Supply Chain Performance Appraisement and Benchmarking for Manufacturing Industries: Emphasis on Traditional, Green, Flexible and Resilient Supply Chain along with Supplier Selection

Supply chain represents a network of interconnected activities starting from raw material extraction to delivery of the finished product to the end-user. The main constituents of supply chain are supplying/purchasing, inbound logistics, manufacturing, outbound logistics, marketing and sales. In recent times, the traditional supply chain construct is being modified to embrace various challenges of present business needs. Today’s global market has become highly volatile; customers’ expectations are ever-changing. Fierce competition amongst business sectors necessitates adapting modern supply chain management philosophies. Agility, greenness, flexibility as well as resilience have become the key success factors in satisfying global business needs. In order to remain competitive in the turbulent marketplace, industries should focus on improving overall performance of the supply chain network. In this dissertation, supply chain performance assessment has been considered as a decision making problem involving various measures and metrics (performance indicators). Since most of the performance indices are subjective in nature; decisionmaking relies on active participation of a group of decision-makers (DMs). Subjective human judgment often bears some sort of ambiguity as well as vagueness in the decision making; to overcome uncertainty in decision making, adaptation of grey/fuzzy set theory seems to be fruitful. To this end, present work deals with a variety of decision support tools to facilitate supply chain performance appraisement as well as benchmarking in fuzzy/grey context. Starting from the traditional supply chain, this work extends appraisement and benchmarking of green supply chain performance for a set of candidate case companies (under the same industry) operating under similar supply chain construct. Exploration of grey-MOORA, fuzzy-MOORA, IVFN-TOPSIS, fuzzy-grey relation method has been illustrated in this part of work. Apart from aforementioned empirical studies, two real case studies have been reported in order to estimate a quantitative performance metric reflecting the extent of supply chain flexibility and resilience, respectively, in relation to the case company under consideration. Performance benchmarking helps in identifying best practices in perspectives of supply chain networking; it can easily be transmitted to other industries. Organizations can follow their peers in order to improve overall performance of the supply chain. vi Supplier selection is considered as an important aspect in supply chain management. Effective supplier selection must be a key strategic consideration towards improving supply chain performance. However, the task of supplier selection seems difficult due to subjectivity of supplier performance indices. Apart from considering traditional supplier selection criteria (cost, quality and service); global business scenario encourages emphasizing various issues like environmental performance (green concerns), resiliency etc. into evaluation and selection of an appropriate supplier. In this context, the present work also attempts to explore fuzzy based decision support systems towards evaluation and selection of potential suppliers in green supply chain as well as resilient supply chain, respectively. Fuzzy based Multi-Level Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MLMCDM) approach, fuzzy-TOPSIS and fuzzy-VIKOR have been utilized to facilitate the said decision making

Supply Chain Performance Appraisement and Benchmarking for Manufacturing Industries: Emphasis on Traditional, Green, Flexible and Resilient Supply Chain along with Supplier Selection

Supply chain represents a network of interconnected activities starting from raw material extraction to delivery of the finished product to the end-user. The main constituents of supply chain are supplying/purchasing, inbound logistics, manufacturing, outbound logistics, marketing and sales. In recent times, the traditional supply chain construct is being modified to embrace various challenges of present business needs. Today’s global market has become highly volatile; customers’ expectations are ever-changing. Fierce competition amongst business sectors necessitates adapting modern supply chain management philosophies. Agility, greenness, flexibility as well as resilience have become the key success factors in satisfying global business needs. In order to remain competitive in the turbulent marketplace, industries should focus on improving overall performance of the supply chain network. In this dissertation, supply chain performance assessment has been considered as a decision making problem involving various measures and metrics (performance indicators). Since most of the performance indices are subjective in nature; decisionmaking relies on active participation of a group of decision-makers (DMs). Subjective human judgment often bears some sort of ambiguity as well as vagueness in the decision making; to overcome uncertainty in decision making, adaptation of grey/fuzzy set theory seems to be fruitful. To this end, present work deals with a variety of decision support tools to facilitate supply chain performance appraisement as well as benchmarking in fuzzy/grey context. Starting from the traditional supply chain, this work extends appraisement and benchmarking of green supply chain performance for a set of candidate case companies (under the same industry) operating under similar supply chain construct. Exploration of grey-MOORA, fuzzy-MOORA, IVFN-TOPSIS, fuzzy-grey relation method has been illustrated in this part of work. Apart from aforementioned empirical studies, two real case studies have been reported in order to estimate a quantitative performance metric reflecting the extent of supply chain flexibility and resilience, respectively, in relation to the case company under consideration. Performance benchmarking helps in identifying best practices in perspectives of supply chain networking; it can easily be transmitted to other industries. Organizations can follow their peers in order to improve overall performance of the supply chain. vi Supplier selection is considered as an important aspect in supply chain management. Effective supplier selection must be a key strategic consideration towards improving supply chain performance. However, the task of supplier selection seems difficult due to subjectivity of supplier performance indices. Apart from considering traditional supplier selection criteria (cost, quality and service); global business scenario encourages emphasizing various issues like environmental performance (green concerns), resiliency etc. into evaluation and selection of an appropriate supplier. In this context, the present work also attempts to explore fuzzy based decision support systems towards evaluation and selection of potential suppliers in green supply chain as well as resilient supply chain, respectively. Fuzzy based Multi-Level Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MLMCDM) approach, fuzzy-TOPSIS and fuzzy-VIKOR have been utilized to facilitate the said decision making

A review of action of commonly used antihypertensive drugs in Ayurveda with special reference to Samprapti Vighatana

Hypertension stands as a disease of high mortality owing to being a major risk factor for cardiovascular diseases, stroke and kidney diseases. Treatment modalities of modern medical science do not have enough efficacies in reducing target organ damage and they have adverse effects as well. So global attention is diverted towards the Ayurveda for safe, effective and economical remedies. A number of Ayurvedic herbs are being used since time immortal to treat hypertension based on the factors involved in the Pathogenesis. So it is the need of the time to validate the claims of antihypertensive herbs on modern parameter regarding its safety and efficacy. This study is made with an aim to review the various studies done on commonly used antihypertensive herbs and their role in breaking the pathogenesis. The various pathological mechanisms contributing the manifestation of hypertension and recent study on antihypertensive herbs are compiled by going through texts, journals and internet search. The obtained data are reviewed critically to understand the actions of herbs in Samprapti Vighatana of Hypertension. It is found that the hypertension is a disorder of Vaata Dosha due to Aavarana. The causative factors are Santarpanajanya Nidaan. The various other factors involved in the manifestation of Hypertension are Rasavaha, Raktavaha, Medovaha and Manovaha Srotas. The treatment of Hypertension should be done with targeting these factors with proper assessment of strength of disease and disesed

IndicNLG Benchmark: Multilingual Datasets for Diverse NLG Tasks in Indic Languages

Natural Language Generation (NLG) for non-English languages is hampered by the scarcity of datasets in these languages. In this paper, we present the IndicNLG Benchmark, a collection of datasets for benchmarking NLG for 11 Indic languages. We focus on five diverse tasks, namely, biography generation using Wikipedia infoboxes, news headline generation, sentence summarization, paraphrase generation and, question generation. We describe the created datasets and use them to benchmark the performance of several monolingual and multilingual baselines that leverage pre-trained sequence-to-sequence models. Our results exhibit the strong performance of multilingual language-specific pre-trained models, and the utility of models trained on our dataset for other related NLG tasks. Our dataset creation methods can be easily applied to modest-resource languages as they involve simple steps such as scraping news articles and Wikipedia infoboxes, light cleaning, and pivoting through machine translation data. To the best of our knowledge, the IndicNLG Benchmark is the first NLG benchmark for Indic languages and the most diverse multilingual NLG dataset, with approximately 8M examples across 5 tasks and 11 languages. The datasets and models are publicly available at https://ai4bharat.iitm.ac.in/indicnlg-suite.Comment: Accepted at EMNLP 202

Draft genome sequence of Sclerospora graminicola, the pearl millet downy mildew pathogen:Genome sequence of pearl millet downy mildew pathogen

Sclerospora graminicola pathogen is one of the most important biotic production constraints of pearl millet worldwide. We report a de novo whole genome assembly and analysis of pathotype 1. The draft genome assembly contained 299,901,251 bp with 65,404 genes. Pearl millet [Pennisetum glaucum (L.) R. Br.], is an important crop of the semi-arid and arid regions of the world. It is capable of growing in harsh and marginal environments with highest degree of tolerance to drought and heat among cereals (1). Downy mildew is the most devastating disease of pearl millet caused by Sclerospora graminicola (sacc. Schroet), particularly on genetically uniform hybrids. Estimated annual grain yield loss due to downy mildew is approximately 10?80 % (2-7). Pathotype 1 has been reported to be the highly virulent pathotype of Sclerospora graminicola in India (8). We report a de novo whole genome assembly and analysis of Sclerospora graminicola pathotype 1 from India. A susceptible pearl millet genotype Tift 23D2B1P1-P5 was used for obtaining single-zoospore isolates from the original oosporic sample. The library for whole genome sequencing was prepared according to the instructions by NEB ultra DNA library kit for Illumina (New England Biolabs, USA). The libraries were normalised, pooled and sequenced on Illumina HiSeq 2500 (Illumina Inc., San Diego, CA, USA) platform at 2 x100 bp length. Mate pair (MP) libraries were prepared using the Nextera mate pair library preparation kit (Illumina Inc., USA). 1 ?g of Genomic DNA was subject to tagmentation and was followed by strand displacement. Size selection tagmented/strand displaced DNA was carried out using AmpureXP beads. The libraries were validated using an Agilent Bioanalyser using DNA HS chip. The libraries were normalised, pooled and sequenced on Illumina MiSeq (Illumina Inc., USA) platform at 2 x300 bp length. The whole genome sequencing was performed by sequencing of 7.38 Gb with 73,889,924 paired end reads from paired end library, and 1.15 Gb with 3,851,788 reads from mate pair library generated from Illumina HiSeq2500 and Illumina MiSeq, respectively. The sequences were assembled using various assemblers like ABySS, MaSuRCA, Velvet, SOAPdenovo2, and ALLPATHS-LG. The assembly generated by MaSuRCA (9) algorithm was observed superior over other algorithms and hence used for scaffolding using SSPACE. Assembled draft genome sequence of S. graminicola pathotype 1 was 299,901,251 bp long, with a 47.2 % GC content consisting of 26,786 scaffolds with N50 of 17,909 bp with longest scaffold size of 238,843 bp. The overall coverage was 40X. The draft genome sequence was used for gene prediction using AUGUSTUS. The completeness of the assembly was investigated using CEGMA and revealed 92.74% proteins completely present and 95.56% proteins partially present, while BUSCO fungal dataset indicated 64.9% complete, 12.4% fragmented, 22.7% missing out of 290 BUSCO groups. A total of 52,285 predicted genes were annotated using BLASTX and 38,120 genes were observed with significant BLASTX match. Repetitive element analysis in the assembly revealed 8,196 simple repeats, 1,058 low complexity repeats and 5,562 dinucleotide to hexanucleotide microsatellite repeats.publishersversionPeer reviewe

Recent advances in hydrothermal carbonisation:from tailored carbon materials and biochemicals to applications and bioenergy

Introduced in the literature in 1913 by Bergius, who at the time was studying biomass coalification, hydrothermal carbonisation, as many other technologies based on renewables, was forgotten during the "industrial revolution". It was rediscovered back in 2005, on the one hand, to follow the trend set by Bergius of biomass to coal conversion for decentralised energy generation, and on the other hand as a novel green method to prepare advanced carbon materials and chemicals from biomass in water, at mild temperature, for energy storage and conversion and environmental protection. In this review, we will present an overview on the latest trends in hydrothermal carbonisation including biomass to bioenergy conversion, upgrading of hydrothermal carbons to fuels over heterogeneous catalysts, advanced carbon materials and their applications in batteries, electrocatalysis and heterogeneous catalysis and finally an analysis of the chemicals in the liquid phase as well as a new family of fluorescent nanomaterials formed at the interface between the liquid and solid phases, known as hydrothermal carbon nanodots

Appraisement and benchmarking of third-party logistic service provider by exploration of risk-based approach

In the present era, Reverse Logistics Support has monitored as a momentous realm, where stuffs are transferred from point of consumption to origin. The companies who provide the logistic equipments, i.e. Truck, Joseph Cyril Bomford, and Shipment, etc. to its partner’s firms called Third-Party Logistics (3PL) service provider. Today, the feasible 3PL service provider evaluation-opt problem is yet an amorous dilemma. The appraisement and benchmarking of logistics service providers in extent of index; allied risk-based indices and their interrelated metrics; outlooked as a great tool for each international firm, in order that firm could obtain their core goals. The novelty of manuscript is that here, a hairy-based approach has been integrated and then implemented upon a novel developed multi hierarchical third-party logistics (3PL) service providers appraisement index in purpose to umpire the 3PL provider for their strong and ill’s core indices. Moreover, the overall score (Si) system has also been carried out for benchmarking the 3PL provider companies, where s1 has been found as the best 3PL service provider. The developed approach enabled the manager of firms to make the verdict towards the best inclusive evaluation process of 3PL performance appraisement and benchmarking. A numerical illustration has also been provided to validate the verdict support system

Machine economic life estimation based on depreciation-replacement model

Decision-making is considered as the cognitive process resulting in the selection of a belief or a course of act among numerous substitute possibilities. Today, decision-making helps to opt for the best assets i.e. machine tools, equipment etc. of firms under several concerns such as depreciation value, price, replacement, maintenance cost, repairmen cost, power consumptions etc. which augments the effectiveness of operations of production units. Recently, the problem of replacement is realized, when the job performing units such as men, machines, equipment, parts etc. becomes less effective, uneconomic, useless due to breakdown, sudden failure and gradual deterioration in their efficiency by the passage of time. By replacing those assets with new ones at frequent interval, maintenance and other overhead costs can be reduced. The work presented a replacement model combined with straight-line depreciation method, which can be used to determine the economic life of the productive machines and equipment. The proposed approach helps the managers and the owners of the business firms in computing the economic life of their machine. Numerical case has been presented, in order to justify the validation of the proposed model

Machine economic life estimation based on depreciation-replacement model PUBLIC INTEREST STATEMENT

Abstract: Decision-making is considered as the cognitive process resulting in the selection of a belief or a course of act among numerous substitute possibilities. Today, decision-making helps to opt for the best assets i.e. machine tools, equipment etc. of firms under several concerns such as depreciation value, price, replacement, maintenance cost, repairmen cost, power consumptions etc. which augments the effectiveness of operations of production units. Recently, the problem of replacement is realized, when the job performing units such as men, machines, equipment, parts etc. becomes less effective, uneconomic, useless due to breakdown, sudden failure and gradual deterioration in their efficiency by the passage of time. By replacing those assets with new ones at frequent interval, maintenance and other overhead costs can be reduced. The work presented a replacement model combined with straight-line depreciation method, which can be used to determine the economic life of the productive machines and equipment. The proposed approach helps the managers and the owners of the business firms in computing the economic life of their machine. Numerical case has been presented, in order to justify the validation of the proposed model