The primary objective of this research is to review the value of business events in the performance of an organisation. Business events are categorised as part of the business tourism sector of the tourism industry. This sector is a strong financial contributor to many nations’ economies. The sector, sometimes also known as the M.I.C.E industry or meetings industry, focuses on creating business events to fit the knowledge needs of organisations across a wide range of industries. The business events are of several genre including exhibitions, training seminars, conferences, congresses and trade shows and all have been created for the purpose of helping organisations improve individual competitive advantages by learning from peers, competitors, suppliers and customers. The financial outcome of holding business tourism events is typically measured by such indicators as the number of business event venues booked, the number of business tourism visitors to a country attending business events, the number of hotel bed-nights sold that relate to business events, the number of add-on packages in the way of transport, entertainment and leisure tours used by business event attendees. Countries including South Africa have specific national policies to attract globally rotating business events to their own country. While hotels, transport and other tourism activities glean substantial financial benefit from the hosting of business events, the outcome of these events in terms of the new knowledge created for organisations is the primary objective of this research. As knowledge is intangible the value of knowledge is hard to understand in terms of past performance such as financial statements but it is seen in the literature review that there are many beneficial implications of seeking knowledge not limited to risk management through informed decision making. New knowledge has the ability to change the future work-place behaviour of employees in turn affecting the performance of an organisation. Lewin (1951) summarised that the level of   behavioural change from the influence of new knowledge attained at an event is a function of the people at the event and the environment of the event. Understanding these variables speaks directly to managing the intangible value created from business events. Thus Lewin’s formula as applied to business events is considered a link in the value chain of intangible asset creation in this research. Knowledge is an intangible asset of every organisation often documented in formal normative managerial actions such as policies, processes and databases and also held informally by individual employees who have personal skills and abilities. Measuring the change in knowledge value through an intervention such as a business event has relevance in terms of valuing the contribution of business events to improving organisational performance. A secondary objective of this research was then to review the current use of the Kirkpatrick-Phillips return-on-investment model in relation to its effectiveness in defining knowledge objectives and measuring their effect on intangible asset creation. The model is the business events sector recommended methodology to set the objectives and key performance indicators that define the degree of success of the business event for an organisation. The utility of this model in helping to manage organisational knowledge value derived from business events is reviewed. The relevance of business events to future organisational performance improvement is understood by analysing firstly an organisation’s perspective of the value of business events and then the perspective of an employee of the organisation attending business events. The findings of the literature review guided the design of both the qualitative and quantitative surveys that were used to explore the way knowledge flows from events into organisations. These surveys fulfil the third and fourth objectives of the research. To understand the flow of new knowledge through an organisation many functions and hierarchies of command, a systems thinking methodology was applied in that it is assumed that all units of the organisation add value at their own level and this value accumulates upwards towards the overall value of knowledge for the organisation in creating competitive advantages. The literature review firstly highlighted the role of creating opportunity for socialisation at events as pivotal in improving an organisation’s knowledge. Then systems methodology tool of viable systems diagnosis suggested a theoretical viable systems model of what a healthy, successful organisational knowledge system would look like. The methodology was then applied to distil the secondary data reviewed to 12 variables each composed of many other variables that act within this theoretical model. The 12 variables were included in semi-open ended questions of a qualitative research instrument that interviewed 18 managers who either design or attend business events. The qualitative responses and the system of the 12 variables were then used to guide the creation of the quantitative instrument. The quantitative research produced 354 useable questionnaires that were statistically analysed by exploratory factor analysis. The latent factors identified were used in the design of a structured equation model (SEM). The SEM indicated that organisations rely on socialisation activities such as business events to create new knowledge. The SEM also indicates that employees of an organisation may well consider business event activities from a personalised perspective of their own continued professional development needs which may not always align to those of the organisation suggesting the alignment between organisational and personal goals as critical in maximising the value attained from a business event. This research therefore made a valuable contribution in that it explored the value chain between the business events and their role in improving an individual organisation’s performance. This in turn implies from a systems thinking point of view to the overall performance of a country’s economy. A further contribution of this study is recommendations made to improve the ease of application of the Kirkpatrick-Phillips model and thus manage the process of socialisation and ultimately knowledge creation better. A pre- and post event extension to the model is recommended defined in a template to be used in an iterative manner to improve the management and capturing of the value of knowledge arising from the event and this fulfils the final objective of the research. / Thesis (PhD (Tourism Management))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2013

The title of the research is “How mentorship is perceived to contribute to the well-being of an employee in an explosives manufacturing organisation”. This research was conducted within AEL Mining Services, an explosives manufacturing organisation that is part of the AECI group of companies. The object of the research was to gain a better understanding of the association between mentorship and well-being, based on how the experience is perceived by the employee that was either part or not part of such a program, be it formal or informal. During the literature study authors such as Keating (2012:91), Govender and Parumasur (2010:2) and Masango (2011:1) felt very strongly that mentorship begins on the day of birth and continues throughout one‟s entire life where competencies in the mentor role entail understanding self and others, communicating effectively and developing employees and it is clear that great leaders would not have achieved their full potential without effective mentoring. During the literature study it was also found that advantages as well as disadvantage are linked to mentorship, but that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. Research identifies the need for sustainable development and although a variety of mentorship models exist that are currently used, it is evident that mentorship does have an impact on whoever is subjected to it. The study adopted a quantitative methodology, in which more than one questionnaire was utilised. Mentorship was identified as the independent variable and well-being as the dependent variable. For this study, the respondents were required to disclose geographical information concerning themselves and in addition to this, the Mental Health Continuum and General Health Questionnaire was utilised in order to determine the level of well-being as perceived by the respondents, based on mentorship or the lack thereof. The Statistical Consultation Services of the North-West University determined the statistical methods and procedures for the analyses of the research. Ellis and Steyn (2003:51-53) make it clear that in many cases it is important to know whether a relationship between two variables is practically significant. The research made use of triangulation where Gratton and Jones (2010:121) propose that triangulation can strengthen the validity of research, and is useful as a means to demonstrate trustworthiness in the analysis. Based on the results generated from the statistical analysis, the mentored group has a better overall state of health and psychological well-being than the non-mentored group. The deduction is thus made that with mentorship there is a significant difference in the overall well-being of an employee that was subjected to such a program. Recommendations were made regarding further research that needs to be conducted, in which a mentorship program is tailored for a specific company/organisation within the explosives manufacturing industry, then implemented and the results of it measured over a period of time. / PhD, North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2014

The primary objective of this research is to review the value of business events in the performance of an organisation. Business events are categorised as part of the business tourism sector of the tourism industry. This sector is a strong financial contributor to many nations’ economies. The sector, sometimes also known as the M.I.C.E industry or meetings industry, focuses on creating business events to fit the knowledge needs of organisations across a wide range of industries. The business events are of several genre including exhibitions, training seminars, conferences, congresses and trade shows and all have been created for the purpose of helping organisations improve individual competitive advantages by learning from peers, competitors, suppliers and customers. The financial outcome of holding business tourism events is typically measured by such indicators as the number of business event venues booked, the number of business tourism visitors to a country attending business events, the number of hotel bed-nights sold that relate to business events, the number of add-on packages in the way of transport, entertainment and leisure tours used by business event attendees. Countries including South Africa have specific national policies to attract globally rotating business events to their own country. While hotels, transport and other tourism activities glean substantial financial benefit from the hosting of business events, the outcome of these events in terms of the new knowledge created for organisations is the primary objective of this research. As knowledge is intangible the value of knowledge is hard to understand in terms of past performance such as financial statements but it is seen in the literature review that there are many beneficial implications of seeking knowledge not limited to risk management through informed decision making. New knowledge has the ability to change the future work-place behaviour of employees in turn affecting the performance of an organisation. Lewin (1951) summarised that the level of   behavioural change from the influence of new knowledge attained at an event is a function of the people at the event and the environment of the event. Understanding these variables speaks directly to managing the intangible value created from business events. Thus Lewin’s formula as applied to business events is considered a link in the value chain of intangible asset creation in this research. Knowledge is an intangible asset of every organisation often documented in formal normative managerial actions such as policies, processes and databases and also held informally by individual employees who have personal skills and abilities. Measuring the change in knowledge value through an intervention such as a business event has relevance in terms of valuing the contribution of business events to improving organisational performance. A secondary objective of this research was then to review the current use of the Kirkpatrick-Phillips return-on-investment model in relation to its effectiveness in defining knowledge objectives and measuring their effect on intangible asset creation. The model is the business events sector recommended methodology to set the objectives and key performance indicators that define the degree of success of the business event for an organisation. The utility of this model in helping to manage organisational knowledge value derived from business events is reviewed. The relevance of business events to future organisational performance improvement is understood by analysing firstly an organisation’s perspective of the value of business events and then the perspective of an employee of the organisation attending business events. The findings of the literature review guided the design of both the qualitative and quantitative surveys that were used to explore the way knowledge flows from events into organisations. These surveys fulfil the third and fourth objectives of the research. To understand the flow of new knowledge through an organisation many functions and hierarchies of command, a systems thinking methodology was applied in that it is assumed that all units of the organisation add value at their own level and this value accumulates upwards towards the overall value of knowledge for the organisation in creating competitive advantages. The literature review firstly highlighted the role of creating opportunity for socialisation at events as pivotal in improving an organisation’s knowledge. Then systems methodology tool of viable systems diagnosis suggested a theoretical viable systems model of what a healthy, successful organisational knowledge system would look like. The methodology was then applied to distil the secondary data reviewed to 12 variables each composed of many other variables that act within this theoretical model. The 12 variables were included in semi-open ended questions of a qualitative research instrument that interviewed 18 managers who either design or attend business events. The qualitative responses and the system of the 12 variables were then used to guide the creation of the quantitative instrument. The quantitative research produced 354 useable questionnaires that were statistically analysed by exploratory factor analysis. The latent factors identified were used in the design of a structured equation model (SEM). The SEM indicated that organisations rely on socialisation activities such as business events to create new knowledge. The SEM also indicates that employees of an organisation may well consider business event activities from a personalised perspective of their own continued professional development needs which may not always align to those of the organisation suggesting the alignment between organisational and personal goals as critical in maximising the value attained from a business event. This research therefore made a valuable contribution in that it explored the value chain between the business events and their role in improving an individual organisation’s performance. This in turn implies from a systems thinking point of view to the overall performance of a country’s economy. A further contribution of this study is recommendations made to improve the ease of application of the Kirkpatrick-Phillips model and thus manage the process of socialisation and ultimately knowledge creation better. A pre- and post event extension to the model is recommended defined in a template to be used in an iterative manner to improve the management and capturing of the value of knowledge arising from the event and this fulfils the final objective of the research. / Thesis (PhD (Tourism Management))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2013

The title of the research is “How mentorship is perceived to contribute to the well-being of an employee in an explosives manufacturing organisation”. This research was conducted within AEL Mining Services, an explosives manufacturing organisation that is part of the AECI group of companies. The object of the research was to gain a better understanding of the association between mentorship and well-being, based on how the experience is perceived by the employee that was either part or not part of such a program, be it formal or informal. During the literature study authors such as Keating (2012:91), Govender and Parumasur (2010:2) and Masango (2011:1) felt very strongly that mentorship begins on the day of birth and continues throughout one‟s entire life where competencies in the mentor role entail understanding self and others, communicating effectively and developing employees and it is clear that great leaders would not have achieved their full potential without effective mentoring. During the literature study it was also found that advantages as well as disadvantage are linked to mentorship, but that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. Research identifies the need for sustainable development and although a variety of mentorship models exist that are currently used, it is evident that mentorship does have an impact on whoever is subjected to it. The study adopted a quantitative methodology, in which more than one questionnaire was utilised. Mentorship was identified as the independent variable and well-being as the dependent variable. For this study, the respondents were required to disclose geographical information concerning themselves and in addition to this, the Mental Health Continuum and General Health Questionnaire was utilised in order to determine the level of well-being as perceived by the respondents, based on mentorship or the lack thereof. The Statistical Consultation Services of the North-West University determined the statistical methods and procedures for the analyses of the research. Ellis and Steyn (2003:51-53) make it clear that in many cases it is important to know whether a relationship between two variables is practically significant. The research made use of triangulation where Gratton and Jones (2010:121) propose that triangulation can strengthen the validity of research, and is useful as a means to demonstrate trustworthiness in the analysis. Based on the results generated from the statistical analysis, the mentored group has a better overall state of health and psychological well-being than the non-mentored group. The deduction is thus made that with mentorship there is a significant difference in the overall well-being of an employee that was subjected to such a program. Recommendations were made regarding further research that needs to be conducted, in which a mentorship program is tailored for a specific company/organisation within the explosives manufacturing industry, then implemented and the results of it measured over a period of time. / PhD, North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2014

There can be little doubt that Six Sigma is far more than just another novelty concept; in fact, it can be considered as a proven quality philosophy and if applied correctly, ensures a competitive advantage. A rapidly increasing number of firms, from all industries and of all sizes, are now reporting significant savings or returns on their program and training investments, because of the implementation of Six Sigma. This paper investigates the origin, definition, financial benefits and challenges of Six Sigma and its implementation. Certain critical success factors determine the successful implementation of Six Sigma in any firm. Many firms have reported significant benefits as a result of Six Sigma project implementation, though not all are yet success stories. This paper reviews the literature related to the critical success factors for the effective implementation of Six Sigma. This research will provide the useful information for firms, which are willing to implement Six Sigma and help firms avoid the risks during the process of Six Sigma implementation. The primary objective of this exploratory research is to identify the critical success factors required for the successful implementation of Six Sigma. Then, based on the critical success factors identified in literature and the survey, the purpose is to develop and propose an applicable framework for firms to successfully implement Six Sigma. The research is explorative of nature and a survey research design was used with a questionnaire as data-gathering instrument. Descriptive statistics (e.g. means and standard deviations) were used to analyse the data. The results confirmed that the most critical success factors for successful Six Sigma implementation include management commitment, change management, effective communication and alignment. The proposed framework presents six interlinking components of Six Sigma which is dependent on these four critical success factors. Limitations in the research are identified and recommendations for future research are made. / Thesis (M.B.A.)--North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus, 2009.

There can be little doubt that Six Sigma is far more than just another novelty concept; in fact, it can be considered as a proven quality philosophy and if applied correctly, ensures a competitive advantage. A rapidly increasing number of firms, from all industries and of all sizes, are now reporting significant savings or returns on their program and training investments, because of the implementation of Six Sigma. This paper investigates the origin, definition, financial benefits and challenges of Six Sigma and its implementation. Certain critical success factors determine the successful implementation of Six Sigma in any firm. Many firms have reported significant benefits as a result of Six Sigma project implementation, though not all are yet success stories. This paper reviews the literature related to the critical success factors for the effective implementation of Six Sigma. This research will provide the useful information for firms, which are willing to implement Six Sigma and help firms avoid the risks during the process of Six Sigma implementation. The primary objective of this exploratory research is to identify the critical success factors required for the successful implementation of Six Sigma. Then, based on the critical success factors identified in literature and the survey, the purpose is to develop and propose an applicable framework for firms to successfully implement Six Sigma. The research is explorative of nature and a survey research design was used with a questionnaire as data-gathering instrument. Descriptive statistics (e.g. means and standard deviations) were used to analyse the data. The results confirmed that the most critical success factors for successful Six Sigma implementation include management commitment, change management, effective communication and alignment. The proposed framework presents six interlinking components of Six Sigma which is dependent on these four critical success factors. Limitations in the research are identified and recommendations for future research are made. / Thesis (M.B.A.)--North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus, 2009.

Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is an autoimmune disease of central nervous system. It may result in a variety of symptoms from blurred vision to severe muscle weakness and degradation, depending on the affected regions in brain. To better understand this disease and to quantify its evolution, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is increasingly used nowadays. Manual delineation of MS lesions in MR images by human expert is time-consuming, subjective, and prone to inter-expert variability. Therefore, automatic segmentation is needed as an alternative to manual segmentation. However, the progression of the MS lesions shows considerable variability and MS lesions present temporal changes in shape, location, and area between patients and even for the same patient, which renders the automatic segmentation of MS lesions a challenging problem. In this dissertation, a set of segmentation pipelines are proposed for automatic segmentation of multiple sclerosis (MS) lesions from brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data. These techniques use a trained support vector machine (SVM) to discriminate between the blocks in regions of MS lesions and the blocks in non-MS lesion regions mainly based on the textural features with aid of the other features. The main contribution of this set of frameworks is the use of textural features to detect MS lesions in a fully automated approach that does not rely on manually delineating the MS lesions. In addition, the technique introduces the concept of the multi-sectional views segmentation to produce verified segmentation. The multi-sectional views pipeline is customized to provide better segmentation performance and to benefit from the properties and the nature of MS lesion in MRI. These customization and enhancement leads to development of the customized MV-T-SVM. The MRI datasets that were used in the evaluation of the proposed pipelines are simulated MRI datasets (3 subjects) generated using the McGill University BrainWeb MRI Simulator, real datasets (51 subjects) publicly available at the workshop of MS Lesion Segmentation Challenge 2008 and real MRI datasets (10 subjects) for MS subjects acquired at the University of Miami. The obtained results indicate that the proposed method would be viable for use in clinical practice for the detection of MS lesions in MRI.

The body motion of patients, during magnetic resonance (MR) imaging causes significant artifacts in the reconstructed image. Artifacts are manifested as a motion induced blur and ghost repetitions of the moving structures. which obscure vital anatomical and pathological detail. The techniques that have been proposed for suppressing motion artifacts fall into two major categories. Real-time techniques attempt to prevent the motion from corrupting the data by restricting the data acquisition times or motion of the patients, whereas the post-processing techniques use the information embedded in the corrupted data to restore the image. Most methods currently in widespread use belong to the real-time techniques, however with the advent of fast computing platforms and sophisticated signal processing algorithms, the emergence of post-processing techniques is clearly evident. The post-processing techniques usually demand an appropriate model of the motion. The restoration of the image requires that the motion parameters be determined in order to invert the data degradation process. Methods for the correction of translational motion have been studied extensively in the past. The subject of this thesis encompasses the rotational motion model and the effect of rotational motion on the collected MR data in the spatial frequency space (k-space), which is in general, more complicated than the translational model. Rotational motion artifacts are notably prevalent in MR images of head, brain and limbs. Post-processing techniques for the correction of rotational motion artifacts often involve interpolation and re-gridding of the acquired data in the k-space. These methods create significant data overlap and void regions. Therefore, in the past, proposed corrective techniques have been limited to suppression of artifacts caused by small angle rotations. This thesis presents a method of managing overlap regions, using weighted averaging of redundant data, in order to correct for large angle rotations. An iterative estimation technique for filling the data void regions has also been developed by the use of iterated application of projection operators onto constraint sets. These constraint sets are derived from the k-space data generated by the MR imager, and available a priori knowledge. It is shown that the iterative algorithm diverges at times from the required image, due to inconsistency among the constraint sets. It is also shown that this can be overcome by using soft. constraint sets and fuzzy projections. One of the constraints applied in the iterative algorithm is the finite support of the imaged object, marked by the outer boundary of the region of interest (ROI). However, object boundary extraction directly from the motion affected MR image can be difficult, specially if the motion function of the object is unknown. This thesis presents a new ROI extraction scheme based on entropy minimization in the image background. The object rotation function is usually unknown or unable to be measured with sufficient accuracy. The motion estimation algorithm proposed in this thesis is based on maximizing the similarity among the k-space data subjected to angular overlap. This method is different to the typically applied parameter estimation technique based on minimization of pixel energy outside the ROI, and has higher efficiency and ability to estimate rotational motion parameters in the midst of concurrent translational motion. The algorithms for ROI extraction, rotation estimation and data correction have been tested with both phantom images and spin echo MR images producing encouraging results.

Thèse--Sciences politiques--Genève, 1979, n °312. / Bibliogr. p. 265-272. Index.

Diss.--Zürich. / Bibliography: p. 217-223.