Did just-in-time management effectively decrease inventory ratios in Belgium?.

Belgium; Inventory; Just in time; Management; Ratios;

Did inventories decrease in the Belgian manufacturing sector between 1979 and 2000?.

It is almost unquestionably accepted by most observers that inventories decreased over time. There are so many Enterprise Resource Planning systems implemented and so many Just-In-Time ideas successfully introduced in companies that we almost automatically conclude that inventories went down. This conclusion, however, is somewhat hasty. Finished product inventories did actually not decrease, whereas the work-in-process and raw materials inventories did go down in most industrial sectors. This is the main conclusion from our econometric study performed on industry data (15 industrial sectors) during the period 1979-2000. In this paper we focus on the econometric model of our study, we interpret the results and we conclude with a number of managerial insights.Companies; Data; Empirical study; Industry; Inventory; Just in time; Manufacturing; Model; Planning; Product; Studies; Systems; Time; Time series;

An analysis of inventory turnover in the Belgian manufacturing industry, wholesale and retail and the financial impact on inventory reduction.

Various inventory studies have been published in the last decades. Some studies emphasize the importance of low inventories, other examine the evolution of inventories over time and especially focus on the impact of the just-in-time (JIT) revolution. The aim of this paper is to investigate the level of inventories held by Belgian companies at one moment in time, namely May 2004. First we examine differences in inventory ratios between manufacturing industry sectors as well as between wholesale and retail. We find empirical evidence that the type of production process is the most important driver for work in process inventory. The finished goods inventory ratio also differs significantly among industry sectors, but here the reasons for the difference are harder to distinguish. Finally we find the inventory ratio to be significantly higher in retail than in wholesale. Furthermore, we examine the financial impact of inventories in the manufacturing industry. We find that companies with very high inventory ratios have more chance to be bad financial performers. Regression analyses partially support the hypothesis of a negative relationship between inventory ratio and financial performance but significant results could not be obtained for all sectors.Inventory; Manufacturing;

Convex Tours of Bounded Curvature

We consider the motion planning problem for a point constrained to move along a smooth closed convex path of bounded curvature. The workspace of the moving point is bounded by a convex polygon with m vertices, containing an obstacle in a form of a simple polygon with $n$ vertices. We present an O(m+n) time algorithm finding the path, going around the obstacle, whose curvature is the smallest possible.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures, abstract presented at European Symposium on Algorithms 199

Capacité à payer des pêcheurs de touladi et d'ombles de fontaine face aux pratiques d'ensemencement au Québec

Le sujet de ce mémoire porte sur l'évaluation de la capacité à payer pour le caractère sauvage des touladis et des ombles de fontaine. Ces deux espèces sont largement pêchées au Québec dans le cadre de la pêche sportive. Cette capacité à payer est évaluée afin de donner des outils ou des pistes de solution pour une gestion des populations d'omble. L'ensemencement est largement utilisé pour soutenir les stocks de ces poissons. Dans le cadre d'une gestion durable, il est peut-être préférable de donner l'opportunité aux pêcheurs de pêcher un poisson dans un lac non ensemencé mais ayant des limites de capture plus restreintes. Cette étude vise aussi à donner un portrait des pêcheurs d'ombles du Québec

Pouvons-nous réduire la dose d’azote après un retour de prairie?

Affiche présentée dans le cadre du Colloque de l'ARC, «Des racines et des ailes pour la recherche collégiale», dans le cadre du 85e Congrès de l’Acfas, Université McGill, Montréal, les 8 et 9 mai 2017.Au Québec, les émissions de gaz à effet de serre (GES) d’origine agricole représentent près de 8 % des émissions totales. Environ 40 % des émissions agricoles découle de l’usage des engrais minéraux et des engrais de ferme. Tout apport excédentaire d’engrais azoté dans les cultures se traduit par des émissions supplémentaires d’oxyde nitreux (N2O), un puissant gaz à effet de serre qui contribue aux émissions de GES. Plusieurs études ont démontré que la culture de maïs n’avait pas besoin d’apports importants d’azote en postlevée, après des retours de prairie. En collaboration avec des producteurs agricoles, 16 sites d’essais de fertilisation azotée ont été implantés sur des retours de prairie ayant reçu des engrais de ferme. Les traitements consistaient à apporter 4 doses d’azote minéral (0, 40, 80 et 120 kg N/ha). La teneur en nitrates du sol ainsi que les rendements à la récolte ont été évalués. La teneur en nitrates a confirmé l’effet significatif de la prairie et des engrais de ferme sur la teneur en azote disponible pour le maïs. L’apport d’azote minéral n’a pas eu d’effet significatif sur les rendements en azote, à l’exception d’un site. Le maïs cultivé sur un retour de prairie ne nécessite pas un ajout d’engrais minéral. Éliminer l’apport d’azote réduit tant les émissions de GES que les dépenses en engrais pour les producteurs

Eye movement control during visual pursuit in Parkinson's disease

BACKGROUND: Prior studies of oculomotor function in Parkinson’s disease (PD) have either focused on saccades without considering smooth pursuit, or tested smooth pursuit while excluding saccades. The present study investigated the control of saccadic eye movements during pursuit tasksand assessed the quality of binocular coordinationas potential sensitive markers of PD. METHODS: Observers fixated on a central cross while a target moved toward it. Once the target reached the fixation cross, observers began to pursue the moving target. To further investigate binocular coordination, the moving target was presented on both eyes (binocular condition), or on one eye only (dichoptic condition). RESULTS: The PD group made more saccades than age-matched normal control adults (NC) both during fixation and pursuit. The difference between left and right gaze positions increased over time during the pursuit period for PD but not for NC. The findings were not related to age, as NC and young-adult control group (YC) performed similarly on most of the eye movement measures, and were not correlated with classical measures of PD severity (e.g., Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS) score). DISCUSSION: Our results suggest that PD may be associated with impairment not only in saccade inhibition, but also in binocular coordination during pursuit, and these aspects of dysfunction may be useful in PD diagnosis or tracking of disease course.This work was supported in part by grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF SBE-0354378 to Arash Yazdanbakhsh and Bo Cao) and Office of Naval Research (ONR N00014-11-1-0535 to Bo Cao, Chia-Chien Wu, and Arash Yazdanbakhsh). There was no additional external funding received for this study. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. (SBE-0354378 - National Science Foundation (NSF); ONR N00014-11-1-0535 - Office of Naval Research)Published versio

5-Fluoro pyrimidines: labels to probe DNA and RNA secondary structures by 1D 19F NMR spectroscopy

19F NMR spectroscopy has proved to be a valuable tool to monitor functionally important conformational transitions of nucleic acids. Here, we present a systematic investigation on the application of 5-fluoro pyrimidines to probe DNA and RNA secondary structures. Oligonucleotides with the propensity to adapt secondary structure equilibria were chosen as model systems and analyzed by 1D 19F and 1H NMR spectroscopy. A comparison with the unmodified analogs revealed that the equilibrium characteristics of the bistable DNA and RNA oligonucleotides were hardly affected upon fluorine substitution at C5 of pyrimidines. This observation was in accordance with UV spectroscopic melting experiments which demonstrated that single 5-fluoro substitutions in double helices lead to comparable thermodynamic stabilities. Thus, 5-fluoro pyrimidine labeling of DNA and RNA can be reliably applied for NMR based nucleic acid secondary structure evaluation. Furthermore, we developed a facile synthetic route towards 5-fluoro cytidine phosphoramidites that enables their convenient site-specific incorporation into oligonucleotides by solid-phase synthesi

Neoadjuvant Docetaxel-Based Chemoradiation for Resectable Adenocarcinoma of the Pancreas

International audienceTo assess the safety and efficacy of a new neoadjuvant chemoradiation (CRT) docetaxel-based regimen in patients with resectable adenocarcinoma of the pancreatic head or body

A spectrograph instrument concept for the Prime Focus Spectrograph (PFS) on Subaru Telescope

We describe the conceptual design of the spectrograph opto-mechanical concept for the SuMIRe Prime Focus Spectrograph (PFS) being developed for the SUBARU telescope. The SuMIRe PFS will consist of four identical spectrographs, each receiving 600 fibers from a 2400 fiber robotic positioner at the prime focus. Each spectrograph will have three channels covering in total, a wavelength range from 380 nm to 1300 nm. The requirements for the instrument are summarized in Section 1. We present the optical design and the optical performance and analysis in Section 2. Section 3 introduces the mechanical design, its requirements and the proposed concepts. Finally, the AIT phases for the Spectrograph System are described in Section 5.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, submitted to "Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy IV, Ian S. McLean, Suzanne K. Ramsay, Hideki Takami, Editors, Proc. SPIE 8446 (2012)