Impact of working capital management on profitability of the food processing and consumer goods business in New Zealand

The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of working capital management (WCM) on the profitability of fifteen food processing and consumer service business listed in the New Zealand Exchange Board. The data were collected through the annual reports of the companies for five years and arranged by using Excel. The working capital was measured by it components like Account receivable period, Account payable period, Inventory conversion period, and cash conversion period. Whereas profitability was measured by Return on Assets, Return on Equity and Net profit margin. To analyse the relationship between WCM and profitability, regression analysis and correlation were used by making WCM components as independent variables and profitability as dependent variables. The correlation result reveals that there is negative relationship between the WCM components and profitability, and longer CCC leads to less profitability of the firm. Whereas the regression result reveals the negative relationship between ICP and ROA. Similarly, there is a negative relationship between ARP and ROE, and also between APP and NPM. Therefore, it is concluded that WCM have very much impact on the profitability of the business and businesses are recommend to decrease their ICP, ARP and CCC in order to increase profitability

The development and validation of a scoring tool to predict the operative duration of elective laparoscopic cholecystectomy

Background: The ability to accurately predict operative duration has the potential to optimise theatre efficiency and utilisation, thus reducing costs and increasing staff and patient satisfaction. With laparoscopic cholecystectomy being one of the most commonly performed procedures worldwide, a tool to predict operative duration could be extremely beneficial to healthcare organisations. Methods: Data collected from the CholeS study on patients undergoing cholecystectomy in UK and Irish hospitals between 04/2014 and 05/2014 were used to study operative duration. A multivariable binary logistic regression model was produced in order to identify significant independent predictors of long (> 90 min) operations. The resulting model was converted to a risk score, which was subsequently validated on second cohort of patients using ROC curves. Results: After exclusions, data were available for 7227 patients in the derivation (CholeS) cohort. The median operative duration was 60 min (interquartile range 45–85), with 17.7% of operations lasting longer than 90 min. Ten factors were found to be significant independent predictors of operative durations > 90 min, including ASA, age, previous surgical admissions, BMI, gallbladder wall thickness and CBD diameter. A risk score was then produced from these factors, and applied to a cohort of 2405 patients from a tertiary centre for external validation. This returned an area under the ROC curve of 0.708 (SE = 0.013, p  90 min increasing more than eightfold from 5.1 to 41.8% in the extremes of the score. Conclusion: The scoring tool produced in this study was found to be significantly predictive of long operative durations on validation in an external cohort. As such, the tool may have the potential to enable organisations to better organise theatre lists and deliver greater efficiencies in care

Bioheat Transfer Equation with Protective Layer

The human thermal comfort is the state of mind, which is affected not only by the physical and body’s internal physiological phenomena but also by the clothing properties such as thermal resistance of clothing, clothing insulation, clothing area factor, air insulation, and relative humidity. In this work, we extend the one-dimensional Pennes’ bioheat transfer equation by adding the protective clothing layer. The transient temperature profile with the clothing layer at the different time steps has been carried out using a fully implicit Finite Difference (FD) Scheme with interface condition between body and clothes. Numerically computed results are bound to agree that the clothing insulation and air insulation provide better comfort and keep the body at the thermal equilibrium position. The graphical representation of the results also verifies the effectiveness and utility of the proposed model