Will There Be an Open Sky Again? The Impact on COVID-19 on the Airline Industry

Travel restriction, bans and lock downs imposed by many countries have made air travel almost nonexistent. This has directly impacted the airline industry with more than 80% of the fleet grounded. Dry of passenger revenue, will make survival extremely difficult for the airlines. New strategies will have to be adopted to survive the crisis and to make the airline industry ready for the future

Level of importance attached to competitive intelligence at a mass import retail organization

The purpose of this research was to establish the level of importance attached to competitive intelligence (CI) at a mass import retail organization in South Africa. The rationale of CI is to alert an organization about the current situation as it relates to its business environment and competitors, and how these aspects affect the competitive situation. In this article, the value and significance that CI presents to organizations upon implementation are discussed by focusing upon the need for a competitive strategy, the significance of institutionalizing CI, various organizational structure options and the establishment of a CI culture. A survey was conducted at a mass import retail organization to determine the level of importance attached to CI. A total of 107 employees were randomly selected to participate in the completion of a questionnaire. Based on the results, it was found that this organization practised CI, albeit in an informal manner, and it was concluded that there was a relatively high level of importance attached to CI within this organization. However, areas for improvement were identified and a recommendation was made of implementing a formal CI function within the organization

Maximising the value of knowledge workers

This article focuses on the role of knowledge workers and their contribution to the achievement of an enterprise's objectives. Knowledge workers do not have enough time to keep abreast of new knowledge and need more than motivation to assist with the capturing of tacit knowledge. The purpose of the empirical survey was to determine the role and contribution of knowledge workers to the objectives of a South African technology-oriented company. A high percentage of respondents indicated a positive relationship between a worker's position on the organisational hierarchy and the opportunities for the worker to make knowledge contributions. The metrics applied to measuring the contribution of knowledge workers need to be considered carefully

World Wide Web Robot for Extreme Datamining with Swiss-Tx Supercomputers

This paper discusses the software and hardware issues of designing a highly parallel robot for extreme datamining on the Internet. As a sample application, a World Wide Web server count experiment for Switzerland and Thailand is presented. Our platform of choice is the SwissTx, a supercomputer built from commodity components that runs NT and COMPAQ tru64 UNIX. Hardware and software of this machine are discussed and benchmark results presented. They show that NT is a feasible choice even under the given extreme conditions. Using statistical modelling for optimizing the search process, the inevitable bandwidth problem is reduced to some extent to a computation problem. We suggest that our approach to Web robots is a robust bet for a multitude of future Internet applications which might lead to a large-scale and cost-efficient usage of Web robots

Organizational structure of competitive intelligence activities : a South African case study

To function effectively in an enterprise, clear objectives must be determined for the competitive intelligence (CI) function and it must be established where the CI unit fits into the organizational structure of the company. There are a number of criteria to consider when deciding where to locate the intelligence function. Factors such as a company’s organizational structure and culture should be considered when making this decision. There is very little empirical evidence on how South African enterprises organize their competitive intelligence activities. To answer these questions, a case study of how competitive intelligence is practiced in Automaker Inc. (a multinational company) is presented

Analysis of the citation of Web-based information resources by UNISA academic researchers.

The Web is a powerful, dynamic and flexible information resource interface that fundamentally alters the academic’s research practices and interaction with information due to the additional avenues available to retrieve research and scholarly information. There is a surge in global knowledge production and a massive expansion in scholarly research output. The growth in the availability of fee- and free-based Web information resources, and the ease of access, has led to a phenomenal increase in the use of these information resources. Today’s researcher has virtually unlimited access to a greater number and variety of information resources than ever before (Noam 1997)

Investigating the business value of information management

Research on the effect of information management on organizational performance is an important issue. The primary problem of the business value of information is embedded in the following reasoning: information management creates business value indirectly but creates business costs directly, making the evaluation and measurement of information management and the benefits thereof difficult for organizations. In this study an empirical survey was conducted in ten large South African organizations to establish practices and norms in managing the business value of information management, information management investment and benefits evaluation. The most common criteria considered to be important were the ability to adapt and support business changes and the stability and quality of information management services to the user community

Comparative study of different PWM control scheme for three-phase three-wire shunt active power filter

Instantaneous reactive power theory was the most popular control theory used when dealing with harmonics compensations. In conjunction with the instantaneous theory, switching signal generation techniques plays an important role to ensure the correct compensation signal injected in the system. Therefore, this paper discussed on comparative study of five (5) methods used in instantaneous theory namely; p-q method, modified p-q, d-q method, p-q-r method and vectorial with three (3) types. of signal generation namely; carrier current control, hysteresis current control and space vector modulation control. Continuous reductions of the total harmonics distortion (THD) are expected at the supply current when applied different types of switching technique. The compnrison was examining using MATLAB/Sirnulink (MLS) environment

Scripting language design and the implementation test for PSO-GA hybridizations

This paper introduces a new design of a set of scripting language constructs and the implementation test for the algorithms development. The design of the scripting language is presented in form of syntactic specification and Deterministic Finite Automaton  (DFA). Based on the several algorithms of PSO-GA hybrids that have been developed with the scripting language constructs, the Characters of Code (COC) are measured in order to test the easiness of the  programming language. The results show that across all algorithms, the scripting language is anticipated to enable easy programming which has been presented by the very less number of COC compared to the JAVA programming language. Furthermore, based on observation from repeated experiments, the optimization results of all the algorithms developed with the scripting language are shown to be very accurate within the scale of results generated by JAVA codes.Keywords: rapid algorithm; development; hybridization dynamic; parameterizations; scripting languag

Consumerism: management challenge of consumer protection in national enterprises

Until recently, consumer policy researchers have concentrated almost exclusively on the competitive market, with little attention to the market failure scenario. This study investigates consumer protection behaviour of national enterprises. It does this by exploring the factors which determine or influence consumer policy decisions when the competitive market mechanism is hindered, and the dilemma facing management in such bounded marketing environments. Fundamentally, two basic approaches to structuring consumer protection have been identified. These relate to, (a) private enforcement, ic. market processes, and (b) public enforcement, ic. political processes. These perspectives were systematically collapsed into Hirschman's Exit/Voice theory and explored using qualitative methodology. Our findings did not broadly uphold the basic configuration of the Exit/Voice paradigm. It is intellectually flawed to insist that decisions about improving enterprises' performance on consumer protection should be impelled by strategies based on those dichotomous perspectives. Strengthening means for consumer advocacy or introducing and protecting competition in the hope that they will concomitantly protect consumers can not, in themselves, assure genuine consumer protection. Consumer protection came through as a discretionary agenda item. It is neither exclusively located in the political process nor in the market mechanism. It is a dependent variable whose behaviour is shaped by variations in management practices. At the enterprise-consumer interface, consumer protection becomes an explicit challenge of management. In terms of institutional arrangements for consumer protection, we did not observe any optimal structure. However, we did observe that the differing approaches that management can adopt can be classified and appraised in relation to four variables. These variables are, (i) Sensitivity (pro-active/reactive), (ii) Definition (consumer/company centered), (iii) Measurement (formal/informal) and, (iv) Implementation (tasks/responsibilities). These variables arc not independent. Their interrelationships lead to a method for evaluating the different approaches in terms of management response to the challenge of consumer protection