Logistics outsourcing and its impact on businesses: a study into the changing trends in the 3PL market

This research addresses the question, what are the challenges for 3PL providers to fulfil shippers’ expectations in outsourcing logistic functions and what are the trends from 2012 to 2020 in the 3PL industry globally. 3PL global and domestic markets are constantly changing. As a consequence of this, it is absolutely necessary for both users and providers of 3PL services to ensure that they are well-prepared in terms of the strategies, procedures, and technologies available to them. This can be accomplished in part by bridging the gap between what the shippers desire and what service providers offer. Hence, this paper attempts to broadly identify and categorize the challenges faced by 3PL companies and discover potential gaps for future research. This research explores the findings of The Annual Third-Party Logistics Study reports from 2012 to 2020 as secondary data published by 3PLStudy website which aims to determine trends in shipper’s expectations for 3PL services and to identify critical shipper and 3PL viewpoints on the utilisation and provision of logistics services. Furthermore, an in-deep interview by senior manager is conducted to support the study. The documents were examined through a NVivo software. This research reports findings that the use of 3PLs allows the shippers to concentrate on its core capabilities. The study shows that the majority of shippers and 3PL providers have a positive relationship. They agreed that their relationships generally have been successful. The study also reports activities that are more transactional, repetitive, and operational in nature tend to be the ones that are outsourced the most frequently. The activities such as domestic transportation, international transportation, warehousing, freight forwarding, and customs brokerage are the most common ones to be contracted out to a third party. However, an IT gap has grown significantly. Shippers in general are looking to their third-party logistics providers for needed IT technologies. Shippers and their 3PL providers are increasingly forming significant partnerships and collaborating to achieve supply chain objectives. It would appear that both sides have a much-heightened awareness of the objectives they are working toward, as well as the ways in which the accessibility of data and the application of technology might assist them in achieving those objectives

Site-level Resource Efficiency Analysis

To achieve agreed targets for reducing global carbon emissions, industry must become more resource-efficient. To this end, two viable strategies exist: energy efficiency and material efficiency. Despite their inherent interdependence, industry continues to treat these two strategies as isolated pursuits, providing in the process only a partial insight into the potential of resource efficiency. To resolve this disconnect, this thesis attempts to develop and apply tools that help integrate industrial energy and material efficiency analyses. Three areas of research are explored. The first is concerned with a fundamental component of industrial performance: efficiency benchmarks. No agreed-upon metric exists to measure the efficiency with which the sector trans- forms both energy and materials – that is, how resource-efficient they are. This thesis applies exergy – a well-established method to consolidate energy and materials into a single metric – to a case study of the global steel industry in 2010. Results show that this exergy-based metric provides a suitable proxy to capture the interactions between energy and materials. By comparing energy and material efficiency options on an equal footing, this metric encourages the recovery of material by-products – an intervention excluded from traditional energy efficiency metrics. To realise resource efficiency opportunities, individual industry firms must be able to identify them at actionable time-frames and scopes. Doing this hinges on understanding resources flows through entire systems, the most detailed knowledge of which resides in control data. No academic study was found to exploit control data to construct an integrated picture of resources that is representative of real operations. In the second research area, control data is extracted to track the resource flows and efficiency of a basic oxygen steel-making plant from TataSteel. This second case study highlights the plant’s material efficiency options during operations. It does so by building close-to-real-time Sankey diagrams of resource flows (measured in units of exergy) for the entire plant and its constituent processes. Without the support of effective policies the new exergy approach is unlikely to be widely adopted in industry. By collating evidence from interviews and policy documents, the third area explores why the European Union’s industrial energy and emissions policies do not incentivise material efficiency. Results suggest several contributing factors, including: the inadequacy of monitored indicators; an imposed policy lock-in; and the lack of a designated industry lobby and high-level political buy-in. Policy interventions are then proposed to help integrate material efficiency into energy and climate agendas. The European Union’s limited agency stresses the need for Member States and industry to drive the move to a low-carbon industry in the short-term.Emerson Electric sponsored my PhD. Emerson Electric is an American multinational corporation headquartered in Ferguson, Missouri, United States

Acción colectiva en la gestión de recursos hídricos y adaptación al cambio climático en la Microcuenca Apalilí en el año 2012

La presente investigación tiene como objetivo caracterizar la acción colectiva en la gestión del recurso hídrico frente a las variaciones climáticas en la Microcuenca Apalilí ubicada en la Subcuenca Waswalí. El tipo de estudio fue descriptivo, de diseño transversal o transeccional, con enfoque cuali-cuantitativo. Las comunidades estudiadas fueron: Sitio Viejo, Ocotal Espeso, Fuente Pura, Palsila y Los Calpules. Las variables medidas fueron acción colectiva para la gestión del recurso hídrico de consumo humano/alimento, uso doméstico, agricultura/regadío, agroindustria y ganadería así mismo, el capital social vinculado a la acción colectiva sobre el medio ambiente; de manera que se pueda visualizar las formas de cooperación, organización y participación que existe en las comunidades de estudio. Para la obtención de la muestra se utilizó el método Finite Population Correction (FPC), el cual fue de 77 viviendas encuestadas a los jefes de hogares. Para recopilar los datos se aplicaron entrevistas a los líderes comunitarios y encuestas a los jefes de hogares. El procesamiento de la información se realizó en las hojas Excel. La metodología utilizada fue: revisión bibliográfica e información secundaria, fotografías y la observación directa en campo. Los resultados indican que la acción colectiva para la gestión del agua en los distintos usos, ha tenido mayor relevancia en el de consumo/alimento y doméstico a diferencia de los usos de agricultura/regadío, agroindustria y ganadería, donde las acciones en conjunto han sido minoritarias, por tanto no existe un manejo a nivel de microcuenca y la organización de los CAPS, solo se limita al manejo para consumo humano/alimento. Ante los efectos del cambio climático el uso que más ha afectado es el de consumo humano/alimento y la principal medida tomada por la población es la búsqueda de fuentes alternativas realizándolas de manera aislad

Social class and university graduates’ overqualification: testing two mediated relationships

[EN] University graduates’ overqualification (i.e., having more education, qualification and/or skills than one’s job requires) has important negative consequences. However, much less is known about its antecedents. This represents an important gap in the literature. In order to fill this gap, the goal of this study is to test a mediational model on the antecedents of university graduates’ overqualification (OQ). We posit that social class is negatively related to OQ through two mediational links: a) via social capital, and b) via social capital and tolerance towards OQ. The results obtained in a sample of 144 university graduates provided support for the second mediational link, so that social class was positively related to social capital, which in turn was negatively related to tolerance towards OQ, which in turn was positively related to graduates’ OQ. The results obtained uncover some of the antecedents of OQ and suggest that increasing social capital may be a way to decrease graduates’ OQ.This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and the Spanish Research Agency [PSI2013-47195-R]http://ocs.editorial.upv.es/index.php/HEAD/HEAD18Gonzalez-Roma, V.; Hernandez, A.; Gamboa, J.; Tomas, I. (2018). Social class and university graduates’ overqualification: testing two mediated relationships. Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 1-8. https://doi.org/10.4995/HEAD18.2018.80351563857

Flow Percolation in non homogeneous Hele-Shaw flows

The wetting front zone where water invades and advances into an initially dry porous material plays a crucial role in solute transport through many environmental flows, such as the unsaturated zone. The leaching of chemicals by wetting fronts seems influenced by two major factors, namely: the irregularity of the fronts and the heterogeneity in the distribution of chemicals, both of which have been described using fractal techniques. This works presents an experimental and theoretical framework for studying the physical interplay between a stationary wetting front of fractal dimension D with different porous materials. Simple wetting experiments are easy to compare with theoretical studies defining the physical interations between a stationary wetting front of maximum fractal dimension D and a multifractal distribution of chemicals around it with a singularity spectrum f( ). If D1 is the entropy dimension of the distribution and 0 is the point where f() attains its maximum value, then, as revealed by mathematical analysis, the fractal curve must have a fractal dimension D equal to or greater than the entropy dimension D1 of the distribution for a positive amount of mass to be accommodated inside it. Also, 0 D constitutes a scaling exponent for the likely mass inside an " -covering of the curve reflecting the potential for leaching on the sole basis of the physical interplay between the wetting front and the surrounding chemical molecules. Different shapes of the multifractal D(c) curves are compare

Instructional factors and over-education of university graduates

[EN] The aim of this study is to test the role of the level of generic competences developed during University studies and the professional and practice orientation of instruction (PPOI) in the prediction of graduates’ initial vertical fit and change in vertical fit over an 8-year period. The study sample comprised 334 graduates who finished their degrees two years before they were interviewed for the first time (Time 1). Four and eight years later they were interviewed again (Times 2 and 3, respectively). All of them were employed at Times 1, 2 and 3. Hypotheses were tested by means of Latent Growth Curve Analysis. The results showed that only PPOI was positively and significantly related to graduates’ rate of change in vertical fit over time, meaning that the rate of change of graduates who received a more professional and practice-oriented instruction was faster than the rate of change of graduates who received a less professional and practice-oriented instruction.Gonzalez-Roma, V.; Hernandez, A.; Gamboa, J. (2015). Instructional factors and over-education of university graduates. En 1ST INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON HIGHER EDUCATION ADVANCES (HEAD' 15). Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 57-60. https://doi.org/10.4995/HEAd15.2015.423OCS576

Death receptor 5 expression is inversely correlated with prostate cancer progression.

Prostate carcinoma (PCa) is one of the most common cancers in men. Prostate-specific antigen (PSA) has been widely used to predict the outcome of PCa and screening with PSA has resulted in a decline in mortality. However, PSA is not an optimal prognostic tool as its sensitivity may be too low to reduce morbidity and mortality. Consequently, there is a demand for additional robust biomarkers for prostate cancer. Death receptor 5 (DR5) has been implicated in the prognosis of several cancers and it has been previously shown that it is negatively regulated by Yin Yang 1 (YY1) in prostate cancer cell lines. The present study investigated the clinical significance of DR5 expression in a prostate cancer patient cohort and its correlation with YY1 expression. Immunohistochemical analysis of protein expression distribution was performed using tissue microarray constructs from 54 primary PCa and 39 prostatic intraepithelial neoplasia (PIN) specimens. DR5 expression was dramatically reduced as a function of higher tumor grade. By contrast, YY1 expression was elevated in PCa tumors as compared with that in PIN, and was increased with higher tumor grade. DR5 had an inverse correlation with YY1 expression. Bioinformatic analyses corroborated these data. The present findings suggested that DR5 and YY1 expression levels may serve as progression biomarkers for prostate cancer

Migración internacional, territorios y sujetos migrantes del Estado de México (pdf)

Compilación sobre migración mexiquense a los Estado Unidos, origen rural y urbano, genero, complejidad del proceso y condiciones laborales.La migración internacional se ha incrementado en términos absolutos, esto quizá no resulta sorprendente, sin embargo, llama la atención que las migraciones modernas aumentaran en climas sociales tan hostiles. Hasta la Primera Guerra Mundial las inmigraciones masivas ocurrieron “sin restricciones” (visas, cuotas o barreras de seguridad); después de la Segunda Guerra Mundial esto cambió y, donde antes predominaban las acciones de reclutamiento y bienvenida a los recién llegados, ahora reinan el control y la restricción. En la actualidad, los países receptores mantienen posturas restrictivas y selectivas de la fuerza de trabajo que conviene “dejar” entrar a su territorio. Hay una generalización de políticas de control de flujos, restricciones sistemáticas a entradas y permanencias, de hecho para muchos gobiernos, este control se erige como preocupación preeminente.UAE

Multiple-bead assay for the differential serodiagnosis of neglected human cestodiases: Neurocysticercosis and cystic echinococcosis

Background: Neurocysticercosis (NCC), and cystic echinococcosis (CE) are two neglected diseases caused by cestodes, co-endemic in many areas of the world. Imaging studies and serological tests are used in the diagnosis of both parasitic diseases, but cross-reactions may confound the results of the latter. The novel multiplex bead-based assay with recombinant antigens has been reported to increases the diagnostic accuracy of serological techniques. Methodology: We set-up an immunoassay based on the multiplex bead-based platform (MBA), using the rT24H (against Cysticercus cellulosae, causing cysticercosis) and r2B2t (against Echinococcus granulosus sensu lato, causing CE) recombinant antigens, for simultaneous and differential diagnosis of these infections. The antigens were tested on 356 sera from 151 patients with CE, 126 patients with NCC, and 79 individuals negative for both diseases. Specificity was calculated including sera from healthy donors, other neurological diseases and the respective NCC or CE sera counterpart. The diagnostic accuracy of this assay was compared with two commercial ELISA tests, Novalisa and Ridascreen, widely used in the routine diagnosis of cysticercosis and CE, respectively. Main findings: For the diagnosis of NCC, sensitivity ranged from 57.94-63.49% for the rT24H-MBA, and 40.48-46.03% for Novalisa ELISA depending on exclusion or inclusion of sera having equivocal results on ELISA from the analysis; specificities ranged from 90.87-91.30% and 70.43-76.96%, respectively. AUC values of the ROC curve were 0.783 (rT24H) and 0.619 (Novalisa) (p-value < 0.001). For the diagnosis of CE, the sensitivity of the r2B2t-MBA ranged from 68.87-69.77% and of Ridascreen ELISA from 50.00-57.62%; specificities from 92.47-92.68% and from 74.15-80.98%, respectively. AUC values were 0.717 and 0.760, respectively. Conclusions/Significance: Overall, the recombinant antigens tested with the bead-based technology showed better diagnostic accuracy than the commercial assays, particularly for the diagnosis of NCC. The possibility of testing the same serum sample simultaneously for the presence of antibodies against both antigens is an added value particularly in seroprevalence studies for cysticercosis linked to control programs in endemic areas where these two parasites coexist.MJP received grants to support this study: “PI17CIII/00019” from ISCIII-AESI and "CIBER Enfermedades infecciosas CB21/13/00120" from ISCIII. https://www.isciii.es. BGB received a Predoctoral Fellowship award for career development by Fundación Rafael Folch (2021/E02). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.S