420 research outputs found
AN APPROACH FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF COMPUTER BASED BEST PRACTICE DELIVERY MECHANISMS FOR SMALL AND MEDIUM SIZED MANUFACTURING ENTERPRISES
Changes in the competitive environment have strongly influenced manufacturing companies
to adopt and develop best practice. Best practice is usually imported into companies using
the services of consultancy organisations. The use of consultancy services does not
guarantee success however, and inadequate results have been obtained by practitioners who
have engaged in client-consultant relationships. The inadequacy of these results may be
explained by the installation of pre-defined solutions by consultants as opposed to the
adaptation and implementation of solutions to meet the specific requirements of
practitioners. Tills may in part be explained by a lack of understanding of 'best practice'.
Tills work presented in this thesis investigated the feasibility of computer based mechanisms
for intervention in small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) for the delivery of best
practice. The research was undertaken using a prototyping approach. Three prototype
computer based tools (CBTs) were developed by the author and tested by practitioners. The
prototypes were designed based on a set of objectives and a framework of features which
was developed. These frameworks were constructed from a synthesis of the research
findings which included a study of best practice, the identification of characteristics of types
of intervention, the identification of SME characteristics, and inhibitors of change in SMEs.
The research has indicated that an approach using computer based tools is appropriate for
intervention in SMEs and for adapting best practice to meet specific requirements. A
structured project management approach is required with identifiable goals and benefits. An
exploratory learning environment should be used to deliver complex best practice concepts
and to support the goal oriented approach. Tools and techniques provided by the CBT
enable the achievement of methodological tasks and facilitate experimentation and learning.
The approach should not prescribe solutions, but should provide information through
computer generated analyses to support decision making. The research suggests that the
proposed approach may support a workbook based methodology, or may encapsulate a
process methodology.
The originality of this work is in the provision of a definition of best practice, an explanation
of the deficiencies of existing mechanisms for the transfer of best practice to SMEs, and the
specification of the features required by a new computer-based approach. Tills provides new
knowledge for the field of production and operations management
Mining topological relations from the web
Topological relations between geographic regions are of interest in many applications. When the exact boundaries of regions are not available, such relations can be established by analysing natural language information from web documents. In particular we demonstrate how redundancy-based techniques can be used to acquire containment and adjacency relations, and how fuzzy spatial reasoning can be employed to maintain the consistency of the resulting knowledge base
Provisional Supervision and Workers' Wages: An Alternative Proposal
AnalysisIn May 2001, the Companies (Corporate Rescue) Bill was gazetted. The Bill makes provision for a statutory corporate rescue mechanism, to be known as provisional supervision. The most controversial aspect of the Bill is the treatment of workers' wages. The Bill essentially requires that before a company may even enter into provisional supervision, it must have paid off in full all debts (and other entitlements) owing to its workers. The Bill does not, however, explain how a financially distressed company is supposed to find the cash to meet the statutory requirement. This requirement may also be criticised because it is at odds with the treatment of workers' wages in other insolvent procedures, thus leading to unfairness. This article proposes an alternative approach, one which, it is suggested, is in the interests of both financially troubled companies and their workers.published_or_final_versio
The New Avoidance Powers Under Hong Kong Insolvency Law: A Move From Territoriality to Extraterritoriality
Generating approximate region boundaries from heterogeneous spatial information: an evolutionary approach
Spatial information takes different forms in different applications, ranging from accurate
coordinates in geographic information systems to the qualitative abstractions that are used
in artificial intelligence and spatial cognition. As a result, existing spatial information processing
techniques tend to be tailored towards one type of spatial information, and cannot
readily be extended to cope with the heterogeneity of spatial information that often arises
in practice. In applications such as geographic information retrieval, on the other hand,
approximate boundaries of spatial regions need to be constructed, using whatever spatial
information that can be obtained. Motivated by this observation, we propose a novel methodology
for generating spatial scenarios that are compatible with available knowledge. By
suitably discretizing space, this task is translated to a combinatorial optimization problem,
which is solved using a hybridization of two well-known meta-heuristics: genetic algorithms
and ant colony optimization. What results is a flexible method that can cope with
both quantitative and qualitative information, and can easily be adapted to the specific
needs of specific applications. Experiments with geographic data demonstrate the potential
of the approach
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