A Preliminary Study of Applying Lean Six Sigma Methods to Machine Tool Measurement

Many manufacturers aim to increase their levels of high-quality production in order to improve their market competitiveness. Continuous improvement of maintenance strategies is a key factor to be capable of delivering high quality products and services on-time with minimal operating costs. However, the cost of maintaining quality is often perceived as a non-added-value task. Improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the measurement procedures necessary to guarantee accuracy of production is a more complex task than many other maintenance functions and so deserves particular analysis. This paper investigates the feasibility of producing a concise yet effective framework that will provide a preliminary approach for integrating Lean and Six Sigma philosophies to the specific goal of reducing unnecessary downtime on manufacturing machines while maintaining its ability to machine to the required tolerance. The purpose of this study is to show how a Six Sigma infrastructure is used to investigate the root causes of complication occurring during the machine tool measurement. This work recognises issues of the uncertainty of data, and the measurement procedures in parallel with the main tools of Six Sigma’s Define-Measure-Analyse-Improve-Control (DMAIC). The significance of this work is that machine tool accuracy is critical for high value manufacturing. Over-measuring the machine to ensure accuracy potentially reduces production volume. However, not measuring them or ignoring accuracy aspects possibly lead to production waste. This piece of work aims to present a lean guidance to lessen measurement uncertainties and optimise the machine tool benchmarking procedures, while adopting the DMAIC strategy to reduce unnecessary downtime

Multi-Criteria Analysis in Compound Decision Processes. The AHP and the Architectural Competition for the Chamber of Deputies in Rome (Italy)

In 1967, a national architectural competition was released for a preliminary project proposal, aimed at the realization of the new building for the Chamber of Deputies in Rome. The outcomes of that competition were unusual: eighteen projects were declared joint winners, and no winner was consequently selected. With reference to that event, this research aims to examine the usefulness of the evaluation tools that are currently employed and the positive effects that one of these techniques would have had, as support for the identification of the “winner” project, are highlighted. Therefore, an hypothetical examination/adjustment of the decision process of that competition through the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is developed, analyzing the outputs obtained by the implementations of this technique on the final decision. In addition to confirming the usefulness of the evaluation tools for compound and conflicting decision processes, the results of this experiment led to a further understanding of the socio-cultural dynamics related to the original outcomes of the competition analyzed. View Full-Tex

The ILAS-ED: A Standards-Based Instrument for Assessing Pre-Service Teachers' Information Literacy Levels

Few constituencies exist where it is more important to produce information literate individuals than teacher candidates, yet rarely is it suggested that practitioners newly entering the field are adequately prepared to teach and model information literacy to their students. As a result, information literacy has been established as a key outcome by a number of teacher education accrediting bodies and professional associations. Corollary to this initiative is the effort to develop valid instruments that assess information literacy skills of teacher candidates. This paper describes the development and validation of the Information Literacy Assessment Scale in Education (ILAS-ED). Funded in part by the Institute for Library and Information Literacy Education and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the study is part of a national initiative spear-headed by the Project for the Standardized Assessment of Information Literacy Skills (SAILS). Test content is based on nationally recognized standards from the International Society for Technology in Education and the Association of College and Research Libraries. Procedures designed to enhance the scale's validity were woven throughout its development. 172 teacher education students at a large, metropolitan university completed a protocol consisting of 22 test items and 13 demographic and self-percept items. This instrument can be used to inform curricular and instructional decisions and to provide evidence of institutional effectiveness for program reviews

A review of the literature on citation impact indicators

Citation impact indicators nowadays play an important role in research evaluation, and consequently these indicators have received a lot of attention in the bibliometric and scientometric literature. This paper provides an in-depth review of the literature on citation impact indicators. First, an overview is given of the literature on bibliographic databases that can be used to calculate citation impact indicators (Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar). Next, selected topics in the literature on citation impact indicators are reviewed in detail. The first topic is the selection of publications and citations to be included in the calculation of citation impact indicators. The second topic is the normalization of citation impact indicators, in particular normalization for field differences. Counting methods for dealing with co-authored publications are the third topic, and citation impact indicators for journals are the last topic. The paper concludes by offering some recommendations for future research

Academic Management and Contemporary Gaps

It is challenge to contemporary academic management to fullfil the demands of the labor market, and to have improvements with the this, considering the scientific development; through the analysis of intangibles like student performance, which can generate positive results with repercussion on institutional reputation. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD, 2018) the adequate professional qualification results in employment for qualified individuals; while activities more prone to automation are observed, and greater chance of unemployment for those with low qualification. In this research there was the reading of 447 abstracts of publications, obtained by refinements applied on 4,491 initial registers, and selected 20 considering the performance of the students as a parameter of the university administration, with the objective of identifying gaps of academic management, resulting: to contemplate student learning as a dependent variable, and to extend to the documents the origin of the research data

The biomedical abbreviation recognition and resolution (BARR) track: Benchmarking, evaluation and importance of abbreviation recognition systems applied to Spanish biomedical abstracts

Healthcare professionals are generating a substantial volume of clinical data in narrative form. As healthcare providers are confronted with serious time constraints, they frequently use telegraphic phrases, domain-specific abbreviations and shorthand notes. Efficient clinical text processing tools need to cope with the recognition and resolution of abbreviations, a task that has been extensively studied for English documents. Despite the outstanding number of clinical documents written worldwide in Spanish, only a marginal amount of studies has been published on this subject. In clinical texts, as opposed to the medical literature, abbreviations are generally used without their definitions or expanded forms. The aim of the first Biomedical Abbreviation Recognition and Resolution (BARR) track, posed at the IberEval 2017 evaluation campaign, was to assess and promote the development of systems for generating a sense inventory of medical abbreviations. The BARR track required the detection of mentions of abbreviations or short forms and their corresponding long forms or definitions from Spanish medical abstracts. For this track, the organizers provided the BARR medical document collection, the BARR corpus of manually annotated abstracts labelled by domain experts and the BARR-Markyt evaluation platform. A total of 7 teams submitted 25 runs for the two BARR subtasks: (a) the identification of mentions of abbreviations and their definitions and (b) the correct detection of short form-long form pairs. Here we describe the BARR track setting, the obtained results and the methodologies used by participating systems. The BARR task summary, corpus, resources and evaluation tool for testing systems beyond this campaign are available at: http://temu.inab.org .We acknowledge the Encomienda MINETAD-CNIO/OTG Sanidad Plan TL and Open-Minted (654021) H2020 project for funding.Postprint (published version

Information Literacy (IL) teaching and learning: a literature review

The paper is largely based on review of existing literature on teaching and learning Information Literacy (IL), both online and in print. It reports on studies about the teaching and learning of IL in some institutions of higher learning. It also discusses lists of competencies, and descriptions of information literacy programmes and courses. In addition, the paper intends to compare literature on various IL undertakings in the developed countries to IL initiatives being undertaken in some developing countries, particularly, in some African Universities. The paper also discusses some challenges faced in the teaching and learning of IL in some institutions of higher learning. Some of these include technological issues, diverse groups, language and cultural barriers and time and lack of computers. The paper has been able to unearth the dearth of studies on information literacy in Africa and concludes that information on IL is mostly Euro-centric; there is little happening in African countries, except for South Africa where there have a been a number of inititiatives. The paper has demonstrated that Information Literacy is being taken seriously as a module or course at some institutions of higher learning in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa and Malawi, although a lot more needs to be done in terms of facilities and equipment which are vital in inculcating IL skills in students. Keywords: Information literacy, teaching and learning, teaching, literature revie

Evaluating a Department’s Research: Testing the Leiden Methodology in Business and Management

The Leiden methodology (LM), also sometimes called the “crown indicator”, is a quantitative method for evaluating the research quality of a research group or academic department based on the citations received by the group in comparison to averages for the field. There have been a number of applications but these have mainly been in the hard sciences where the data on citations, provided by the ISI Web of Science (WoS), is more reliable. In the social sciences, including business and management, many journals and books are not included within WoS and so the LM has not been tested here. In this research study the LM has been applied on a dataset of over 3000 research publications from three UK business schools. The results show that the LM does indeed discriminate between the schools, and has a degree of concordance with other forms of evaluation, but that there are significant limitations and problems within this discipline

The metric tide: report of the independent review of the role of metrics in research assessment and management

This report presents the findings and recommendations of the Independent Review of the Role of Metrics in Research Assessment and Management. The review was chaired by Professor James Wilsdon, supported by an independent and multidisciplinary group of experts in scientometrics, research funding, research policy, publishing, university management and administration. This review has gone beyond earlier studies to take a deeper look at potential uses and limitations of research metrics and indicators. It has explored the use of metrics across different disciplines, and assessed their potential contribution to the development of research excellence and impact. It has analysed their role in processes of research assessment, including the next cycle of the Research Excellence Framework (REF). It has considered the changing ways in which universities are using quantitative indicators in their management systems, and the growing power of league tables and rankings. And it has considered the negative or unintended effects of metrics on various aspects of research culture. The report starts by tracing the history of metrics in research management and assessment, in the UK and internationally. It looks at the applicability of metrics within different research cultures, compares the peer review system with metric-based alternatives, and considers what balance might be struck between the two. It charts the development of research management systems within institutions, and examines the effects of the growing use of quantitative indicators on different aspects of research culture, including performance management, equality, diversity, interdisciplinarity, and the ‘gaming’ of assessment systems. The review looks at how different funders are using quantitative indicators, and considers their potential role in research and innovation policy. Finally, it examines the role that metrics played in REF2014, and outlines scenarios for their contribution to future exercises

Functional Analysis: Deriving Systems Knowledge From Bibliographic Information Resources

Analyses of particular technology developments provide vital managerial intelligence. Framing of such analyses is key to maximize their managerial value. This paper presents a case analysis of automotive fuel efficiency technologies, posed as a functional analysis, rather than as a technology analysis. This functional perspective provides a systems frame of reference, yielding enhanced managerial knowledge. The case illustrates the use of bibliometric methods to glean systems intelligence from large abstract databases