Lean in UK Government : internal efficiency or customer service?

This article draws on service operations and Lean management in considering the relationship between internal service processes and customer service in public sector organisations. It draws on extensive evidence from two case studies of large UK Government departments to illustrate that whilst public service organisations recognise that methodologies such as Lean improves their internal processes to date they have not linked this to value or customer service. This article presents a model which shows that public service organisations are driven towards internal operations improvement due to the efficiency agenda leading to a process focus, rather than a market driven approach focusing on the customer. This article argues that although this starting point is not necessarily bad in order to sustain improvement after initial gains there is a need to focus on both process and customer. This article therefore contributes and extends the discussion on the adaptation of Lean for a public sector context

Metal Organic Vapour Phase Epitaxy for the Growth of Semiconductor Structures and Strained Layers

The technological development of semiconductor materials started in the period following the second world war. In the electronics industry, the first transistors were fabricated from germanium, later from silicon. It was soon realized that also the AIII–BV or AII – BVI materials (most often simply termed III–V or II–VI materials) exhibited semiconductive behaviour. The energy difference between the valence band and the conduction band made them candidates for electronic devices which can absorb or emit phonons over a range of frequencies (wavelengths). Direct bandgap materials such as gallium arsenide (GaAs) were suitable for devices in which efficient electron-hole recombinations could take place and high efficiency light emitting devices were a possibility. Stimulated emission was first demonstrated in 1970 with the preparation of the single heterojunction and the double heterojunction laser diodes. These devices are multiple layer structures with a thin waveguide region contained between layers of larger bandgap and different refractive index (for confinement of carriers and radiation, respectively, in the active region). A basic laser diode chip consists of two parallel facets, (110) planes, which are prepared by cleavage and act as mirrors. The Fabry-Perot cavity is defined by these two parallel facets and the passive (cladding) layers. In the longitudinal direction current definition is by mesa etching and/or stripe-contact metallization

The effects of match uncertainty and bargaining on labor market outcomes: evidence from firm and worker specific estimates

Expected productivity, Random matching, Two-tier frontier, C2, J3, J15, J41,