Industry 4.0 implementation strategy for Small Medium Enterprises

I4.0 implementation strategy is a tool that aids small and medium enterprises to meet the fourth industrial revolution pre-requisites and standards. The main objective of the current research that has been achieved is that it established an industry 4.0 implementation strategy for SMEs, that is capable of providing enterprises with the most effective road map to overcome the obstacles faced by SMEs during transformation and accomplish the fourth industrial revolution’s standards. A roadmap and the implementation strategy will be specifically tailored to the participating enterprise, based on their assessment scores. The implementation strategy requires four consecutive steps including Maturity Assessment, Influence Assessment, Roadmap Construction, and Implementation. An Industry 4.0 implementation strategy has been devised to increase the accuracy of assessing SME’s technological maturity level by providing a weighting factor for relevant implementation dimensions by using an Analytic hierarchy process (AHP). Weight factors were established to identify dimensions that are most influential at small/medium manufacturing enterprises and prioritize their transformation. A total maturity score of the enterprise as a whole valued between 0-100 is determined at the end of the maturity assessment through utilizing radar charts. This research includes a case study that was conducted at SPM Automation Inc., a local small-sized enterprise, where the proposed four-step implementation strategy was conducted and succeeded to measure the current I4.0 maturity score which was 33% and create an implementation strategy that targets the most influential dimensions and prioritize their transformation

Synteny (co-linearity) in some cereal crops genomes as revealed by amplified fragment length polymorphisms (AFLP), simple sequence repeats (SSR) and inter simple sequence repeats (ISSR) markers

Genomes of barley, maize, rice, wheat and sorghum were characterized based on three different mole-cular markers based on DNA sequence namely; Amplified Fragment Length Polymorphisms (AFLP), Simple  Sequence Repeats (SSR) and Inter Simple Sequence Repeats (ISSR) markers. Five AFLP primer combinations were used for fingerprinting six cultivars which belongs to barley, rice and wheat cultivars leading to the  production of numerous AFLP bands, 300 of them were polymorphic. Thirty SSR markers were obtained from  fingerprinting eight cultivars belonging to the five studied species using 11 SSR primers, whereas 91 ISSR  markers were obtained from fingerprinting the same cultivars using 10 ISSR primers. All data were analyzed  using Numerical Taxonomy System of Multivariate Statistical (NTSYS-pc) software packages to address the relationship and studying the synteny between the genomes of the five cereal species. The resulted  dendrogram revealed that rice, barley and wheat genomes are more related to each other than sorghum and maize genomes that appeared close relatedness to each other but distant from other cereal's genomes under study. Barley and wheat genomes revealed close relatedness to each other compared to rice genome.Key words: Amplified fragment length polymorphisms (AFLP), simple sequence repeats (SSR), inter simple sequence repeats (ISSR), wheat, barley, rice, synteny

The association of metformin dose up-titration and treatment duration with adiposity, lipid profile indicators, and serum leptin levels in T2DM Iraqi patients

Introduction: Numerous factors, including age, gender, physical inactivity, insufficient dose, noncompliance, and drug-drug interactions, may contribute to significant intraindividual variation in metformin (MET) response. This study aims to determine the effect of Met dose and treatment duration on adiposity markers and serum leptin levels in Iraqi patients with type 2 diabetes. Methods: Between October 2021 and March 2022, a cross-sectional study at the Diabetes and Endocrinology Center in Baghdad included 150 type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) patients with a disease duration of more than 1 year. Clinical and physical examinations were conducted before enrollment. We measured anthropometric variables such as body mass index, waist-to-hip ratio, and visceral adiposity index. We evaluated glycated hemoglobin, leptin, C-reactive protein, total cholesterol (TC), high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-c), and triglycerides (TGs) in the serum. Results: Only the TC/HDL-c and TG/HDL-c ratios were significantly different after the data were arranged according to glycemic control level. Arrangement for MET doses and treatment duration, none of the evaluated parameters were significantly different (p > 0.05) between groups receiving different doses of MET for different durations, except visceral adiposity index (VAI), which shows a very slight decrease (p = 0.046) after more than 10 years of treatment. Pearson’s correlation analysis revealed a weak and significant association between waist circumference (WC) and hip circumference and MET doses, and a weak and significant association between WC, VAI, and TG levels and treatment duration. The other markers lacked a significant relationship with MET doses or duration of treatment. Conclusion: MET dose and duration of treatment were not significantly correlated with adiposity and lipid profiles in Iraqi patients with T2DM