Orientador: Messias Borges Silva / Coorientador: João Paulo Estevam de Souza / Banca: Otávio José de Oliveira / Banca: Marco Antonio Carvalho Pereira / Resumo: Esta pesquisa tem como objetivos verificar a similaridade de requisitos entre os modelos Americano, Europeu e Brasileiro de excelência em gestão e o sistema de gestão da qualidade baseado na norma ISO 9001:2015 e verificar qual o nível de aderência das empresas brasileiras do setor aeronáutico quanto a estes modelos. Para a realização da pesquisa foi utilizado o método Survey. Constatou-se que existem similaridades entre os requisitos dos modelos de excelência Americano, Europeu e o Brasileiro e os requisitos similares são: gestão da liderança, processos e resultados do negócio. Foi possível identificar uma aproximação entre o modelo de excelência em gestão Brasileiro e a ISO 9001, especialmente a partir da versão 2015 da norma. Quanto ao nível de aderência dos requisitos nas atuais empresas manufatureiras do setor aeronáutico, os resultados mostram que 90.4% das empresas-respondentes, concordam parcialmente ou totalmente quanto às práticas propostas pelo modelo de excelência em gestão e os itens que apresentaram maior nível de aderência foram: o mapeamento de processos, a utilização dos indicadores de desempenho que mede a satisfação do cliente e a conformidade do produto. Também foi verificado que as principais melhorias percebidas no ambiente empresarial foram a aprendizagem organizacional, a cultura de excelência e a melhora da competitividade e sustentabilidade do negócio / Abstract: This research aims to verify the similarity of requirements between the American, European and Brazilian models of management excellence and the quality management system based on ISO 9001:2015 and the adherence level of Brazilian aeronautical companies to these models. In this research the method survey was used. The research found that there are similarities between the requirements of the global business excellence models and the Brazilian excellence model, and these similar requirements are: leadership management, processes, and business results. It was possible to identify an approximation between the Brazilian model of excellence and the ISO 9001, especially since the 2015 version of the standard. Regarding the level of adherence of the requirements in the current aeronautical manufacturing companies, the results show that the 90.4% of respondents, agree partially or totally on the practices proposed by the model of excellence in management. And, the items that presented the highest level of adherence were: the mapping of processes, the use of performance indicators that measure customer satisfaction and product compliance. It was also verified that the main improvements perceived in the business environment were the organizational learning, the culture of excellence and the improvement of the competitiveness and sustainability of the business / Mestre

El texto completo de este trabajo no está disponible en el Repositorio Académico UPC por restricciones de la casa editorial donde ha sido publicado. / The objective of this work is to develop a quality management system focused on the principles of TQM for cocoa micro and small enterprises (MSEs) in the province of La Convención, Cusco - Perú. The diagnosis for this investigation was made using in-depth interviews to the cocoa farmers that facilitated the identification of the current situation of cocoa MSEs. With the results obtained and based on the scientific articles studied, the critical elements in each activity related to the cocoa production process were determined, and it is focused on establishing a quality management system adaptable to the requirements of the plots studied. As a result of the analysis of the experts, the system in question is based on the following principles of TQM: documentation, customer focus, process-based approach and continuous improvement.

El texto completo de este trabajo no está disponible en el Repositorio Académico UPC por restricciones de la casa editorial donde ha sido publicado. / In this study, we propose a basic quality management model that was designed based on good agricultural practices for micro-enterprises of pecan farmers in Ica el Valle, Peru. The research study was developed based on in-depth interviews with 18 farmers within the agricultural sector under study. The study focused on identifying and analyzing the current situation of farmers to design a basic quality management model that can be implemented. The results led to the identification of critical aspects for each of the activities related to the production of nuts. We thus designed a basic quality management model based previous scientific studies. This management system is composed of the following subprocesses: quality adjustment; documentation; parameters definition; monitoring and control; and continuous improvement and analysis of results.

Corporations are expected to be transparent on their sustainability impact and keep their stakeholders informed about how large the impact on the environment is, as well as their work on reducing the impact in question. The transparency is accounted for in a, usually voluntary, sustainability report additional to the already required financial report. With new regulations for mandatory sustainability reporting in Sweden, comprehensive and complete guidelines for corporations to follow are insufficient and the reports tend to be extensive. The reports are therefore hard to assess in terms of how well the reporting is actually done. The Sustainability Reporting Maturity Grid (SRMG) is an assessment tool introduced by Cöster et al. (2020) used for assessing the quality of sustainability reporting. Today, the assessment is performed manually which has proven to be both time-consuming and resulting in varying assessments, affected by individual interpretation of the content. This thesis is exploring how assessment time and grading with the SRMG can be improved by applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) on sustainability documents, resulting in a compressed assessment method - The Prototype. The Prototype intends to facilitate and speed up the process of assessment. The first step towards developing the Prototype was to decide which one of the three Machine Learning models; Naïve Bayes (NB), Support Vector Machines (SVM), or Bidirectional Encoder Representations of Transformers (BERT), is most suitable. This decision was supported by analyzing the accuracy for each model and for respective criteria in the SRMG, where BERT proved a strong classification ability with an average accuracy of 96,8%. Results from the user evaluation of the Prototypeindicated that the assessment time can be halved using the Prototype, with an initial average of 40 minutes decreased to 20 minutes. However, the results further showed a decreased average grading and an increased variation in assessment. The results indicate that applying NLP could be successful, but to get a more competitive Prototype, a more nuanced dataset must be developed, giving more space for the model to detect patterns in the data.

Ziel der Untersuchung ist die Prüfung der Dienlichkeit des Grundansatzes des Qualitätsmanagementsystems QESplus und seiner konzeptionellen sowie operativen Ausprägung bei der Organisationsentwicklung und -steuerung von Einrichtungen der Erwachsenen- bzw. Weiterbidung. Es geht um die Beurteilung der Chancen und Probleme bei der Einführung von QESplus und seiner Auswirkungen auf die Organisations- und Managementdimensionen der untersuchten (Weiter-) Bildungseinrichtungen. Die Arbeit stellt einen ersten Schritt zur empirisch-qualitativen Reflexion des Implementierungsprozesses von QESplus dar und bietet praxisrelevante Anregungen für die Gestaltung von Qualitätsmanagementprozessen sowie Organisationsentwicklung in Einrichtungen der Erwachsenen- bzw. Weiterbildung.

This creative nonfiction thesis tells a story of how water turns into waste. With Portland, Oregon as a base, the reader visits a wastewater treatment plant, several buried and lost streams, a high-tech sewage processor, stormwater education classes, a stormwater management conference, several "green" streets, sewage construction zones, and sewage-related parks. The thesis explores how Western sewage systems came to be, and how wastewater management might change in the future.

El texto completo de este trabajo no está disponible en el Repositorio Académico UPC por restricciones de la casa editorial donde ha sido publicado. / Revisión por pares

Water quality management (WQM) significantly affects water use and ecosystem health, which is helpful for achieving sustainability in environmental and economic aspects. However, the implementation of water quality management is still challenging in practice due to the uncertainty and nonlinearity existing in water systems, as well as the difficulty of the integration of simulation and optimization analyses. Therefore, effective optimization frameworks for handling nonlinearity, various uncertainties, and integrated complex water quality simulation models are highly desired. This dissertation tries to address such challenges by proposing new efficient hybrid inexact optimization models for water quality management under uncertainty through: i) developing an interval quadratic programming (IQP) model for handling both nonlinearity and uncertainty expressed as intervals for water quality management, and solving the developed model by three algorithms to compare and investigate the most effective and straightforward solution algorithm for IQP-WQM problems; ii) developing a simulation-based interval chance-constrained quadratic programming model, which is able to deal with nonlinearity and uncertainties with multiple formats, and implementing a real-world case study of phosphorus control in the central Grand River, Ontario, Canada; iii) proposing a data-driven interval credibility constrained quadratic programming model for water quality management by utilizing a data-driven surrogate model (i.e., inexact linear regression) to incorporate a complex water quality simulation model with the optimization framework to overcome challenges from the integrated simulation-optimization. The performance of the proposed frameworks/models was tested by different case studies and various mathematical techniques (e.g., sensitivity analysis). The results indicate the proposed models are capable of dealing with nonlinearity and various uncertainties, and significantly reducing the computational burden from simulation-optimization analysis. Coupling such efforts in developing efficient hybrid inexact optimization models for water quality management under uncertainty can provide useful tools to solve large-scale complex water quality management problems in a robust manner, and further provide reliable and effective decision supports for water quality planning and management. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / Water quality management plays a key role in facilitating environmental and economic sustainability. However, many challenges still exist in practical water quality management problems, such as various uncertainties and complexities, as well as complicated integrated simulation-optimization analysis. Therefore, the goal of this dissertation is to address such challenges by developing a set of efficient hybrid inexact optimization models for water quality management under uncertainty through: i) developing an interval quadratic programming model for water quality management, and investigating its effective and straightforward solution algorithms; ii) leveraging the power of data-driven modeling and proposing efficient data-driven optimization models based on hybrid inexact programming for water quality management. Robust and effective water quality planning schemes for large-scale water quality management problems can be obtained based on the proposed frameworks/models.

A widely employed instructional design approach, the ADDIE (Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, Evaluation) model, has been one of the most popular and well documented instructional design models (Wilson, Jonassen, and Cole, 1993) for decades. Despite its widespread use, Thiagarajan, a leading instructional technologist, asserts that ADDIE, as an instructional design approach, is comparable to an outdated 1950's manufacturing model (Zemke, 2002). Since the 1950's, manufacturing has evolved, focusing initially on reducing inspection or evaluation costs and later on shifting these cost improvements throughout the organization. Just as manufacturing models and their application have evolved, service operations models such as instructional design models and especially their application are evolving. This dissertation reviews these changes in manufacturing models and associated service operations models in order to examine how these changes have informed instructional design models such as ADDIE and their usage in practice by those attempting to design conditions for learning and to create associated learning objects. In order to better understand how this shift may be applied to both theory and practice in instructional design, this dissertation uses an exploratory case study methodology to examine best practices in the inspection/evaluation process employed during the development of courses. This methodology reflects procedures used in a major study (Institute for Higher Education Policy, 2000). They followed a three-step process, which included a comprehensive literature review, the identification of subjects that "have substantial experience and are providing leadership in distance education." (p.9), and surveying leaders. In similar fashion, during the first phase of the study reported in this research, quality management and instructional design literature is reviewed. In the second phase, the case study subject, the Center for Instructional Design at a major university is selected. In the third phase, instructional design practices used at the Center were studied and areas for reducing inspection/evaluation costs were identified. Principles and methods surmised from the literature reviews and the case study research are presented along with application examples from the case study. These principles and methods illustrate how ADDIE has evolved and continues to be a viable model for the creation of instruction.

Since it's release in Dec 2000, there has been a slow movement towards the new version of ISO 9001:2000 by ISO 9000:1994 certified organizations. Of the 561,747 ISO 9000 certified businesses, 167,210 are certified under the new ISO 9001:2000, which is less than 30 % of the total ISO 9000 certified companies. Although many studies have been conducted to understand and assess the practices of ISO 9000:1994 standards, no research has been done to investigate the practices of ISO 9001:2000 in Saudi Arabia. This study is designed to investigate the implementation practices of the new ISO 9001:2000 standard in Saudi business organizations. The main objectives of this study are to identify the critical factors that lead to successful implementation of the new standard, to determine what barriers have been encountered during implementation, and to identify the most difficult parts of the standard to comply with. It investigates the perceived benefits that Saudi firms have gained from implementing the system and examines the level of knowledge about ISO 9001:2000 and the perceptions of the new standard among the management teams and staff of ISO registered firms. It determines the level of integration between ISO 9001:2000 and other implemented systems. Furthermore, this study aims to investigate the factors that may explain the Saudi organizations' decisions to implement ISO 9001:2000 in their businesses. To accomplish these research objectives, a questionnaire was developed based on an extensive review of related literature and tested for validity and reliability. The target sample for the study was made up of all ISO 9001:2000 registered sites in Saudi Arabia up to 31 Dec. 2002, which comprised 131 organizations. A total of 89 completed surveys were received, for a response rate of 72%. Descriptive statistics, measurement of variation, and association, and factor analysis were used in the interpretation of collected data. The major findings are as follows: 86.5% of the total respondents had implemented ISO 9001:2000 as a transition process from previous ISO 9000 standards. 68.5% of the certified sites took less than one year to implement the standard. Most of them were previously certified in one of the ISO 9000:1994 standards. This high percentage indicates that ISO 9001:2000 can be easily implemented in a short time frame. Most of the companies in the study reported the use of external consultants (70.8%), but overall there was a low level of reliance on them, with 64.0% of registered organizations having documented less than 10% participation of external consultants in implementing the ISO 9001:2000 system. The top five critical success factors in implementing the ISO 9001:2000 quality management system, in descending order, are as follows: commitment of management, effective internal auditing, commitment of middle management, employee motivation and involvement, resource allocation, and existence of appropriate communication routes. The major hindrances during the implementation of ISO 9001:2000, in descending order, were as follows: lack of employee involvement, difficulties in co-operation among middle managers over quality problems, lack of training programs related to quality, insufficient project time, and lack of customer co-operation. The most significant reasons for Saudi organizations to implement the system, in descending order, are as follows: top management initiative, quality improvement of internal operations and processes, customers requirements, part of the overall quality policy of the organization. The highest perceived benefits, in descending order, were as follows: development of quality culture, improved customer satisfaction, better communication with customers, increased management commitment, and use of data as a business management tool. Most respondents are highly satisfied with the standard, believe that it is cost effective and would strongly recommend the standard to other firms. Top managers were the most knowledgeable about the ISO 9001:2000 standard, followed by middle managers, then employees. Findings reveal that level of knowledge about ISO 9001:2000 among organization's people is positively correlated with most of the attainable benefits from implementing the standard. Based on the findings of this study, many conclusions and recommendations were drawn. In summary, for a successful implementation of ISO 9001:2000 standard, organizations must give great consideration to the people involvement factor, particularly top and middle management s involvement and commitment to quality, employees motivation and involvement, quality awareness, and ISO 9001:2000 training.