In the last half century, the aerospace industry has seen a dramatic paradigm shift from a focus on performance-at-any-cost to product economics and value. The steady increase in product requirements, complexity and global competition has driven aircraft manufacturers to seek broad portfolios of advanced technologies. The development costs and cycle times of these technologies vary widely, and the resulting design environment is one where decisions must be made under substantial uncertainty. Modeling and simulation have recently become the standard practice for addressing these issues; detailed simulations and explorations of candidate future states of these systems help reduce a complex design problem into a comprehensible, manageable form where decision factors are prioritized. While there are still fundamental criticisms about using modeling and simulation, the emerging challenge becomes ``How do you best configure uncertainty analyses and the information they produce to address real world problems?” One such analysis approach was developed in this thesis by structuring the input, models, and output to answer questions about the risk and economic impact of technology decisions in future aircraft programs. Unlike other methods, this method placed emphasis on the uncertainty in the cumulative cashflow space as the integrator of economic viability. From this perspective, it then focused on exploration of the design and technology space to tailor the business case and its associated risk in the cash flow dimension. The methodology is called CASSANDRA and is intended to be executed by a program manager of a manufacturer working of the development of future concepts. The program manager has the ability to control design elements as well as the new technology allocation on that aircraft. She is also responsible for the elicitation of the uncertainty in those dimensions within control as well as the external scenarios (that are out of program control). The methodology was applied on a future single-aisle 150 passenger aircraft design. The overall methodology is compared to existing approaches and is shown to identify more economically robust design decisions under a set of at-risk program scenarios. Additionally, a set of metrics in the uncertain cumulative cashflow space were developed to assist the methodology user in the identification, evaluation, and selection of design and technology. These metrics are compared to alternate approaches and are shown to better identify risk efficient design and technology selections. At the modeling level, an approach is given to estimate the production quantity based on an enhanced Overall Evaluation Criterion method that captures the competitive advantage of the aircraft design. This model was needed as the assumption of production quantity is highly influential to the business case risk. Finally, the research explored the capacity to generate risk mitigation strategies in to two analysis configurations: when available data and simulation capacity are abundant, and when they are sparse or incomplete. The first configuration leverages structured filtration of Monte Carlo simulation results. The allocation of design and technology risk is then identified on the Pareto Frontier. The second configuration identifies the direction of robust risk mitigation based on the available data and limited simulation ability. It leverages a linearized approximation of the cashflow metrics and identifies the direction of allocation using the Jacobian matrix and its inversion.

Today companies are competing on the basis of what they know, how fast they learn it, and how well they use what they learn. At the heart of this knowledge-based competition lie knowledge and even more important intelligence. Competitive Intelligence, as a discipline, is increasingly being viewed as a critical enabler to reach competitive advantage. Previous research, however, suggest that South African com¬panies showed a general lack of appropriate pro¬cesses or structures for competitive intelligence compared to their international counterparts. The research aims to demonstrate, through a case study, how the theoretical concepts associated with competitive intelligence can be translated into practice so as to ensure efficient and cost effective competitive intelligence practices and thus contribute to the future success of competitive intelligence programmes in South Africa. / Information Science / M. Inf.

PhD (Psychology) / Department of Psychology / Background: South Africa has world’s highest prevalence of HIV-positive people with approximately 7.06 million HIV-positive people with 110 000 HIV- related deaths reported by Statistics South Africa in 2017. South Africa has expanded access to anti-retroviral therapy services, from urban centers to resource-constrained rural communities. The rate of loss, however, to follow-up for patients on anti-retroviral treatment continues to increase. Aim of the Study: The aim of this study was to determine patient and nurse perspectives on loss to follow up among HIV-positive patients in Sekhukhune District of Limpopo Province, South Africa. The findings of the study guided the development of a proposed strategy to decrease loss to follow up among HIV-positive patients. Method: A qualitative research design was used with non-probability purposive sampling and with probability systematic sampling. The sample of patients comprised 30 HIV-positive people classified as lost to follow-up from clinics with high prevalence rates of lost to follow-up patients. Eight nurses, four from clinics with high rates and four from clinics with low lost to follow-up rates comprised the sample of nurses. Semi-structured interviews were conducted using the study research questions as a guide. Eight interviews were conducted with nurse clinic managers and 30 with the patients. Content analysis was used to analyze the data. Results: The key themes that emerged from the study included patients’ and nurses` perspectives on factors contributing to loss to follow up among HIV- positive patients; and Patients’ and nurses’ perspectives on strategies that would address barriers to loss to follow up among HIV- positive patients. Sub-themes on patients’ and nurses’ perspectives on factors contributing to loss to follow up among HIV- positive patients included: Lack of understanding of anti-retroviral treatment; fearful to disclose HIV status; lack of confidentiality; negative side effects; use of traditional medicine; self-transfer from one clinic to another. Patients’ and nurses’ elicited the strategies that would assist patients to remain in care and to take antiretroviral treatment consistently. The strategies included: providing patients with health education; working as a team; implementing social support group programme; providing nurses with in-service education on ethics and ethos. Informed by various intervention models in HIV care: Information Motivational Behavioural model; Health Belief Model; Social Action Theory and Social Cognitive Theory; I proposed a strategy that may reduce the rate of non-adherence and loss to follow up among patients with HIV in Limpopo Province. / HWSETA