Utilising the Surging Potential of E-commerce: A Case of Hour Glass Supply Chain

Decade of nineties saw two significant developments with far reaching implications; bringing down of iron curtain and the exponential growth of “Internet”. However, the impact of the latter has been phenomenal. It would not be wrong to say that Internet has redesigned the way we live and undertake economic activities. Ever since the launch of Windows 95 and Intel Pentium chip, the Internet has grown at an exponential rate, never witnessed before in any industry. At the turn of the century as many as 387 million people were hooked to Internet [UNCTAD (2003), p. 2]. As this bubble of Internet expanded, it started engulfing every aspect of life and business. The sheer difference of processes on Internet resulted in new terms as e-commerce and e-business to be coined up. In five years since 1995, Internet grew from simple information searching to controlling under sea robots. The biggest market penetration however, has been online retail stores and business to business (B2B) commerce. Online shopping has its potential because of its easy access by the customers and B2B commerce has its attraction in the savings achieved by implementing e-processes. Another advantage of doing business on Internet is the audit trail, with which any dubious transactions, from anywhere in the world could be traced back to its originator. In the beginning of this decade, the e-commerce was estimated to the tune of US$354 billion. This is slated to expand to US$ 9 trillion in just five years and continuing at the same pace through this decade, see Figure 1. This paper looks into the exponential growth of e-commerce, different sectors and e-supply chains. It develops a new concept in e-supply chain—Hour Glass Supply Chain (HGSC); detailing how this e-supply chain can help in the transition of Pakistan’s economy into e-economy. In this context this paper also elaborates as how

Towards Good Governance: Developing an e-Government

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), today, are seen as the miracle medicines for curing a nation from the ails of corruption, mismanagement, poor governance, inflation, monopolies, business stagnation, illiteracy and so on. One important aspect concerns development and implementation of ICTs for the EGovernance. E-Governance holds enormous potential in terms of improving service delivery and efficiency, better response to business and citizen needs, and provision of affordable government services. Defined as “Government’s use of technology, particularly web-based Internet applications, to enhance the access to and delivery of government information and service to citizens, business partners, employees, other agencies, and government entities [McClure (2000)]” or “the continuous optimisation of service delivery, constituency participation, and governance by transforming internal and external relationships through technology, the Internet, and new media [Gartner Group (2000)]”. The e-government makes it possible for a government’s different departments and organisations to have direct access to grassroots and vice-versa. It cuts down the costs and delivery times for the government and simultaneously becomes a tool for check and balances against the government. The e-government in short is a tool for good governance—transparency, participation, regulations and accountability

Decube Framework: An Introduction to a New Energy Modelling and Planning Process for Sustainable Utilisation of Pakistan’s Energy Resources

Sustainable Development—which ensures that the use of resources and the environment today does not restrict their use by future generations [UNEP (2007)]—is the most significant challenge facing today’s governments. Consequently, the notion of Sustainable Development [Matthews (1979)] has become a fundamental part of any policy and decision carried out at national and international levels. If the current acceleration of human advancement is not reduced it poses the biggest threat to long term sustainability of the entire globe, arising from the development and industrialisation in the twenty-first century, dwarfing the impact of twentieth century. This further compounds the work of policy-makers faced with the challenge of fast tracking the economies of developing countries. Since the Industrial Revolution energy has become the lifeline of economic development and progress. This led to exponential increase in use of fossil fuels. However, rampant, unchecked and accelerated burning of fossil fuels in the twentieth century has resulted disastrous and long term damaging effects to earth’s climate. Consequently, world has begun this century with the aim “to develop a coherent and practical approach to climate change [World Energy Council (2007)].” “Safe, environmentally sound and economically viable energy pathway that will sustain human progress into the distant future is clearly imperative [WCEW (1987)]” to achieve the above goal. As a result environment has become an integral part of any energy system and policy. On the whole today’s energy policies and decisions have to be carefully woven into an intricate web traversing the boundaries of economy, environment and society

Utilising the Surging Potential of E-commerce: A Case of Hour Glass Supply Chain

Decade of nineties saw two significant developments with far reaching implications; bringing down of iron curtain and the exponential growth of “Internet”. However, the impact of the latter has been phenomenal. It would not be wrong to say that Internet has redesigned the way we live and undertake economic activities. Ever since the launch of Windows 95 and Intel Pentium chip, the Internet has grown at an exponential rate, never witnessed before in any industry. At the turn of the century as many as 387 million people were hooked to Internet [UNCTAD (2003), p. 2]. As this bubble of Internet expanded, it started engulfing every aspect of life and business. The sheer difference of processes on Internet resulted in new terms as e-commerce and e-business to be coined up. In five years since 1995, Internet grew from simple information searching to controlling under sea robots. The biggest market penetration however, has been online retail stores and business to business (B2B) commerce. Online shopping has its potential because of its easy access by the customers and B2B commerce has its attraction in the savings achieved by implementing e-processes. Another advantage of doing business on Internet is the audit trail, with which any dubious transactions, from anywhere in the world could be traced back to its originator

Carbon negative platform chemicals from waste using enhanced geothermal systems

Australia has ample geothermal resource, however, it is of low-grade heat and requires Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS). Integrating heat recovered via EGS into a lignocellulosic biorefinery opens the avenue for countless opportunities in biomass to products industries. In this study, a biorefinery is modelled that uses heat from a supercritical C

Treatment of flue-gas impurities for liquid absorbent-based post-combustion CO2 capture processes

This chapter discusses the importance of flue-gas treatment and the effect of its impurities on post-combustion CO2 capture (PCC) process performance. Important consequences of nonoptimized flue-gas treatment include atmospheric emissions, amine degradation, extra maintenance requirements through corrosion or fly ash deposition, and waste handling. Each of these areas is strongly dependent on the others. We briefly describe existing flue-gas separation technologies and compare them to the requirements of PCC. Further pretreatment technologies are suggested to improve the composition and thereby the properties of the flue gas entering the PCC plant. For optimal plant operation, the overall process from boiler to atmosphere and waste needs to be analyzed holistically, because: certain approaches can increase efficiency when treating multiple contaminants compared with treating each component separately;most "cleaning" steps influence or generate other compounds that could reduce the performance of the process chain;all costs associated with the treatment chain increase production costs, with little or no increase in value. © 2016 Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved

Biosynthetic organic solar cell biorefinery to fulfil Australian baseload power demands

Renewable energy technologies are fundamental to mitigating climate change. However, the intermittent nature associated with wind and solar technologies is the biggest hurdle to their implementation in baseload grid. The other two issues are incorporation of fossil fuel derived materials in their synthesis and end-of-life recycling. These issues for solar panels have been addressed here. In this study, for the first time, a pathway for the incorporation of renewable organic materials in the synthesis of organic solar cells has been developed. While this novel biorefinery concept has been developed for Australia, it is just as applicable in other regions. In this concept, 650,000 metric tons of non-food bio-waste is consumed for the production of organic materials that manufacture solar cells with 14 GW nameplate capacity, annually. In the State of Victoria (Australia) this is sufficient for 2 GW of baseload capacity. In this baseload 12 GW is earmarked for electrolytic hydrogen production to generate 2 GW of fuel cell based power for 18 h, daily, at 50% roundtrip efficiency. The land area required for such a 2 GW baseload solar farm is 200 km2. These results show that less than 300,000 km2 of area (0.2% of Earth's surface) is needed to transition the entire planet's power grid to solar baseload and 150 biorefineries can produce enough organic solar panels to achieve this transition in ten years. At their end-of-life, these solar panels are easier to recycle, when compared to silicon solar panels due to their organic materials. © 2023 IEEE