Roles Played by the Governments on Agricultural Logistics Operations during the COVID-19 Pandemic and Lockdown. A Systematic Literature Review

This paper documents the roles played by governments in agricultural logistics operations during the global COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown. Specifically, the paper reports on the roles played by the Chinese Government as a case study for developed countries and the roles played by the East African countries’ governments. Systematic literature review was carried for existing literature published between December 2019 and June 2021. Hence, the study conducted systematically by reviewing related literature on roles played by governments in agricultural logistics operations during the global COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown. The paper found that every government has tried to put efforts to ensure the movement of agricultural products within and across the supply chain partners including exemption of food delivery trucks from road restrictions, fining some price-gouging businesses who seemed to make food less affordable; establishing measures to ensure availability of supplies of agricultural inputs for production, provision of technical services and financial support, introduction of robot delivery and exemptions from Value Added Tax (VAT) to agricultural products and related inputs. This study is review in nature and it based on China and East Africa countries only from December, 2019 to June 2021. So, empirical study is needed on this study. Also, adding study period could improve the quality of results. The study make immense contribution to the existing literature on the role of government in enhancing agricultural logistics amidst global supply chain disruption

The Impact of Additive Manufacturing Technologies on Industrial Spare Parts Strategies

The paper aims to investigate potential benefits and the applicability of additive manufacturing (AM) technologies for spare parts management in the automotive industry. Research results contribute to a gap in literature on strategic impact of AM technologies on the automotive after sales business. Firstly, the paper investigates the general validity of AM in the spare parts industry by utilising a working hypothesis which assumes that AM technologies will have a strategic impact on the automotive aftermarket. Secondly, interacting market partici-pants and their relation to potential applications of AM are explored. The research is exploratory in nature and employs a multi-case research approach. The analysis identified potential benefits in the automotive aftermarket to transform this business by providing individualised spare parts on demand and on location without a necessity for expensive tooling. However, the research also revealed that neither concepts are technically feasible from today’s point of view. Nevertheless, additive technologies entail advantages as outlined in this paper that will affect the automotive aftermarket in the future. The paper summarises five findings that can support research in the area

A Collection of Technical Papers

Papers presented at the 6th Space Logistics Symposium covered such areas as: The International Space Station; The Hubble Space Telescope; Launch site computer simulation; Integrated logistics support; The Baikonur Cosmodrome; Probabalistic tools for high confidence repair; A simple space station rescue vehicle; Integrated Traffic Model for the International Space Station; Packaging the maintenance shop; Leading edge software support; Storage information management system; Consolidated maintenance inventory logistics planning; Operation concepts for a single stage to orbit vehicle; Mission architecture for human lunar exploration; Logistics of a lunar based solar power satellite scenario; Just in time in space; NASA acquisitions/logistics; Effective transition management; Shuttle logistics; and Revitalized space operations through total quality control management

Improving the Management of Global Manufacturing Ramp-ups

All trade becomes more international and the business environment is under constant change. The rapid global ramp-up of new products is becoming a more important success factor from the point of view of the entire product life cycle. The target of this study is to offer methods to improve a case company’s global ramp-up procedures and to develop new practices to solve the most typical challenges in those projects. The literature review presents the relevant theory concerning local and global ramp-ups. The main source of the theoretical information was literature covering the areas of new product introduction, project management and multi-cultural leadership. The field of study concerning the ramp-ups is relatively young, but offers a moderate amount of practices and examples. The field of global ramp-ups on the other hand cannot yet afford much, but is under growing interest of researchers. This is a case study whose research subject is a multinational corporation of electrical engineering. The ramp-up practices and procedures used by the company have been studied using interviews, internal documents and a questionnaire sent to the employees with ramp-up experience. The objective was to find methods to develop the company’s current global ramp-up model with the help of own observations and solutions offered by the literature. The disturbances and challenges mentioned in the literature review correspond well with the observations concerning the company’s earlier projects. Only the mutual weighting is different. Meanwhile the theoretical solutions cannot be seen to be perfectly suitable for the company. This is due to the industry specific suggestions, special characteristics of the factories and major benefits resulting from local adaptation. It was detected that during a global ramp-up there is a strong need for transferring knowledge and information between the different factories. The literature concerning global manufacturing ramp-ups should underline the observed management related aspects much better. The recommendations for the case company focus on solutions to improve cooperation between the projects, methods to improve international relationships and a suggestion to develop a standardized start-up process for the international projects

The State of the Art of Information Integration in Space Applications

This paper aims to present a comprehensive survey on information integration (II) in space informatics. With an ever-increasing scale and dynamics of complex space systems, II has become essential in dealing with the complexity, changes, dynamics, and uncertainties of space systems. The applications of space II (SII) require addressing some distinctive functional requirements (FRs) of heterogeneity, networking, communication, security, latency, and resilience; while limited works are available to examine recent advances of SII thoroughly. This survey helps to gain the understanding of the state of the art of SII in sense that (1) technical drivers for SII are discussed and classified; (2) existing works in space system development are analyzed in terms of their contributions to space economy, divisions, activities, and missions; (3) enabling space information technologies are explored at aspects of sensing, communication, networking, data analysis, and system integration; (4) the importance of first-time right (FTR) for implementation of a space system is emphasized, the limitations of digital twin (DT-I) as technological enablers are discussed, and a concept digital-triad (DT-II) is introduced as an information platform to overcome these limitations with a list of fundamental design principles; (5) the research challenges and opportunities are discussed to promote SII and advance space informatics in future

A Globalised Vulnerability: Re-Presenting the Labouring Body of Ireland\u27s Newly Industrialised Landscape

Situated in the context of globalisation in the Republic of Ireland, this ethnographically informed practice-based thesis addresses the critical relationship between visual arts practice, curatorship, the historical representation of labour, industrialised space and contemporary global labour practices. Drawing on audio and visual ethnographic material generated in my fieldsite - the Hewlett-Packard Manufacturing and Research complex in Leixlip, Ireland, together with the resulting installation and publication titled The Breathing Factory, it further investigates the dissemination of such epistemologies, the term ‘re-representation\u27 being deployed as a reflexive gesture in acknowledgement of such critical re-contextualisations

Foreign Direct Investment as an Entry Mode. An Application in Emerging Economies.

This dissertation examines the determinants of foreign investment entry modes in Central and Eastern Europe during transition. Utilizing various theoretical bases in industrial organization and strategy, it attempts to distill a better understanding of the ownership choice between joint ventures and wholly owned subsidiaries and the establishment mode choice between acquisitions and green-field investments. In deciding about foreign entry mode, several factors at firm, industry and host country level need to be taken into account. The analysis reveals the crucial role played by technology and sales assets, international and operational experience, uncertainty and global strategic motivations in determining the complex entry mode decision. The dissertation also includes four case studies that focus on the foreign investment decision process. Overall, the study represents an effort towards the larger objective of contributing to a more holistic understanding of the discriminatory forces that drive foreign entry mode.