Leanness and agility as means for improving supply chains. A case study on Egypt

Supply chain management has received greater attention from the academics and the practitioners, however the literature review lacks a comprehensive view for supply chain management practices and how its members should act to contribute to its overall success (Li el at., 2005). In this era, where the business organisations are working in several challenging threats and opportunities, greater attention is given to supply chain management. Nowadays, companies are always searching for means to improve their supply chains. The main aim of this research is to show "how leanness and agility approaches can be used within the same enterprise as complementary means for improving its supply chain". To achieve this research objective, the research has provided an assessment and summarised the literature on the supply chain management, lean thinking and agility thinking including their importance; their definitions; their practices and the relationship between lean and agility. The resulted proposed framework deduced from the literature has been applied in the Egyptian Manufacturing Business to show the relationship between the agility principles, lean principles, entity performance and the successful supply chain

Buyer-supplier partnership in agile supply chains: A conceptual view

The purpose of this paper focuses on achieving agility within the supply chain and seeks to examine the impact of developing an integrated buyer-supplier partnership on achieving agility. It also aims to investigate the moderating role played by information sharing and technology in achieving such a goal. Supply chain management and agility have both been received great attention in recent years. In a highly dynamic and complex business market place the customer is demanding more choice and companies need to possess the means to rapidly adjust to market changes in order to satisfy its customers in an effective manner. Agility has been introduced to the supply chain context to enable companies to face the business environmental changes and deal with them effectively. The methodological approach used in this paper is an analysis and critique to the existing literature, as an initial step for developing the empirical study for the paper

Control of Multiple Remote Servers for Quality-Fair Delivery of Multimedia Contents

This paper proposes a control scheme for the quality-fair delivery of several encoded video streams to mobile users sharing a common wireless resource. Video quality fairness, as well as similar delivery delays are targeted among streams. The proposed controller is implemented within some aggregator located near the bottleneck of the network. The transmission rate among streams is adapted based on the quality of the already encoded and buffered packets in the aggregator. Encoding rate targets are evaluated by the aggregator and fed back to each remote video server (fully centralized solution), or directly evaluated by each server in a distributed way (partially distributed solution). Each encoding rate target is adjusted for each stream independently based on the corresponding buffer level or buffering delay in the aggregator. Communication delays between the servers and the aggregator are taken into account. The transmission and encoding rate control problems are studied with a control-theoretic perspective. The system is described with a multi-input multi-output model. Proportional Integral (PI) controllers are used to adjust the video quality and control the aggregator buffer levels. The system equilibrium and stability properties are studied. This provides guidelines for choosing the parameters of the PI controllers. Experimental results show the convergence of the proposed control system and demonstrate the improvement in video quality fairness compared to a classical transmission rate fair streaming solution and to a utility max-min fair approach

The impact of personality on scholarly performance in the light of intervening job of scholarly motivation

This examination and coming about commitment are the consequence of instructive motivation intervened in the relationship between receptiveness to experience, and measures with insightful performance. Based on the alternate elements (e.g., IQ, learning moves close and biological variables) can influence academic execution that can be broken down in future examinations.Purpose: This comparative study holistically assesses the effect of personality on scholastic motivation and scholarly performance. Design/Methodology/Approach: The contribution and the relevant methodology are based on an educational motivation interceded the association between openness to experience and standards with scholarly performance. The research sample consists of students who willfully participated and they were approached to finish a personality poll (NEO-FFI), and a scholastic motivation survey (AMS-C 28, included GPA and statistic information) on a pioneering critical comparative structural model. Findings: Based on the implied arguments and yielded results, the article considers the interceding role of scholastic motivation about personality and performance. The nature of these relations, can be a point of takeoff to assist inquires about this issue. Practical implications: Based on addressing its structural purposes, the study sheds a new light on the conscientiousness that predicts both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Earlier investigations show that there is a relationship between openness to involvement and insights. Originality/Value: Although this study builds upon recent studies about character, motivation and different factors can affect scholastic performance that can be analyzed in future investigations as an innovative idea for the harmonization in this field.peer-reviewe

BANZKP: a Secure Authentication Scheme Using Zero Knowledge Proof for WBANs

-Wireless body area network(WBAN) has shown great potential in improving healthcare quality not only for patients but also for medical staff. However, security and privacy are still an important issue in WBANs especially in multi-hop architectures. In this paper, we propose and present the design and the evaluation of a secure lightweight and energy efficient authentication scheme BANZKP based on an efficient cryptographic protocol, Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP) and a commitment scheme. ZKP is used to confirm the identify of the sensor nodes, with small computational requirement, which is favorable for body sensors given their limited resources, while the commitment scheme is used to deal with replay attacks and hence the injection attacks by committing a message and revealing the key later. Our scheme reduces the memory requirement by 56.13 % compared to TinyZKP [13], the comparable alternative so far for Body Area Networks, and uses 10 % less energy