Disability support services strategic plan 2014 to 2018

The Ministry of Health’s Disability Support Services (DSS) group has developed a four-year Strategic Plan for 2014 to 2018. Summary The plan sets out the vision for Disability Support Services – that disabled people and their families are supported to live the lives they choose – along with some guiding principles that informed the development of the plan. Context for the plan’s development is outlined, including: the strategies and commitments that guided its development information on disability support in New Zealand demographic analysis. It also includes an action plan for the Disability Support Services group. One of the priority areas contained in the plan is the implementation of the Putting People First quality review. The plan was developed with input and guidance from stakeholders to ensure it reflects a shared direction and commitment to the vision and related activities

New Zealand spinal cord impairment action plan 2014–2019

Outlines a vision, purpose, priorities and eight overarching objectives to help ensure the best possible health and wellbeing outcomes for people with spinal cord impairment, enhancing their quality of life and ability to participate in society. Introduction Spinal cord impairment (SCI) is rare but complex. Every year in New Zealand approximately 80 to 130 people are diagnosed with SCI through injury or medical/congenital causes. This affects their lives and those of many others, especially their families and whānau. SCI can occur at any age from birth, during childhood or as an adult. Due to medical advancements most people living with SCI now have a near normal life expectancy, but this brings with it progressive complexity for people and their lifelong self-management

Information Technology Supplier Management in Hospitals

In this study, we developed a document for managing Information Technology suppliers in hospitals. This document is used to ensure the proper management of IT suppliers in the hospital. Products and services in Information Technology have characteristics and specifications that are always up to date, making it difficult for non-IT people to understand. Hospitals whose main business in the health sector is often lack of human resources who understand IT. Observations and interviews were conducted in Indonesian hospital, to identify the characteristics and problems in supplier management. Control Objectives for Information and Related Technologies (COBIT), Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and government regulations on supplier management were reviewed and combined as a benchmark and guidance on how supplier management activities are carried out. The result of the process is a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) document.    The parties involved in the supplier management process have evaluated the SOP document. From the results of the study, it is known that currently, the hospital is still focused on procedures procurement of goods and services that are government regulated. This study proposes some new activities that are not currently done by the hospital

New decision support tools for forest tactical and operational planning

Doutoramento em Engenharia Florestal e dos Recursos Florestais - Instituto Superior de AgronomiaThe economic importance of the forest resources and the Portuguese forest-based industries motivated several studies over the last 15 years, particularly on strategic forest planning. This thesis focuses on the forest planning processes at tactical and operational level (FTOP). These problems relate to harvesting, transportation, storing, and delivering the forest products to the mills. Innovative Operation Research methods and Decision Support Systems (DSS) were developed to address some of these problems that are prevalent in Portugal. Specifically, Study I integrates harvest scheduling, pulpwood assortment, and assignment decisions at tactical level. The solution method was based in problem decomposition, combining heuristics and mathematical programming algorithms. Study II presents a solution approach based on Revenue Management principles for the reception of Raw Materials. This operational problem avoids truck congestion during the operation of pulpwood delivery. Study III uses Enterprise Architecture to design a DSS for integrating the operations performed over the pulpwood supply chain. Study IV tests this approach on a toolbox that handled the complexity of the interactions among the agents engaged on forest planning at regional level. Study V proposes an innovative technological framework that combines forest planning with forest operations' control

Semi-Annual Report to Congress for the Period of April 1, 2014 to September 30, 2014

[Excerpt] I am pleased to submit this Semiannual Report to the Department and the Congress, which highlights the most significant activities and accomplishments of the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) Office of Inspector General (OIG) for the six-month period ending September 30, 2014. The OIG remains committed to promoting the integrity, effectiveness, and efficiency of DOL’s programs and operations. In addition, our investigations continue to combat labor racketeering and organized crime in internal union affairs, employee benefit plans, and labor-management relations. During this reporting period, the OIG issued 19 audit and other reports in which we recommended that $5.1 million in funds be put to better use. Among our many significant findings, we reported the following: The Employee Benefits Security Administration has not provided the guidance and oversight needed to adequately protect more than$1 trillion of plan assets invested in complex trust arrangements and hard-to-value assets held and certified by custodians. The Mine Safety and Health Administration lacked a unified timeliness standard for its laboratories, covering the entire cycle time from collection of samples by mine inspectors to the reporting of results, for tests of underground mine air, gas, and dust samples that are critical to ensuring mine safety and health. Approximately $900,000 of Job Corps funds were misused or wasted because the agency lacked basic internal controls over prepaid debit cards and centrally billed government travel cards used to pay student travel expenses. The Department’s financial management continuity plans did not include a fully developed plan for an acceptable recovery or reconstitution of financial data after a disruption or failure. The OIG’s investigative work also yielded impressive results, with a total of 253 indictments, 249 convictions, and$41.3 million in monetary accomplishments. Highlights include the following: Two Chicago-area women were sentenced to 6 years and 4 years in prison and ordered to pay more than $4.8 million and$4.6 million, respectively, in restitution. This one of the largest fictitious employer UI fraud schemes ever prosecuted in the U.S. A Texas psychologist was sentenced to 3 years in prison and ordered to pay more than $1.8 million in restitution to the Office of Workers’ Compensation Programs for defrauding the Federal Employees’ Compensation Act program. A chiropractor and his wife were sentenced to 8 years and 2 years in prison, respectively, and ordered to pay more than$1.4 million in restitution to the victims of a health care fraud scheme. The wife of a Colombo La Cosa Nostra Crime Family associate was sentenced to 4 years’ probation and ordered to pay $40,000 in restitution after pleading guilty to embezzling from a union benefit plan. These are some of the examples of the exceptional work done by our dedicated OIG staff. I would like to express my gratitude to them for their significant achievements during this reporting period. We are currently working on several important audits for fiscal year 2015, including reviews of Job Corps center safety and the federal Black Lung program. For more details, I invite you to review our audit work plan, which can be accessed at www.oig.dol.gov/workplan/FY2015.pdf. I look forward to continuing to work constructively with the Department and the Congress on our shared goals of identifying improvements to DOL programs and operations and protecting the rights and benefits of workers and retirees

A decision support system for the re-equilibrium of PPP contracts

Public Private Partnership (PPP) contracts tend to have longer contract durations compared to other conventional procurement methods. Due to their prolonged nature, PPP contracts are extremely prone to contract renegotiation along their lifecycles in comparison to other forms of contracts with shorter durations. The common outcomes of the renegotiation process may include: increasing the service charges, increasing the concession period, or paying a lump sum amount to the party of concern in order to maintain a fixed rate of return and keep the return on equity constant. In this research, a framework is developed in order to calculate the renegotiation process outcomes and facilitate the decision making process of choosing the optimum scenario that preserves the rights and the interests of all the stakeholders. This is done using a weighted sum model to calculate the weights and ranks of a number of factors influencing the stakeholders\u27 decisions. A Decision Support System (DSS) is developed with the aid of Microsoft Excel 2013, Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) programming language, and the Precision Tree 5.5 for Excel add-in. The data for the model is obtained from a case study of a wastewater treatment plant in Egypt. The results obtained from the model are close to the ones obtained from the Independent Financial Expert (IFE) of the wastewater treatment plant

Towards Sustainable Development of Nanomanufacturing

Sustainability is a buzz word these days not just among regulatory agencies but even with corporations, as evident by the release of annual sustainability report by a large number of firms. Companies are starting to portray profit making along with corporate environmental responsibility. Nanotechnology and nanomanufacturing which holds a lot of promise for development in a multitude of fields in science and engineering is the new kid on the block and carries a lot of apprehension due to public concern about their potential unwanted side effects that may result in the case of an untoward incident or lack of oversight. This thesis covers the following aspects of nanomanufacturing in light of sustainable development Identifying regulatory needs, Life cycle thinking in evaluating products and use of green methods for nanomanufacturing, Methods for selection of manufacturing processes that cause least harm to the environment, Use of industrial engineering tools for evaluating manufacturing processes at a process step level to identify areas of environmental performance improvement, and Provide guidance to nanomanufacturing facilities in the form of expert opinion to help implement workplace controls

Readiness for E-Tendering in the Construction Sector- Designing a Computer Programme

Development of a country is measured by the number and quality of modern and contemporary projects that have been and are being established. As the construction industry is the nucleus for the development of any country, the stages of each project are tracked and monitored. It was found that the procurement stage has the biggest and most important influence in the successful completion of the project with the desired results. This research aims to eliminate corruption in the procurement process, identify the  additional factors relating to a contractor’s qualification that contribute towards an increase in the quality of the project; designing a computer programme that conducts the tender process electronically to avoid any human contact. The researcher designed a questionnaire which contains a number of factors that would increase the efficiency and quality of the project. The researcher distributed 50 questionnaire forms and received back 46 completed forms. The questionnaire outputs were analyzed by using the SPSS software which can be defined as a software package used in statistical analysis for data. After analyzing the results a nominal group session was held. This consisted of eight employees with technical, financial, legal, and supervisory and IT expertise. The work was collective and many questions were asked. All relevant factors were discussed. It was agreed to cancel three factors only as being irrelevant to the contractor's qualification process. The most significant findings were that if the organizations adopt the E-T system in the tendering process, corruption cases will disappear, the tendering process will be achieved with high level of integrity and transparency, and in order to implement the E-T system, the organization must be ready to change, the employees should have enough courage to adopt the system, and there would be a need for at least one person to play the role of champion/leader

Readiness for E-Tendering in the Construction Sector- Designing a Computer Programme

Development of a country is measured by the number and quality of modern and contemporary projects that have been and are being established. As the construction industry is the nucleus for the development of any country, the stages of each project are tracked and monitored. It was found that the procurement stage has the biggest and most important influence in the successful completion of the project with the desired results. This research aims to eliminate corruption in the procurement process, identify the  additional factors relating to a contractor’s qualification that contribute towards an increase in the quality of the project; designing a computer programme that conducts the tender process electronically to avoid any human contact. The researcher designed a questionnaire which contains a number of factors that would increase the efficiency and quality of the project. The researcher distributed 50 questionnaire forms and received back 46 completed forms. The questionnaire outputs were analyzed by using the SPSS software which can be defined as a software package used in statistical analysis for data. After analyzing the results a nominal group session was held. This consisted of eight employees with technical, financial, legal, and supervisory and IT expertise. The work was collective and many questions were asked. All relevant factors were discussed. It was agreed to cancel three factors only as being irrelevant to the contractor's qualification process. The most significant findings were that if the organizations adopt the E-T system in the tendering process, corruption cases will disappear, the tendering process will be achieved with high level of integrity and transparency, and in order to implement the E-T system, the organization must be ready to change, the employees should have enough courage to adopt the system, and there would be a need for at least one person to play the role of champion/leader