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Project-based organizations need to procure different commodities, and the failure/success of a project depends heavily on procurement management. Companies must refine and develop methods to simplify and optimize the procurement process in a highly competitive environment. This paper presents a methodology to help managers of project-based organizations analyze procurement processes to determine the optimal framework for simultaneously addressing multiple objectives. These goals include minimizing the time between the generation and required approval for a purchase, identifying unnamed activities, and allocating the budget efficiently. In this paper, we apply process mining algorithms to a dataset consisting of event logs on Oracle Financials-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) procurement processes in ERP systems and demonstrate interesting results leading to project procurement intelligence (PPI). The provided log data is the real-life data consisting of 180,462 events referring to seven activities within 43,101 cases. The logged procurement processes are filtered and analyzed using the open-source process mining frameworks PrOM and Disco. As a result of the process mining activities, a simulation of the discovered process model derived from the event log of the entire procurement process is presented, and the most frequent potential behaviors are identified. This analysis and extraction of frequent processes from corporate event logs help organizations understand, adapt, and redesign procurement operations and, most importantly, make them more efficient and of higher quality. This study shows that after the successful formulation of guiding principles, data refinement, and process structure optimization, the case study results are considered significant by the organization’s management.

This study compares the results of two political approaches to transport directed at the reduction of negative external effects. The comparison is between a policy of building a high-speed rail line to attract travelers away from highways and full social-cost pricing on all modes, that is, removing the implicit subsidies to all modes by pricing congestion and external costs. The former approach was adopted in 1992 in Spain with the introduction of the high-speed train in the Madrid–Seville corridor, bringing with it an important increase in the modal share of railway transport. From the analysis made, it can be concluded that from the point of view of economic efficiency and social benefit optimization, the high-speed train should not have been implemented that year (1992) in the Madrid–Seville corridor. Other transport policy approaches, such as the introduction of an optimal modal price based on the respective marginal social costs, would have increased social benefit. Therefore, the results obtained in this investigation indicate the necessity to introduce higher economic efficiency in the transport market through the application to each mode of transport of a price based on the marginal social cost.

The ecological footprint is studied as a macroindicator of sustainability applicable to companies and corporations. Until now, this macroindicator has been applied to cities, regions, or countries. It accounts for the consumption of natural resources by converting them into hectares of “nature” or consumed productive land. The parameters analyzed in this research have been consumption of energy, fuel, material, paper, wood, water, built land, and green areas, and residues generated by the Gijón Port Authority, Spain. The results show a net ecological footprint of 3,279.84 ha. The main components of the footprint are construction works (nearly 2,000 ha) and electricity consumption (679 ha). Studies of this kind enable companies to design sustainable development plans to reduce consumption as well as develop “green” (footprint-free) products and create “natural capital” (wastage absorption). Until now, these issues have not been on the agenda of companies, but they are indispensable in achieving real sustainability.

This paper analyses the behaviour of the functions of importing and exporting goods by maritime transport mode in Spain during the period 1994.I–1998. IV Cointegration techniques are used in the estimations to obtain long-term price and income elasticities. These estimations can be used to assess the effects of price modifications in the volume of imports and exports and, hence, to carry out forecasts on international trade and maritime transport.

The main methodologies applied to obtain the economic impact of a port, are discussed in this paper. A systematic classification which allows to evaluate the availability of the resources as well as the advantages, and disadvantages of every methodology, is offered according to the aims. Moreover, with these methodologies, the impact of port industry on the rest of the economy, can be obtained.

In this paper, we propose a methodology to estimate the economic impact of the ports of a country. Inspired by traditional literature about the research on port impact, we obtain the estimation of the impact of ports on the Spanish economy in 1993. Input–output techniques are used to obtain direct, indirect and induced economic impacts for the different types of economic agents: port users, port industry and port authority.

The previous models, based on the conventional demand theory, provide us with empirical evidence for road, railway and air transport in Spain from 1980 to 1988. We obtain the Marshallian demand functions with respect to relevant income and price variables for each modes of transport analyzed. In this work we offer income and price elasticities estimations as well as exchange of data aggregated to interurban passengers transport in Spain. It is necessary to be cautious when interpreting data, due to the high variable aggregation. Some research could be made in the future on this type of model from the desagregation of transport service demand into different lines.

The most efficient airports are the ones of Madrid, Barcelona, Palma de Mallorca, Malaga, Gran Canaria, Tenerife South, Alicante, Ibiza, Fuerteventura, Menorca and Bilbao.