Operations management: Olympics TV and a fish and chip supper

As in many homes all over the UK, Friday evening meal in our house is a Fish and Chip supper. As my wife was going to collect our meal, I thought I would catch up on some of the Olympics on TV, until our youngest asked me to explain what exactly was Operations Management...again! My wife's parting words was "explain it in a memorable and interesting way before I get back with our supper", our youngest nodded with agreement, so I put my Olympic catch up TV moment on hold

The knowledge transfer openness matrix facilitating accessibility in UK management education teaching

This is an empirical investigation considering how the Knowledge Transfer Openness Matrix (KTOM) could facilitate accessibility and Knowledge Transfer (KT) for the UK Higher Education (HE) Management Education Teaching when utilising learning technologies. Its focus is where learning technologies applications currently assist the KT process and support accessibility for the HE teacher and learner. It considers the philosophy of openness, focussing on its usefulness to support accessibility within UK HE Management Education Teaching. It discusses how the openness philosophy may assist the KT process for the HE teacher and learners using learning technologies. In particular, the potential to support accessibility within HE Management Education Teaching environments is appraised. There appear several implications for both teachers and learners. These are characterized in the proposed KTOM. The matrix organises KT events based on the principles of the openness philosophy. The role of learning technologies in events is illustrated with regard to teaching and learning accessibility

Retailers and consumers could feel the pinch from Brexit

The debate during the summer highlighted how a low skill labour shortage could seriously impact future UK harvests post ‘Brexit’. Now, it is the turn of the retail sector to raise their very serious concerns with supporting the UK’s retail supply chains to meet with their delivery promises. We already know many of the UK’s short term distribution operations are staffed by labour that originates from the European Union (EU), in particular the Eastern European nations. The leave vote has raised a very serious question in that there could be a low skill labour shortage in the immediate future

Can the development of a conceptual model for UK engineering companies help understand what the customer wants from new products?

The long-term survival of a business often hinges upon its ability to successfully introduce new products into the market place. These new products and their successful development can be the lifeblood of a company. Thus, New Product Development (NPD) is a major consideration for most organisations. New products can provide the stimulus for the company to grow and produce profitable returns. Additionally, new products can gain new markets and market shares and subsequently help to defend against competitive pressures. Some businesses not only want to accelerate their NPD efforts, they also like to be a ‘first to market’ business. However, this strategy has its own risks as well as competitive advantages. There are numerous cases where businesses first to launch a new product did not profit from their innovations as much as their followers. Therefore, across numerous businesses NPD is one of the leading areas for focus, as companies seek to reduce time to market, access new technologies and develop more and better products. Subsequently, the consistent development and introduction of new products that customers’ value can be an important criteria for business growth and prosperity. There has been much research into defining the NPD process and the management of its activities, and this was useful as an opening for this research. However, there is little evidence that details the specific aspect of designing for customer needs compliance. This research is exploratory in nature and provides empirical support to several propositions found in the literature on the development of new products to meet customers’ needs compliance. The findings suggest that each of the companies do perceive a difference in the needs of the customers between different product types. However, they also imply that specific types of customers have similar needs, no matter what types of products are involved

OpenCL Actors - Adding Data Parallelism to Actor-based Programming with CAF

The actor model of computation has been designed for a seamless support of concurrency and distribution. However, it remains unspecific about data parallel program flows, while available processing power of modern many core hardware such as graphics processing units (GPUs) or coprocessors increases the relevance of data parallelism for general-purpose computation. In this work, we introduce OpenCL-enabled actors to the C++ Actor Framework (CAF). This offers a high level interface for accessing any OpenCL device without leaving the actor paradigm. The new type of actor is integrated into the runtime environment of CAF and gives rise to transparent message passing in distributed systems on heterogeneous hardware. Following the actor logic in CAF, OpenCL kernels can be composed while encapsulated in C++ actors, hence operate in a multi-stage fashion on data resident at the GPU. Developers are thus enabled to build complex data parallel programs from primitives without leaving the actor paradigm, nor sacrificing performance. Our evaluations on commodity GPUs, an Nvidia TESLA, and an Intel PHI reveal the expected linear scaling behavior when offloading larger workloads. For sub-second duties, the efficiency of offloading was found to largely differ between devices. Moreover, our findings indicate a negligible overhead over programming with the native OpenCL API.Comment: 28 page

Fluoxetine: a case history of its discovery and preclinical development

Introduction: Depression is a multifactorial mood disorder with a high prevalence worldwide. Until now, treatments for depression have focused on the inhibition of monoaminergic reuptake sites, which augment the bioavailability of monoamines in the CNS. Advances in drug discovery have widened the therapeutic options with the synthesis of so-called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), such as fluoxetine. Areas covered: The aim of this case history is to describe and discuss the pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic profiles of fluoxetine, including its acute effects and the adaptive changes induced after long-term treatment. Furthermore, the authors review the effect of fluoxetine on neuroplasticity and adult neurogenesis. In addition, the article summarises the preclinical behavioural data available on fluoxetine’s effects on depressive-like behaviour, anxiety and cognition as well as its effects on other diseases. Finally, the article describes the seminal studies validating the antidepressant effects of fluoxetine. Expert opinion: Fluoxetine is the first selective SSRI that has a recognised clinical efficacy and safety profile. Since its discovery, other molecules that mimic its mechanism of action have been developed, commencing a new age in the treatment of depression. Fluoxetine has also demonstrated utility in the treatment of other disorders for which its prescription has now been approved

SME’s disinclination towards subcontracting in the public sector markets : an attributional perspective

Purpose - This study aims to examine the causes of SME’ disinclination towards subcontracting in public sector markets. Previous studies have revealed that UK SMEs are reluctant to do business with the public sector through the subcontracting route, but the reasons for this lack of enthusiasm have not been widely researched. Design/methodology/approach- Drawing on semi-structured interviews with SMEs competing for public contracts in North West England, a qualitative study was performed, from which several themes emerged. Findings- The findings were synthesised into a framework underpinned by attribution theory, to portray situationally and dispositionally caused factors which were used to interpret SMEs behaviour. Originality- The paper contributes in a unique way to an emerging discourse on how subcontracting can facilitate the access of SMEs to government procurement spending. It adds to knowledge regarding the explanatory power of attribution theory– from its base in social psychology