According to W. Edwards Deming, American companies require nothing less than a transformation of management style and of governmental relations with industry. In Out of the Crisis, originally published in 1982, Deming offers a theory of management based on his famous 14 Points for Management. Management's failure to plan for the future, he claims, brings about loss of market, which brings about loss of jobs. Management must be judged not only by the quarterly dividend, but by innovative plans to stay in business, protect investment, ensure future dividends, and provide more jobs through improved product and service. In simple, direct language, he explains the principles of management transformation and how to apply them.

Out of the Crisis

Established in 2006, TATA Africa Services (Nigeria) Limited operates as the nodal point for Tata businesses in West Africa. TATA Africa Services (Nigeria) Limited has a strong presence in Nigeria with investments exceeding USD 10 million. The company was established in Lagos, Nigeria as a subsidiary of TATA Africa Holdings (SA) (Pty) Limited, South Africa and serves as the hub of Tata’s operations in Nigeria and the rest of West Africa.

What About Us

Introduction to stochastic programming

In the last four decades the container as an essential part of a unit-load-concept has achieved undoubted importance in international sea freight transportation. With ever increasing containerization the number of seaport container terminals and competition among them have become quite remarkable. Operations are nowadays unthinkable without effective and efficient use of information technology as well as appropriate optimization (operations research) methods. In this paper we describe and classify the main logistics processes and operations in container terminals and present a survey of methods for their optimization.

Container terminal operation and operations research — a classification and literature review

The current decade sees a considerable growth in worldwide container transportation and with it an indispensable need for optimization. Also the interest in and availability of academic literatures as well as case reports are almost exploding. With this paper an earlier survey which proved to be of utmost importance for the community is updated and extended to provide the current state of the art in container terminal operations and operations research.

Operations research at container terminals: a literature update

DEM speedup: Stiffness effects on behavior of bulk material

The international biomass market is growing, and is expected to be a large-scale trading market in the long term future. The demand within the European Union, however, cannot be met by local supply. Therefore, a large-scale biomass bulk terminal for both solid and liquid biomass and liquid biofuels is required to accommodate the biomass flows. The capacity for the large-scale biomass bulk terminal is set at a maximum of 40 million tons per annum, with the estimated share of solid biomass of 40–50 percent. Although some of the issues or concerns (e. g. particle breakage that leads to downstream segregation problems) with regard to storage and handling of biomass can be addressed with the knowledge gained from existing dry bulk terminals, little information is available from the perspective of biomass. Therefore, experiments have been done to determine physical properties of some biomass materials. They are required to allow the design of suitable equipment (e.g. hopper) and handle biomass materials properly, i.e. the materials are handled based on first in first out stock rotation within storage vessel and/or ground storage scheme. Failure to achieve this goal will lead to the risk of negative effects and incidents such as material degradation (due to e.g. fermentation, biological reactions), self-heating (due to exothermic reaction), health hazard, and explosion. The objective of this paper is to present various decisive physical material properties of three types of solid biomass fuels: wood pellets, wood chips and torrefied pellets. The properties studied are physical material properties and the characteristics when the materials interact with the storage and handling equipment. In addition to the results, among which particle size distribution and angle of internal friction, the experimental setup as well as the relevant standards (e.g. ASTM and CEN) will be described.

Physical properties of solid biomass

Micro–macro properties of quartz sand: Experimental investigation and DEM simulation

Detecting fatigue in car drivers and aircraft pilots by using non-invasive measures: the value of differentiation of sleepiness and mental fatigue

Condition monitoring systems are commonly exploited to assess the health status of equipment. A fundamental part of any condition monitoring system is data acquisition. Meaningfully estimating the current condition and predicting the future behaviour of the equipment strongly depend on the characteristic of the data measurement stage. Nowadays, condition monitoring has wide applications in the railway industry, and various monitoring approaches have been proposed for the inspection of wheel and rail conditions. In-service condition monitoring of wheels provides the real-time data required for maintenance planning, while in-workshop inspection is normally done at fixed intervals carried out periodically. In-service data acquisition can be divided into on-board and wayside measurements. In this paper, on the basis of these classifications, the existing data acquisition techniques for the monitoring of railway wheel condition are reviewed, and the state-of-the-art methods and required research are discussed.

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Gabriel Lodewijks

Papers

DEM speedup: Stiffness effects on behavior of bulk material

Physical properties of solid biomass

Micro–macro properties of quartz sand: Experimental investigation and DEM simulation

Detecting fatigue in car drivers and aircraft pilots by using non-invasive measures: the value of differentiation of sleepiness and mental fatigue

Condition monitoring approaches for the detection of railway wheel defects