Spatial water quality assessment of Langat River Basin (Malaysia) using environmetric techniques

This study investigates the spatial water quality pattern of seven stations located along the main Langat River. Environmetric methods, namely, the hierarchical agglomerative cluster analysis (HACA), the discriminant analysis (DA), the principal component analysis (PCA), and the factor analysis (FA), were used to study the spatial variations of the most significant water quality variables and to determine the origin of pollution sources. Twenty-three water quality parameters were initially selected and analyzed. Three spatial clusters were formed based on HACA. These clusters are designated as downstream of Langat river, middle stream of Langat river, and upstream of Langat River regions. Forward and backward stepwise DA managed to discriminate six and seven water quality variables, respectively, from the original 23 variables. PCA and FA (varimax functionality) were used to investigate the origin of each water quality variable due to land use activities based on the three clustered regions. Seven principal components (PCs) were obtained with 81% total variation for the high-pollution source (HPS) region, while six PCs with 71% and 79% total variances were obtained for the moderate-pollution source (MPS) and low-pollution source (LPS) regions, respectively. The pollution sources for the HPS and MPS are of anthropogenic sources (industrial, municipal waste, and agricultural runoff). For the LPS region, the domestic and agricultural runoffs are the main sources of pollution. From this study, we can conclude that the application of environmetric methods can reveal meaningful information on the spatial variability of a large and complex river water quality data

The awareness of lean manufacturing implemented practices in SME in Sabah State: TQM And TPM practices approach

This study aims to evaluate the awareness of implemented practices that already applied and the implementation of lean manufacturing practice of Total Quality Management (TQM) and Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) on Small Medium Enterprise (SME) companies in Sabah. Regarding the implementation of TQM and TPM practices of lean manufacturing, this study evaluates the awareness implementation of lean manufacturing practices TQM and TPM among manufacturing company located in Sabah before analyzing the respondent survey data. As to know better the awareness of TQM and TPM practices, a study of the awareness of lean manufacturing implemented practices was conducted which to identify the practices that already been implement and the pillars practices that highly and lowest implemented to the SME’s companies in term of TQM and TPM practices. The scope of this study has covered the manufacturing company of drinking manufacturing industry that is actively operating in Sabah, specifically on Small Medium Enterprise (SME) companies. The methodology used for the study was by survey questionnaire which contains open and closed ended questions, sent out to desired respondents. The outcomes of the analysed data were created using descriptive statistics by explaining the trends in dataset and Cronbach’s Alpha to test the internal reliability of the item. This study finds significant evident of the implementation of lean manufacturing and its practices among SME’s drinking manufacturing companies in Sabah, as well as the awareness implementation of lean manufacturing practices with a statistical value