Determining the essential characetristics of Six Sigma Black Belts

A Six Sigma Black Belt (SSBB) plays the role of a full-time team leader responsible for implementing process improvement projects using the Six Sigma methodology (Define-Measure-Analyse-Improve-Control) within the business to drive up customer satisfaction levels and business productivity. Black Belt projects are typically defined so that they can be completed in less than 6 months, and are generally focused on high-priority business issues and are targeted to add $175,000 to$250,000 to the bottom-line of organisations (Snee, 2004). A fully trained BB will be expected to deliver a minimum of $500,000 to well over$1,000,000 in direct cost savings to the bottom-line of an organisation per year (Harry and Schroeder, 2000). Moreover, a BB is expected to complete between 4 to 6 projects per annum depending on the scope of the project, complexity of the project and availability of data. The BB program of study focuses on an understanding of the Six Sigma philosophy, key principles and concepts, tactics, application of tools and techniques, project management skills, etc. So,why the martial arts terminology? The sole function of a BB is to focus on disciplined problem solving using the DMAIC (Define-Measure-Analyse-Improve-Control) methodology and a specific set of tools and techniques with speed (i.e. project completion in a short period of time). The purpose here is to defeat the enemy – variation in processes which lead to customer dissatisfaction (Brue and Howes, 2006)

Alternatives to prohibition illicit drugs: how we can stop killing and criminalising young Australians

This report follows from a Roundtable discussion held in July 2012 to consider new approaches to public policy about illicit drugs in Australia. An earlier Australia21 report launched in April 2012 had concluded that attempts to control drug use through the criminal justice system have clearly failed. They have also caused the needless and damaging criminalisation of too many young people, often with adverse life-changing consequences, including premature death from overdose

Biallelic and Genome Wide Association Mapping of Germanium Tolerant Loci in Rice (Oryza sativa L.)

Funding: This project was partially funded by a Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) grant (BB/J003336/1) awarded to AHP. The work was also supported by a self-funded studentship (PT). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Gene dynamics of toll-like receptor 4 through a population bottleneck in an insular population of water voles (Arvicola amphibius)

Acknowledgments We would like to thank all colleagues who have contributed to fieldwork and sampling during this study. We would especially like to thank Marius Wenzel and Sandra Telfer for collaboration with different aspects of the study, and Dave Jones and Nat Jones for Bartonella PCR assays. This work was supported by the BBSRC studentship to MKG (BB/J01446X/1) and a NERC studentship to MKO. The research was carried out under project license PPL 40/1813.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Mitochondrial metagenomics: letting the genes out of the bottle

‘Mitochondrial metagenomics’ (MMG) is a methodology for shotgun sequencing of total DNA from specimen mixtures and subsequent bioinformatic extraction of mitochondrial sequences. The approach can be applied to phylogenetic analysis of taxonomically selected taxa, as an economical alternative to mitogenome sequencing from individual species, or to environmental samples of mixed specimens, such as from mass trapping of invertebrates. The routine generation of mitochondrial genome sequences has great potential both for systematics and community phylogenetics. Mapping of reads from low-coverage shotgun sequencing of environmental samples also makes it possible to obtain data on spatial and temporal turnover in whole-community phylogenetic and species composition, even in complex ecosystems where species-level taxonomy and biodiversity patterns are poorly known. In addition, read mapping can produce information on species biomass, and potentially allows quantification of within-species genetic variation. The success of MMG relies on the formation of numerous mitochondrial genome contigs, achievable with standard genome assemblers, but various challenges for the efficiency of assembly remain, particularly in the face of variable relative species abundance and intra-specific genetic variation. Nevertheless, several studies have demonstrated the power of mitogenomes from MMG for accurate phylogenetic placement, evolutionary analysis of species traits, biodiversity discovery and the establishment of species distribution patterns; it offers a promising avenue for unifying the ecological and evolutionary understanding of species diversity

Crisis Management in Government Parastatals: A Case Study of National Railways of Zimbabwe

The 2008 economic turmoil has ignited different crises among state business entities in Zimbabwe and to date (2016) many parastatals are struggling and production capacity is low. Financial, technological, and confrontation crises at National Railways of Zimbabwe (NRZ) became prominent following the 2008 economic decline, with seeming less attention and control being devoted. This quantitative research therefore, adopted a descriptive research design to investigate crisis management effectiveness, efficiency, crisis response strategies and factors affecting crisis management at NRZ. A sample of 100 respondents was selected from 135 employees targeted at NRZ- Harare station, using a proportionate systematic sampling technique. Structured questionnaires were used to gather data. Data was analysed using the Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) 16.0 into percentages, means and standard deviations, then presented in form of tables. The study established that, crisis management at NRZ is ineffective, with several factors affecting crisis management, in which leadership mandate and support is the major limiting factor. However, crisis management efficiency at NRZ was also found to be moderate, with crisis response strategies such as recapitalisation, restructuring and public-private ownership being used. As a result, the researcher recommended NRZ management to adhere to company procedures and be freed from politics and corruption. Further, the researcher recommended for NRZ to seek inter-parastatal loans, international loans and investors, embark on Crisis Management training, massive infrastructure improvement and stakeholder relationship building. Further researches are recommended to investigate crisis management effectiveness and efficiency on crisis preparedness, crisis prevention, crisis event management and post-crisis management. Future studies should also assess the strength of the impact of crisis management factors on crisis management success.Keywords: Crisis management, Government Parastatals, Crisis Response Strategies, NR

A Market-based Approach to Multi-factory Scheduling

In this paper, we report on the design of a novel market-based approach for decentralised scheduling across multiple factories. Specifically, because of the limitations of scheduling in a centralised manner -- which requires a center to have complete and perfect information for optimality and the truthful revelation of potentially commercially private preferences to that center -- we advocate an informationally decentralised approach that is both agile and dynamic. In particular, this work adopts a market-based approach for decentralised scheduling by considering the different stakeholders representing different factories as self-interested, profit-motivated economic agents that trade resources for the scheduling of jobs. The overall schedule of these jobs is then an emergent behaviour of the strategic interaction of these trading agents bidding for resources in a market based on limited information and their own preferences. Using a simple (zero-intelligence) bidding strategy, we empirically demonstrate that our market-based approach achieves a lower bound efficiency of 84%. This represents a trade-off between a reasonable level of efficiency (compared to a centralised approach) and the desirable benefits of a decentralised solution

Statistics of Bubble Rearrangement Dynamics in a Coarsening Foam

We use speckle-visibility spectroscopy to measure the time dependence of bubble rearrangement events that are driven by coarsening in an aqueous foam. This technique gives the time trace for the average scattering site speed within a prescribed volume of the sample. Results are analyzed in terms of distributions of event times, event speeds, and event displacements. The distribution of rest times between successive events is also measured; comparison with diffusing-wave spectroscopy results shows that the spatial structure of a typical event consists of a core of only a few bubbles which undergo topology change plus a surrounding shell of bubbles which shift by an amount that decays to one wavelength at four to five bubbles away. No correlations are found between the durations, speeds, and rest times between successive events