Succeeding with business process reengineering in the financial service industry

A Doctoral Thesis Presented to the Faculty of The Engineering and Built Environment at the University of Witwatersrand In Fulfilment of Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Johannesburg, South Africa May, 2016The problem of failed projects has been and still is an interesting topic with many views emanating through various research avenues. The research presented in this thesis is one such avenue. In pursuit of Business Process Reengineering (BPR) via defined and executed projects, the financial institutions of South Africa have not seemed able to succeed in executing a high number of successful BPR projects. The research presented in this thesis was undertaken to understand why this was, even though industry accepted methodologies such as Six Sigma and Lean Engineering were adopted. The research focused on understanding what factors influenced the successful execution of BPR projects, by reviewing prior research and by conducting a case study. This analysis led to the development of the “Organisation Ring of Influence” (ORoI) model which highlighted the impact and influence organisation structures and organisation behaviours have on the successful execution of BPR projects. The primary objective of the research, however, was to take this understanding and combine it with the thinking of Systems Theory, more specifically the sociotechnical problem solving methodology developed by Peter Checkland, known as Soft Systems Methodology (SSM), in order to develop a management approach. If applied, the management approach would improve the probability of success of executed BPR projects. The management approach developed was termed the “Pre Project Organisation Environment Enablement Model” (P2OE2M).MT201

GLOBAL HEALTH ISSUES WITH CONFLICT ESCALATION AMONG PANDEMIC, CLIMATE, AND ECONOMIC CRISES

Religion, governance, and politics - as well as related topics such as human rights, justice, and so on - have historically caused many of the world’s most significant conflicts, and they continue to do so because these issues are often the most fundamental in the structure of a society. To gain a military advantage, parties to armed conflicts have polluted water, burned crops, cut down forests, poisoned soils, and killed animals over the years. A variety of context factors, particularly socioeconomic conditions, governance, and political factors, interact and play a key role in translating climate change into conflict risks. The present unrest all over the world risks putting more than half of the countries into a crisis of health, economy, and social safety, which remains the most constant threat to human civilization. The security and safety of health-care facilities, workers, and supply lines remain paramount concerns, along with access to health services, technology, and innovation

HEALTH HAZARDS WITH ADULTERATED SPICES: SAVE THE “ONION TEARS”

Spices are among the top five most commonly adulterated food types because they are expensive commodities that are processed before sale, used most frequently and consumed by mass population. There is a strong incentive to pollute. In Bangladesh, different types of grounded spices powders are available such as onion, ginger, coriander, chili, turmeric, and cumin. These powdered spices are commercially processed and packaged by some leading food industries, while some local non-branded industries also exist. Nowadays, people are busy with their carriers, the demand of branded spices powder is increasing gradually. In general, most of the people tend to buy loose spices from the local grocery store if branded and packaged spices are not available. This increases the risk of consuming adulterated spices. Unlike this particular adulterant is not unhealthy (but illegal), most of the adulterants are unhealthy and can cause serious and fatal damage to our system if consumed regularly. The escalating market of this product implies that in Bangladesh, this tradition is increasingly attaining momentum. Spices are consumed in various forms such as whole spices, ground spices, oleoresins, and extracts. Spices play an important role in enhancing the flavor and taste of processed foods. They are also used in medicine because of their carminative stimulating and digestive properties. Ground spices may be adulterated with artificial colors, starch, chalk powder, etc., to increase their weight and enhance appearance. High value ground spices are frequently adulterated for economic gains. Adulteration is difficult to identify by visual and sensory inputs alone. Although there are few renowned food industries, peoples are always suspicious about these products. However, there are still not enough investigations for the quality check of all these branded powdered products

An extensive review of patient satisfaction with healthcare services in Bangladesh

Patient satisfaction is a useful measure for providing quality indicators in healthcare services. Assessing patients’ satisfaction is important since it often helps, in absence of healthcare service quality indicators, to determine the quality of health-care delivery and health system responsiveness. Higher levels of patient satisfaction indicate higher levels of patient empowerment, commitment to care and compliance to recommended management–all of which results in better health outcomes. Concern over the quality of healthcare services in Bangladesh has resulted in a loss of faith in healthcare providers, low utilization of public health facilities, and increased outflows of patients from Bangladesh to hospitals abroad. The main barriers to accessing health services are inadequate services and poor quality of existing facilities, shortage of medical supplies, the busyness of doctors due to high patient load, long travel distance to facilities, and long waiting times once facilities were reached, very short consultation time, lack of empathy of the health professionals, their generally callous and casual attitude, aggressive pursuit of monetary gains, poor levels of competence and, occasionally, disregard for the suffering that patients endure without being able to voice their concerns—all of these service failures are frequently reported in the print media. Such failures can play a powerful role in shaping patients\u27 negative attitudes and dissatisfaction with healthcare service providers and healthcare itself. The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare plans and implements the public healthcare delivery through various healthcare infrastructure, from national to the community level. Experience Framework This article is associated with the Policy & Measurement lens of The Beryl Institute Experience Framework. (http://bit.ly/ExperienceFramework) Access other PXJ articles related to this lens. Access other resources related to this lens

Pharmacists in Telemedicine: Meeting the Ongoing Demand of Bangladesh

Background: Currently, coronavirus COVID-19 has affected 210 countries around the world, killed more than 268,500 and infected more than 3.8 million, according to worldometer, May 08, 2020. Home-care is especially important in these situations because hospitals are not seemingly safe during pandemic outbreaks. Also, the chance to get out of the home during the lockdown period is limited. Telemedicine and telehealth technologies are especially effective during epidemic outbreaks, when health authorities recommend implementing social distance systems.Materials and Methods: This study started in February 2020, when the Philippines reported its first death outside China. PubMed, ALTAVISTA, Embase, Scopus, the Science Web and the Cochrane Central Register have been carefully searched. The keywords were used to search out extensively followed journals from various publishers such as Elsevier, Springer, Willey Online Library, and Wolters Kluwer.Results: The idea of employing pharmacists in telemedicine is not only good for general patients’ healthcare access but also utilization of a huge number of pharmacists who are currently unemployed. In this Covid-19 pandemic situation, where vaccine and medicines are literally non-existent, this cheap but effective technology-based support can ensure maximum protection against virus spread and safety.But, Pharmacy education of Bangladesh does not meet the minimum requirement for adequate clinical, hospital and community pharmacy practice. The system needs special attention too.Conclusion: The telemedicine sector in Bangladesh is still in its beginning phase. Employing pharmacists with proper training would bring the best outcome but proper initiatives are not taken. The policy makers are the sole to take any initiatives in the country. Proper lobbing through proper channel is the only solution to establish pharmacists in telemedicine sector

A Brief Review of Covid-19 Situation in Bangladesh

    COVID-19 has affected 212 countries around the world, killed more than 287,000 and infected more than 4.2 million. Bangladesh, a South Asian low-middle-income economy, has experienced a demographic andepidemiological transition with rapid urbanization and a gradual increase in life expectancy. It is the seventh most populous country in the world and population of the country is expected to be nearly double by 2050. The increasing burden of noncommunicable diseases in Bangladesh can be attributable to rapid urbanization and nearly 50% of all slum dwellers of the country live in Dhaka division. In 2017, National Rapid Response Team of IEDCR investigated 26 incidents of disease outbreak. The joint survey of the Power and Participation Research Centre and BRAC Institute of Governance and Development reveals that per capita daily income of urban slum and rural poor drops by 80% due to present countrywide shutdown enforced by the government to halt the spread of Covid-19. 40%-50% of these population took loans to meet the daily expenses

Trust in Artificial Intelligence: Toward Measuring the Impact of Public Perception

Applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) are currently seen in almost every sector. Some of the common examples of AI applications are visible in recommender systems such as movie recommendations, books recommendation, restaurant recommendations, etc. Earlier, the role of trust in technology adoption was recognized in the Information Systems (IS) discipline. Thus, with the growing use of AI, identifying the factors contributing toward building trust in this technology has become a critical issue. The public perception of AI was found to reveal trust toward AI (Zhang 2021). Therefore, we propose to measure the impact of two dimensions of AI public perception toward building trust in this technology. These two dimensions are control of AI and ethics in AI. We also propose to include a mediating factor called mood. These dimensions and the mediating factor were found as a component of public perception of AI in a previous study. This study used a dataset of trends in public perception of AI extracted from news articles published in the New York Times over 30 years (Fast and Horvitz 2017). The dimensions of trust that may impact trust in AI have been identified previously (Glikson and Woolley 2020). These dimensions were based on two aspects of trust – cognitive trust and emotional trust. Although separate dimensions for each of these aspects have been identified, some of them seem to overlap. The dimensions of cognitive trust include tangibility, transparency, reliability, task characteristics, and immediacy behavior. On the other hand, the dimensions of emotional trust also include tangibility, and immediacy behaviors, in addition to anthropomorphism. Our proposed dimensions will have an impact on both cognitive trust and emotional trust in AI. However, control and ethics will have a direct impact on cognitive trust, and an indirect impact on emotional trust through the mediating factor mood. In a previous study, mood was identified as an internal factor that can alter trust in AI (Hoff and Bashir 2015). In the dataset to be used for this study, the variable named “control” indicates whether a certain paragraph in an article implies public concern about the loss of control in AI. On the other hand, the variable named “ethics” indicates the presence of ethical concern in public perception. The mediating variable “mood” is measured ranging from pessimistic to optimistic. For the purpose of our study, we will measure the direct impact of “control” and “ethics” toward building trust in AI, as well as the indirect impact through the mediating variable “mood”. We plan to use structural equation modeling (SEM) for the analysis, as it will enable us to measure the impact of the mediating variable in this context

Health and welfare observation in new broiler hydrids in Sweden

The stronger demand from consumers and welfare society to introduce new breeds that fit for higher welfare and better sustainability has been a strong factor to start introducing new breeds to the Swedish market and to meet these strong demands. Two breeds has been chosen as interesting breeds to be studied in the Swedish market. Several parameters like weight gain, health and welfare indicators between two slow growing (SG) organic broiler hybrids, Rowan Ranger (RR) and Hubbard (H) were studied compared using two different housing systems, these two hybrids were chosen to be studied because they were the latest genotypes in the Swedish market and many organic farmers use them in their poultry production. Evaluation of performance, welfare and sustainability of these new genotypes is the key factor for the future of sustainable poultry production. Two groups with 200 birds each were reared in a research centre facility until the age of ten weeks. Total body weight, carcass parts, plumage cleanliness, footpad dermatitis, hock burns, skeletal problems and gait score were recorded weekly with reporting the mortality and culled birds with the reason of culling. Welfare Quality® protocol had been used to record welfare parameters on birds. There were some significant differences in some Welfare Quality® parameters between both hybrids. There was a significant difference in live weight, where RR had higher live weight and breast meat yield than H, nevertheless, there were no significant differences in the slaughter weight between both hybrids apart from that males had higher mean body weight in both hybrids and production systems than females. Additionally, Welfare Quality indicators have been evaluated for both hybrids and production systems, RR showed to have more incidents of dirtiness in plumage and higher footpad dermatitis score comparing to H. Other welfare indicators did not significantly differ between hybrids or production systems.Den högre efterfrågan från konsumenter och djuvälfärd organisationer att intruducera hybrider som uppnå högre välfärd och bättre hållbarhet har varit en stark påverkande faktor till att göra flera vetenskapliga studier och undersökningar om nya kycklinghybrider som är långsamväxande och möter dessa krav. Två raser som nyligen funnists i den Svenska marknaden och används av vissa kycklings uppfödare har valts att studeras i den här studien. Flera parametrar såsom, avkastning, hälsa och vissa välfärdparametrar mellan två långsamväxande ekologiska kycklighybrider, nämligen Rowan Ranger och Hubbard, har studerats. Studiens syfte var att jamföra mellan två olika inhyssningssystem med fokus på avkastning, välfärd och hållbarhet. Två grupper med 200 fåglar vardera föds upp och i en förskningcenteranläggning fram till tio veckors ålder. Total kroppsvikt, stycknings delar, fjäderdräkten, dermatit i trampdynan, brännskador i hasen och skelettskador bedömdes varje vecka samt dödlighet, avlivade fåglar och slaktade registerardes veckovis. En Welfare Quality® protokoll användes när välfärdparametrar registerades. Det fanns segnifikanta skillnader i Welfare Quality® parametrar mellan båda hybdrider. Avkastningen skilled sig mellan olika hybrider och kön, där RR hade högre levande vikt och bröstköttutbyte än H, det fans dock inga signifikanta skillnader i slaktviktavkatsning mellan båda hybdriderna. Hanar hade högre medelkroppsvik. Det fanns inga andra signifikanta olikheter i andra välfärdsparametrar mellan hybriderna och inhyssningssystem

マルチングがダイズ天水栽培における土壌水分・温度環境に及ぼす効果

京都大学0048新制・課程博士博士(農学)甲第22782号農博第2425号新制||農||1081(附属図書館)学位論文||R2||N5302(農学部図書室)京都大学大学院農学研究科地域環境科学専攻(主査)教授 中村 公人, 教授 星野 敏, 教授 藤原 正幸学位規則第4条第1項該当Doctor of Agricultural ScienceKyoto UniversityDFA