Quick response inputs and outcomes in the apparel industry: an example from a South African retailer

This paper provides a two-tier framework for empirically analysing Quick Response on a product level. The first part of the framework suggests retail metrics based on the characteristics of Quick Response to allow comparison between supply chains in terms of their adherance ot the strategy. The second section of the framework lays out a methodology for quantifying the benefits of Quick Response by comparing product level performance of Quick Response products to those on traditonal lead times. The suggested methodology is applied to data from a large South African clothing retailer as an example

Perceptions of Czech and Slovak participants of the usefulness of the Iowa State University Farm Management in a Market Economy Workshop

The purpose of this investigation was to assess the perception of the participants who attended Farm Management in a Market Economy (Workshop I), which was presented at the three agriculture universities in the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic. The workshop was designed to assist them in their efforts in moving from a centrally controlled economy (society) to a market economy (society). Objectives of the study were to determine: (1) to what extent the participants were able to understand the information presented in the workshop; (2) the usefulness of the workshop to the participants in their efforts to understand a market economy; and (3) to what extent the workshop was effectively planned and organized;For the study\u27s first objective, 99.2 percent of the respondents indicated they completely understood the information or they understood most, but not all, of the information presented;The composite overall mean score for the second objective was 4.25 (useful to very useful). The respondents indicated that they felt that the question and response period was the most useful. Least useful were audio visual presentations;For the study\u27s third objective, that of assessing if the participants felt the workshop was effectively planned and organized, the overall mean score for this objective was 4.06 (more than adequate);Significant differences (=.05) were observed among group means for the objectives when the respondents were grouped by age, professional responsibility, years in current position, and location in which they participated in the workshop;Several of the participants indicated that they felt the workshop was very well presented and several indicated they were going to try to use the information to make changes in their work. The most striking example was given by a participant from the Nitra workshop, Jan\u27 Goldsmith. On Thursday, during the open discussion period set aside for evaluation comments, he publicly announced, Because of this workshop, I quit my job on the cooperative farm last night and I am going to be a private farmer. Participants also indicated that they felt the workshop was useful to them in their efforts to understand a market economy

Data integration with data warehousing and data mining in database environments

The topics of data warehousing and data mining encompasses architectures, algorithms and tools for bringing together selected data from multiple databases or other information sources into a single repository called a data warehouse which is suitable for direct querying or analysis. The querying and analysis can be implemented with any of the data mining tools being developed. Data mining is the non-trivial extraction of implicit, previously unknown and potentially useful information from information sources; In this thesis, we will define a specific data warehousing architecture, its components and give an explanation of the responsibilities of the components in the data warehousing system are defined. The new data warehousing system and it components will also provide suitable topics for exploratory research into their implementation. We will also explain how data mining techniques will be used to extract data from multiple information sources to place data into the central data warehouse of the system and how data mining tools will be used to query and analysis the data warehouse system

Surfactant/Supercritical Fluid Cleaning of Contaminated Substrates

CFC's and halogenated hydrocarbon solvents have been the solvents of choice to degrease and otherwise clean precision metal parts to allow proper function. Recent regulations have, however, rendered most of these solvents unacceptable for these purposes. New processes which are being used or which have been proposed to replace these solvents usually either fail to remove water soluble contaminants or produce significant aqueous wastes which must then be disposed of. In this work, a new method for cleaning surfaces will be investigated. Solubility of typical contaminants such as lubricating greases and phosphatizing bath residues will be studied in several surfactant/supercritical fluid solutions. The effect of temperature, pressure, and the composition of the cleaning mixture on the solubility of oily, polar, and ionic contaminants will be investigated. A reverse micellar solution in a supercritical light hydrocarbon solvent will be used to clean samples of industrial wastes. A reverse micellar solution is one where water is dissolved into a non-polar solvent with the aid of a surfactant. The solution will be capable of dissolving both water-soluble contaminants and oil soluble contaminants. Once the contaminants have been dissolved into the solution they will be separated from the light hydrocarbon and precipitated by a relatively small pressure drop and the supercritical solvent will be available for recycle for reuse. The process will be compared to the efficacy of supercritical CO2 cleaning by attempting to clean the same types of substrates and machining wastes with the same contaminants using supercritical CO2. It is anticipated that the supercritical CO2 process will not be capable of removing ionic residues

Creating and Managing a New Liaison Organizational Model: Strategies for Success

Over the past decade, there has been an increased focus on liaison librarianship in response to changes in the higher education landscape. Within higher education, there have been significant shifts in student learning, assessment methods, technologies, scholarly communications, the management of research data, and the impact of “big data.” In ongoing efforts to broadly support initiatives and changes in higher education, academic libraries began examining the roles of liaison librarians and to develop strategies to support emerging changes. This article discusses the University of Maryland Libraries' experience in developing, assessing, and continuing a successful liaison model

Developing a New Model and Organizational Framework for Liaison Librarians

This chapter covers the developments arising from two major task forces at the University of Maryland Libraries, a Liaison Librarian task force and the Research Commons task force. Using Kotter’s Eight Stage Process, the authors discuss the planning and initial phases of these ideas, the work of the task forces, and communication to the library organization about the need and urgency for this work, as well as the subsequent steps taken since the final reports were submitted