A case study of Kanban implementation within the Pharmaceutical Supply Chain

The paper explores the implementation of the kanban system, which is a Lean technique, within the Pharmaceutical Supply Chain (PSC). The case study provides insight to the benefits and challenges arising from the application of this technique, within a group of cooperative pharmacists, in Greece. The research questions developed from the review of the literature were tested using evidence from field-based, action research within a pharmaceutical organisation. The reported case study contributes to the longer term debate on assessing the Lean maturity level within the healthcare sector. There are two primary findings: i) that the adoption of kanban system provides a strategic benefit and improves the quality of services. ii) it also provides a basis for a strategy of operational change; it gives the opportunity to the organisation to move away from the current push delivery and logistics systems toward improved logistics strategy models

Leadership that facilitates the successful implementation of Lean Six Sigma

Researchers have identified leadership as a critical success factor for Lean Six Sigma implementation. It is essential to understand leadership behaviours that facilitate the use of Lean Six Sigma. This paper aims to identify leadership styles from the literature that can facilitate Lean Six Sigma implementation, which in turn broaden the current understanding of the suitable leadership styles. Also, the authors aim to explore how leadership styles can enhance Lean Six Sigma operations. The authors systematically reviewed the literature on leadership styles and Lean Six Sigma. The results determined the leadership styles that can enable the use of Lean Six Sigma successfully. These leadership styles are as follows: situational (task-oriented or relation-oriented behaviour), transformational, servant, authentic, empowering, and distributed leadership. The authors provide a better understanding for practitioners and researchers from existing literature on how leaders' behaviours can enhance Lean Six Sigma implementation. It is not clear which style is the most dominant and effective. There is a lack in interpreting how these leadership styles linked to Lean Six Sigma implementation. There is a lack of empirical evidence most of the studies depended on a theoretical base. Very few studies have focused on leadership styles and Six Sigma success; to the best of the authors' knowledge only one paper has studied this. Also, there is scarcity in papers that addressed leadership styles that facilitate Lean Six Sigma implementation. This paper initiates a call to study Lean Six Sigma rather than focus only on either Lean or Six Sigma. This proposition guides future research based on the view that Lean management can share underlying assumptions with Lean Six Sigma characteristics. However, the mean limitation of this review is the use of specific keywords and database to identify studies

Accounting for success and failure: a discursive psychological approach to sport talk

YesIn recent years, constructionist methodologies such as discursive psychology (Edwards & Potter, 1992) have begun to be used in sport research. This paper provides a practical guide to applying a discursive psychological approach to sport data. It discusses the assumptions and principles of discursive psychology and outlines the stages of a discursive study from choice of data through to transcription and analysis. Finally, the paper demonstrates a discursive psychological analysis on sport data where athletes are accounting for success and failure in competition. The analysis demonstrates that for both success and failure, there is an apparent dilution of personal agency, to either maintain their modesty in the case of success or to manage blame when talking about failure. It is concluded that discursive psychology has much to offer sport research as it provides a methodology for in-depth studies of supporting interactions

Council Representative of my committee.

Gabor C. Temes. I have been very honored and privileged to have worked under his supervision and have benefited greatly from his deep intuition for circuits and systems. I wish to thank him for his guidance, patience, and support and for providing an excellent environment for research. Many thanks to Prof. Un-ku Moon. I appreciate his advice and encouragement and many enlightening technical discussions. Special thanks to Prof. Michael E. Kassner for his support and encouragement on my concurrent degree study and research. Also thanks to Prof. Gordon M. Reistad, Prof

Cell-line dependent antiviral activity of sofosbuvir against Zika virus

The recent epidemic of Zika virus (ZIKV) in the Americas and its association with fetal and neurological complications has shown the need to develop a treatment. Repurposing of drugs that are already FDA approved or in clinical development may shorten drug development timelines in case of emerging viral diseases like ZIKV. Initial studies have shown conflicting results when testing sofosbuvir developed for treatment of infections with another Flaviviridae virus, hepatitis C virus. We hypothesized that the conflicting results could be explained by differences in intracellular processing of the compound. We assessed the antiviral activity of sofosbuvir and mericitabine against ZIKV using Vero, A549, and Huh7 cells and measured the level of the active sofosbuvir metabolite by mass spectrometry. Mericitabine did not show activity, while sofosbuvir inhibited ZIKV with an IC50 of ∼4 μM, but only in Huh7 cells. This correlated with differences in intracellular concentration of the active triphosphate metabolite of sofosbuvir, GS-461203 or 007-TP, which was 11–342 times higher in Huh7 cells compared to Vero and A549 cells. These results show that a careful selection of cell system for repurposing trials of prodrugs is needed for evaluation of antiviral activity. Furthermore, the intracellular levels of 007-TP in tissues and cell types that support ZIKV replication in vivo should be determined to further investigate the potential of sofosbuvir as anti-ZIKV compound