Change management and implementation of total productive maintenance: an exploratory study of Malaysian manufacturing companies

This study examines the effects of change management towards the implementation of productivity and quality improvement programs through the concept of Total Productive Maintenance (TPM), in manufacturing firms in Malaysia. The factors measured are management commitment, training and education, employee empowerment, team culture and company policies and goals for change management. Autonomous maintenance and planned maintenance factors were used to measure TPM. The findings of the study provide empirical evidence that change management factors significantly enhances the extent of TPM implementatio

The Effect of Service Quality and Corporate Image on Student Satisfaction and Loyalty in TVET Higher Learning Institutes (HLIS)

The 11th Malaysia Plan has emphasised that TVET HLIs is expected to increase the number of enrolment, improve quantity and quality of graduate to meet industry demand. This is not an easy task.  In a competitive higher learning sector, previous researches revealed that TVET institutes is facing challenges such as service quality and image issue which could have effect the level of student satisfaction and loyalty. Thus, the main objective of this research is to measure the linkages of service quality, corporate image, student satisfaction and loyalty in one framework for TVET HLIs. Stimulus- Organism- Response (SOR) model is adapted to conceptualise the relationship between the constructs. Six hypotheses have been developed. The scope of study is focus on student from TVET HLIs under higher education institutes of Council of Trust for the People (MARA). Since this study adapted quantitative method, a set of questionnaire was used for data collection. 398 data were collected and analysed using SPSS and PLS-SEM. The measurement model indicated that the measurement items are reliable and valid. The structural model indicates that there is a direct and significance effect between service quality, corporate image, student satisfaction and student loyalty. Thus, all hypotheses are supported. This research suggested that future research to investigate the mediating effect in the research framework and the scope of study to be extended to other TVET HLIs

Elemental and physical effect of carbon from date's frond after activation by phosphoric acid

Date frond, a low-cost agricultural by-product abundant in Saudi Arabia was used as a precursor for the production of porous carbons by chemical activation using phosphoric acid. The developed surface morphology was studied using thermogravimetry analysis (TGA), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and single point BET surface area. The result obtained from TGA indicates major weight loss is during heating before 400 °C. In this study, thus this temperature was chosen to carbonize the date frond after the chemical activation using phosphoric acid (H3PO4) at various concentrations. FTIR results show that the sample is successfully converted from raw material to pure high surface area carbon. This study also shows that chemical activation at 60% H3PO4 gives the highest surface area of 1138.0 m2·g-1. Field emission scanning microscope/energy dispersive X-ray Spectroscopy (FESEM/EDAX) on the other hand shows that chemical activation will wash away some minerals during activation to create the high surface area activated carbon

Comparative analysis on bayesian classification for breast cancer problem

The problem of imbalanced class distribution or small datasets is quite frequent in certain fields especially in medical domain. However, the classical Naive Bayes approach in dealing with uncertainties within medical datasets face with the difficulties in selecting prior distributions, whereby parameter estimation such as the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) and maximum a posteriori (MAP) often hurt the accuracy of predictions. This paper presents the full Bayesian approach to assess the predictive distribution of all classes using three classifiers; naïve bayes (NB), bayesian networks (BN), and tree augmented naïve bayes (TAN) with three datasets; Breast cancer, breast cancer wisconsin, and breast tissue dataset. Next, the prediction accuracies of bayesian approaches are also compared with three standard machine learning algorithms from the literature; K-nearest neighbor (K-NN), support vector machine (SVM), and decision tree (DT). The results showed that the best performance was the bayesian networks (BN) algorithm with accuracy of 97.281%. The results are hoped to provide as base comparison for further research on breast cancer detection. All experiments are conducted in WEKA data mining tool

Human Capital Development of Orang Asli Youth: Supportive and Suppressive Factors

The aim of the research was to explore the factors that influence the human capital development of Orang Asli youth in Peninsular Malaysia. Surveys and interviews were conducted at Orang Asli settlements in Bera, Gua Musang, Cameron Highlands and Pulau Carey. High dropouts among Orang Asli students have become an issue as it was reported nearly 34% of those who had completed their primary schooling did not continue their studies at the secondary level. This article presents the supportive and suppressive factors that influence the human capital development among th Orang Asli youth

Penguasaan penulisan karangan bahasa Arab dalam kalangan pelajar Melayu melalui penggunaan imitasi

Kertas konsep ini bertujuan untuk menjelaskan penguasaan penulisan karangan bahasa Arab dalam kalangan pelajar Melayu melalui penggunaan imitasi. Kemahiran berbahasa secara umumnya terbahagi kepada empat bahagian iaitu, kemahiran mendengar, kemahiran bertutur, kemahiran membaca dan kemahiran menulis. Penguasaan kemahiran menulis dalam bahasa kedua merupakan isu yang perlu diberi perhatian kerana kemahiran menulis merupakan satu kemahiran yang kompleks dan melibatkan integrasi pelbagai kemahiran (Mohd Uzaini & Muhammad Azhar, 2017). Turut dibincangkan di dalam kertas konsep ini ialah penggunaan imitasi bagi membantu pelajar Melayu menulis karangan dengan mudah. Imitasi adalah suatu proses kognitif untuk melakukan tindakan meniru atau menyalin gaya orang lain, tidak kira dari segi sikap, percakapan, penampilan serta apa jua tindakan dengan melibatkan pancaindera sebagai penerima rangsangan. Penulisan ini diharapkan dapat membantu para guru bagi meningkatkan kualiti pengajaran dan membantu pelajar meningkatkan pencapaian dalam mata pelajaran Bahasa Arab

Improved economic viability of integrated biogas energy and compost production for sustainable palm oil mill management

This paper proposes a new approach for integrated technology of biogas energy and compost production for a palm oil mill. This study evaluated the economic viability based on the changes of materials flow and energy balance when a palm oil mill introduces this approach. A palm oil mill processing 54 tonnes fresh fruit bunch (FFB) per hour has the potential to produce 8.2 GWh per year of electricity using biogas captured during anaerobic treatment of palm oil mill effluent (POME). Compost production using shredded empty fruit bunch (EFB) and POME anaerobic sludge obtained from the anaerobic digester is equivalent of 579 tonnes, 151 tonnes and 761 tonnes per year of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium respectively. The integrated technology is a more attractive solution compared to the case when the palm oil mill installs either biogas energy or compost technology individually. The result of economic analysis suggests that this integrated approach is the most economically effective in comparison to the other two cases. Interestingly, even without Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), the integrated technology can still be economically viable, which can be a good solution for sustainable palm oil industry management in the near future

Honey hydrogel dressing to treat burn wound in rats - a preliminary report

Various studies have shown that honey is effective in healing burns and wounds. In this study, Malaysian honey was incorporated into hydrogel dressing formulation using electron beam irradiation technique and introduced as Honey Hydrogel dressing. The wound healing efficacy of Honey Hydrogel dressing on deep partial thickness burns was monitored on the basis of gross appearances, rate of wound contraction and histopathological changes. Deep partial thickness burns were created by applying an aluminium template preheated to 85°C to the backs of rats for 5 s and randomly treated with Honey Hydrogel or hydrogel while control group received no treatment. Wound appearance was photographed and the rate of wound contraction was calculated at 7, 14, and 21 days post burn. Rats were euthanized after 21 days of treatment and skin samples were taken for histopathological examination. The wounds treated with Honey Hydrogel dressing showed better gross appearances and significantly (p<0.05) enhanced the rate of wound contraction as compared to the control group at 21 days post burn. Faster epithelialization was also seen in the Honey Hydrogel treated group as compared to the other groups, although this was not statistically significant. The results substantiate the potential efficacy of Honey Hydrogel in accelerating burn wound healing

Biochar enhanced the nitrifying and denitrifying bacterial communities during the composting of poultry manure and rice straw

Biochar has proven to be a feasible additive for mitigating nitrogen loss during the composting process. This study aims to evaluate the influence of biochar addition on bacterial community and physicochemical properties changes, including ammonium (NH4+), nitrite (NO2−) and nitrate (NO3−) contents during the composting of poultry manure. The composting was carried out by adding 20% (w/w) of biochar into the mixture of poultry manure and rice straw with a ratio of 2:1, and the same treatment without biochar was prepared as a control. The finished product of control compost recorded the high contents of NO2− and NO3− (366 mg/kg and 600 mg/kg) with reduced the total NH4+ content to 10 mg/kg. Meanwhile, biochar compost recorded a higher amount of total NH4+ content (110 mg/kg) with low NO2− and NO3− (161 mg/kg and 137 mg/kg) content in the final composting material. The principal component analysis showed that the dynamics of dominant genera related to Halomonas, Pusillimonas, and Pseudofulvimonas, all of which were known as nitrifying and denitrifying bacteria, was significantly correlated with the dynamic of NO2− and NO3− content throughout the composting process. The genera related to Pusillimonas, and Pseudofulvimonas appeared as the dominant communities as the NO2− and NO3− increased. In contrast, as the NO2− and NO3− concentration decreased, the Halomonas genus were notably enriched in biochar compost. This study revealed the bacterial community shifts corresponded with the change of physicochemical properties, which provides essential information for a better understanding of monitoring and improving the composting process

Case study: preliminary assessment of integrated palm biomass biorefinery for bioethanol production utilizing non-food sugars from oil palm frond petiole

In this case study, a preliminary assessment on the bioethanol production from oil palm frond (OPF) petiole sugars within an integrated palm biomass biorefinery was carried out. Based on the case study of 4 neighbouring palm oil mills, approximately 55,600 t/y of fermentable sugars could be obtained from OPF petiole. The integrated biorefinery will be located at one of the 4 mills. The mill has potential excess energy comprising 3.64 GW h/y of electricity and 177,000 t/y of steam which are sufficient to run the biorefinery. With 33.9 million litres/y of bioethanol production, the specific production cost of bioethanol is estimated at $0.52/l bioethanol, compared to$ 0.31–0.34/l bioethanol produced from sugarcane and $ 0.49–0.60/l bioethanol from other lignocellulosics. The net energy ratio of 7.48 for bioethanol production from OPF provides a promising alternative for OPF utilization as a non-food sugar feedstock