SOURCING WITH SHARED SERVICE CENTRES: CHALLENGES IN THE DUTCH GOVERNMENT

Many shared service centres are being established in the Dutch government as part of an e-government program, primarily in order to save costs. However, as literature shows, developing shared service centres proves to be a complex task. In this exploratory research, an initial taxonomy is created presenting various organisational, managerial and technological challenges that organisations can encounter when developing shared service centres. Initial data from three case studies of shared service centres in the Dutch government is presented. Results enlist a number of diverse challenges that organisations need to deal with when trying to achieve cost-efficient operations with shared service centres

Processes and Tools for Decision Support

The change in description of Decision Support Systems (DSS) from "concept" through "movement" to "bandwagon" clearly illustrates the growing interest in the managerial as well as in the research field for decision support systems in their different manifestations. One may expect that a conference on processes and tools for decision support brings together people from practice and research, whose experiences give insight in the direction the bandwagon is likely to go. This brings us to the question how expertise on processes and tools for decision support can be stored in such a way that one can get advice when developing future DSS. This asks for the definition and construction of a knowledge base, into which the expertise can be brought. In section 2 of this book, the authors address possible frameworks for such a knowledge base. In section 3 they place the papers presented into the chosen framework. Finally an attempt to make inferences from the contributed papers is made

Creating patient value in glaucoma care

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore in a specific hospital care process the applicability in practice of the theories of quality costing and value chains. Design/methodology/approach: In a retrospective case study an in-depth evaluation of the use of a quality cost mode

On the mechanisms governing gas penetration into a tokamak plasma during a massive gas injection

A new 1D radial fluid code, IMAGINE, is used to simulate the penetration of gas into a tokamak plasma during a massive gas injection (MGI). The main result is that the gas is in general strongly braked as it reaches the plasma, due to mechanisms related to charge exchange and (to a smaller extent) recombination. As a result, only a fraction of the gas penetrates into the plasma. Also, a shock wave is created in the gas which propagates away from the plasma, braking and compressing the incoming gas. Simulation results are quantitatively consistent, at least in terms of orders of magnitude, with experimental data for a D 2 MGI into a JET Ohmic plasma. Simulations of MGI into the background plasma surrounding a runaway electron beam show that if the background electron density is too high, the gas may not penetrate, suggesting a possible explanation for the recent results of Reux et al in JET (2015 Nucl. Fusion 55 093013)

Velocity-space sensitivity of the time-of-flight neutron spectrometer at JET

The velocity-space sensitivities of fast-ion diagnostics are often described by so-called weight functions. Recently, we formulated weight functions showing the velocity-space sensitivity of the often dominant beam-target part of neutron energy spectra. These weight functions for neutron emission spectrometry (NES) are independent of the particular NES diagnostic. Here we apply these NES weight functions to the time-of-flight spectrometer TOFOR at JET. By taking the instrumental response function of TOFOR into account, we calculate time-of-flight NES weight functions that enable us to directly determine the velocity-space sensitivity of a given part of a measured time-of-flight spectrum from TOFOR

Relationship of edge localized mode burst times with divertor flux loop signal phase in JET

A phase relationship is identified between sequential edge localized modes (ELMs) occurrence times in a set of H-mode tokamak plasmas to the voltage measured in full flux azimuthal loops in the divertor region. We focus on plasmas in the Joint European Torus where a steady H-mode is sustained over several seconds, during which ELMs are observed in the Be II emission at the divertor. The ELMs analysed arise from intrinsic ELMing, in that there is no deliberate intent to control the ELMing process by external means. We use ELM timings derived from the Be II signal to perform direct time domain analysis of the full flux loop VLD2 and VLD3 signals, which provide a high cadence global measurement proportional to the voltage induced by changes in poloidal magnetic flux. Specifically, we examine how the time interval between pairs of successive ELMs is linked to the time-evolving phase of the full flux loop signals. Each ELM produces a clear early pulse in the full flux loop signals, whose peak time is used to condition our analysis. The arrival time of the following ELM, relative to this pulse, is found to fall into one of two categories: (i) prompt ELMs, which are directly paced by the initial response seen in the flux loop signals; and (ii) all other ELMs, which occur after the initial response of the full flux loop signals has decayed in amplitude. The times at which ELMs in category (ii) occur, relative to the first ELM of the pair, are clustered at times when the instantaneous phase of the full flux loop signal is close to its value at the time of the first ELM