large numbers of attributes, transactions, relationships, complexities, and individuals. Government data are typically viewed as aggregate data. However, plenty of examples show that your in...

Die Nutzung Betrieblicher Umweltinformationssysteme (BUIS) im Rahmen der betrieblichen Gefahrenabwehr ist bisher noch weitgehend unerforscht. Dabei lassen sich gerade Informationen, die von BUIS verwaltet werden, als wichtige Indikatoren von Gefahren und darüber hinaus auch zur Bestimmung von Abwehrmaßnahmen verwenden. Im vorliegenden Beitrag wird...

Nearly all SME companies regard their collaboration as a very important part of their success. The measures for collaboration have shown that collaboration covers many external relationships. The index of extra-organizational collaboration is related to internal IT use for business tasks as well as to technologies for internal and extra-organizatio...

Well-informed network participants are a necessity for successful collaboration in business networks. The widespread knowledge of the many aspects of the network is an effective vehicle to promote trust within the network, successfully resolve conflicts, and build a prospering collaboration climate. Despite their natural interest in being well info...

In response to critical events Security Management Organizations (SMO) need to follow plans. Among others response plans can require decisions to be made by several SMO people. For security situations with a not too high time pressure it is possible to repeatedly perform a decision making process that includes decision makers that are separated by...

The complexity of many decision problems of today's globalized world requires new innovative solutions that are built upon proven decision support technology and also recent advancements in the area of information and communication technology ICT such as Cloud Computing and Mobile Communication. A combination of the cost-effective Cloud Computing a...

Successful collaboration in business networks calls for well-informed network participants. Members who know about the many aspects of the network are an effective vehicle to successfully resolve conflicts, build a prospering collaboration climate and promote trust within the network. The importance of well-informed network participants has led to...

Well-informed network participants are a necessity for successful collaboration in business networks. The widespread knowledge of the many aspects of the network is an effective vehicle to promote trust within the network, successfully resolve conflicts, and build a prospering collaboration climate. Despite their natural interest in being well info...

Successful collaboration in business networks calls for well-informed network participants. Members who know about the many aspects of the network are an effective vehicle to promote trust within the network, successfully resolve conflicts, and build a prospering collaboration climate. The importance of well-informed network participants has lead t...

Successful management of collaborative business in company networks calls for efficient moderator processes in assigning companies to a particular request. The moderator makes configuration decisions that generate a Virtual Enterprise (VE) as a set of companies from the network members. Alternative configurations are evaluated and the most fitting...

Companies in collaborative networks require intermediation to perform. The collaborative network forms the breeding environment for the configuration of a Virtual Enterprise that can handle a business request. This configuration task can be supported by IT services. For collaborative networks such as production networks focused on non-digital servi...

Successful collaboration in collaborative networks calls for network participants who are well informed about the many aspects of networks. This includes information about the network strategy, the members, the current network status, and collaborative business processes. Otherwise, a network can be threatened by distrust between the participating...

Theory and observations about the positive influence of robust decision downloading among the employees within single companies can be related to the context of Collaborative Networks were a moderator makes decisions on behalf of the network. Especially, configuration decisions that generate a Virtual Enterprise arranged from the network members mu...

Small and medium-sized companies benefit from participation in collaborative networks that allow the companies in symbiotic collaboration to perform tasks that would be out of reach for any single company. An inquiry to the network has to be orchestrated into a virtual organisation where each of the selected companies delivers products and services...

Purpose This paper aims to investigate the management process in company networks. A new information support service can assist network managers in the complex task of orchestrating members of the network to so‐called network actor sets (NAS) that deliver the “best fit” for incoming inquiries. Design/methodology/approach A corresponding conceptual...

A 2007-2008 two-nation business survey was carried out by two universities and supporting business development agencies. The intention of describing small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) and their use of information technology and cooperation was disrupted by a very low response rate. Some practices concerning nonresponse (Rogelberg & Stanton,...

More and more companies improve their sustainability by belonging to company networks. When a specific inquiry is directed towards the company network required is a selection of companies that partner- up in a mixture of supplementing or even overlapping companies to form a virtual organization. The selection of partners is a challenging task for t...

Dynamic data centres are regarded as promising approach to achieve a high degree of resource utilization. In such data centres, applications are dynamically allocated to servers under consideration of the actual resource demand and the actual load states of the servers. However, as a result of this flexible deployment model, it i s difficult to siz...

Supplier E-Marketplaces prevalently offer composite products that require complex production processes where multiple suppliers cooperate with each other. Since collaborating suppliers often hold overlapping production competencies multiple process alternatives may exist where production steps are allocated to suppliers in different ways. This proc...

The presence of multiple multimedia data streams, e.g., an audio data stream in conjunction with several video data streams within a complex advertisement show, which presentation must proceed in a mutually synchronized manner, is one of the unique features that distinguishes digital multimedia data from traditional, conventional, alphanumeric data...

In this paper, we present a concept and implementation of a largely dispersed multimedia database system which consists of several multimedia database systems. The users and applications can access the databases in various ways. Our solution also covers the administration of media object duplicates. The entire multimedia database system is a compon...

A multimedia database management system (MM-DBMS) supports the development of multimedia applications and the handling of multimedia data at runtime. It explicitly handles continuous data such as video, audio and animation. The user of a MM-DBMS gets all the support he needs to store, manipulate, and present such data. Hence application development...

Today's limitations of general purpose distributed computing environments require for multimedia database system capabilities for the graceful adaptation of Quality of Service (QoS). This requirement is particularly acute for presentational applications where possibly hundreds of multimedia presentations must be performed simultaneously. The QoS ad...

Database systems which support preorchestrated multimedia presentations must be able to adapt the resource demand of executing presentations. Such adaptations can be dictated by underlying resource management components. When resources are not reserved, such adaptations are necessary to overcome fluctuating resource availability. Adaptations across...

Multimedia database systems must accommodate the capability to adapt the resource demand of executing presentations. This concerns adaptations across components of presentations as well as across concurrent sessions adhering to the individual needs of content providers and viewers.This paper describes the general concept of Reactive Playout Managem...

A novel database system service called playout management service which performs multimedia presentations was proposed recently. In distributed multimedia database systems without end-to-end guarantees, such a playout management service faces the potential problem that system performance can become insufficient when realizing a stored presentation....

The paper describes recent progress in research on database system support for executing multimedia presen- tations. It proposes the general concept of Reactive Playout Management to adjust multimedia presentations. This ad- justment can be required due to performance fluctuations as in the absence of end-to-end quality of service guarantees, cost...

Playout management subsumes lower and higher level system tasks necessary to execute stored multimedia presentations. For multimedia database management systems, we propose the integration of a respective playout management service. On one hand, this provides optimal database management support for multimedia applications. On the other, this makes...

A novel database system service called a playout management service, which performs multimedia presentations was proposed by the authors recently [1st Int. Workshop on Multimedia Database Mgmt. Systems, pp. 38-47, 1995]. In distributed multimedia database systems without end-to-end guarantees, such a playout management service faces the potential p...

Playout management subsumes both, lower and higher level system tasks necessary to execute stored multimedia presentations. An elegant way to handle the data management tasks especially for simultaneous multimedia presentations is to use a database management system. Based on an analysis of some alternative solutions for providing a playout managem...

For domains such as interpersonal messaging, office communication, or teleconferencing, adequate multimedia and hypermedia teleservices have been introduced recently. While such teleservices are primarily focused on the data interchange aspect, a teleservice Multimedia Archive provides more comprehensive support for networked hypermedia application...

This paper presents the concept and general architecture of a multimedia enhanced CSCW teleservice that controls and monitors cooperative multiauthoring processes for possibly multimedia documents. Involved authors can be worldwide geographically dispersed. The instantiation of such a process is performed by submitting a workflow specification incl...

. In this paper, a teleservice for archiving and retrieving multimediadocumentsusingpublicnetworks is described.Thisteleserviceencouragesabroadrange of multimedia archiving applications. The described implementation is based on standardized multimediamailand suitable for an asynchronous access mechanism. Theoriginalityofthiswork is theintegrationof...

In this paper, a teleservice for archiving and retrieving multimedia documents using public net - works is described. This teleservice encourages a broad range of commercially applicable multime - dia archiving applications suitable for an asynchronous access mechanism. It is based on an inte - grated architecture comprising stand alone archive cli...