The poor trust culture in the construction sector is often considered an inhibiting factor to collaboration success in the United Kingdom (UK) despite reform efforts. Numerous reform initiatives tend to have focused on improvements in client and main contractor aspects of construction supply chain relationships, prompting claims that failure to integrate subcontractors, suppliers and consultants into collaborative arrangements remains a major shortcoming. Main contractor and subcontractor relationships therefore continue to be typified by such problems as late payments, charging fees to tender for work, award of contracts based on cheapest price rather than best value, negative margins and demand of retrospective discounts and cash rebates; all of which negatively impact on trust. Some main contractor organisations however, continue to embed supply chain management practices as a strategy for levering value from subcontractors. Such collaborative practices and their implications for inter-organisational trust development, and indeed overall project outcomes, have nonetheless received limited attention in construction management research, raising significant questions on the empirical basis for their implementation. This research was thus undertaken to investigate strategic supply chain management practices adopted by UK main contractors and its implications for inter-organisational trust development during projects. The study adopts a multiple case study design so as to unravel complex subtleties of inter-organisational trust development in the main contractors’ supply chain during projects. With four purposefully selected UK main contractor organisations that had implemented strategic supply chain management, data was gathered through a supply chain workshop, semi-structured interviews, passive observations and documentary analysis. From analysis of the data, it was revealed that strategic supply chain management practices of the main contractors were instrumental for trust manifestation across cognition, system and relational based dimensions. These practices served as constitutive elements of face-to-face interactions through which inter-organisational trust developed, whilst providing the institutional framework to which respective supply chain parties directed their psychological expectations. These findings highlight the importance of maintaining a core of subcontractors from which the main contractor can leverage long-term value irrespective of economic climate. This can be achieved by adequately prioritizing relationally trusted subcontractors for sensitive and high risk work packages whilst ensuring that strategic supply chain management principles can be used to engender impersonal (cognition and system-based) trust dimensions amongst other subcontractors used on a project. Accordingly, a supply chain management oriented framework for engendering inter-organisational trust during projects has been developed based on the study findings and evaluated through semi-structured interviews with selected target participants. This framework does not only provide a systematic and coherent approach for implementing or benchmarking strategic supply chain management in a main contractor’s organisation, but can also be used to prioritize and promote different trust dimensions and their associated behavioural consequences on projects, depending on perceived work package risks.

Since the introduction of sustainable development, industries have witnessed significant sustainability challenges. Literature shows that the food industry is concerned about its need for efficient and effective management practices in dealing with perishability and the requirements for conditioned storage and transport of food products that effect the environment. Hence, the environmental part of sustainability demonstrates its significance in this industrial sector. Despite this, there has been little research into environmentally sustainable inventory management of deteriorating items. This thesis presents mathematical modelling based research for production inventory systems in perishable food supply chains. In this study, multi-objective mixed-integer linear programming models are developed to determine economically and environmentally optimal production and inventory decisions for a two-echelon supply chain. The supply chain consists of single sourcing suppliers for raw materials and a producer who operates under a make-to-stock or make-to-order strategy. The demand facing the producer is non-stationary stochastic in nature and has requirements in terms of service level and the remaining shelf life of the marketed products. Using data from the literature, numerical examples are given in order to test and analyse these models. The computational experiments show that operational adjustments in cases where emission and cost parameters were not strongly correlated with supply chain collaboration (where suppliers and a producer operate under centralised control), emissions are effectively reduced without a significant increase in cost. The findings show that assigning a high disposal cost, limit or high weight of importance to perished goods leads to appropriate reduction of expected waste in the supply chain with no major cost increase. The research has made contributions to the literature on sustainable production and inventory management; providing formal models that can be used as an aid to understanding and as a tool for planning and improving sustainable production and inventory control in supply chains involving deteriorating items, in particular with perishable food supply chains.

Purpose of this paper: The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the factors that enable or aggravate the implementation of a GSCM strategy for textile and fashion companies. Moreover, it shall be investigated how textile and fashion companies perceive their incentives of implementing GSCM and what their organizational responses regarding the perceived barriers and enablers look like. Design/methodology/approach: The report combines a literature study on previous research in the field of supply chain management, Green Supply Chain Management and the drivers and barriers of implementing a GSCM strategy, with an empirical study consisting of an online survey, a semi-structured interview and two case studies that are based on literature review. In order to analyze the survey results, a method to calculate a company’s GSCM incentive score has been developed. Findings: The factors that have been identified as the strongest or most important ones by many companies of the survey, as well as the interviewee and the case studies are supplier collaboration, the lack of supplier commitment, customer demand for more sustainability, customer desire for lower prices and top management commitment. Some companies also perceived the alignment of their company’s strategy as strong GSCM enabler. However, the calculation shows that the overall incentive score of most participants is in the neutral level; meaning that they in total perceive neither significant incentives nor barriers to implement GSCM. With mostly internal enablers and external barriers, more than half of the survey participants can be categorized as Agenda Setters. Research limitations: Due to the low response rate, the sample size of this study is very small. Moreover, the results strongly depend on the personal opinion and experiences of the interviewee and the individual situations of the companies. This means that the results of this study give an indication, but are not generalizable. Therefore, another study with a different sampling method and a larger sample size is needed. Practical implications: The outcomes of this study show that GSCM concerns every aspect of a supply chain. A company that wants to engage in GSCM needs to have good relationships with and control over its suppliers in order to ensure that they fulfill the sustainability requirements, and deal with pressure from NGOs. Additionally, the company needs to balance customer demands for low prices and sustainability, expect some (one-time) investments and sacrifice short-term profit in order to ensure sustainable production. Originality/value: This report identifies the most important GSCM barriers and enablers for textile companies. By evaluating how companies within the textile and fashion sector perceive their incentives of implementing GSCM and investigating their organizational behavior towards barriers and enablers of GSCM, this study indicates what the current situation in the textile industry looks like; shows where improvements are necessary and gives insight for companies that aim to engage in green practices. The development of the so called GSCM incentive score; a method to calculate a company’s perceived incentives to implement a GSCM strategy, can be useful for future studies within this field.

China has a long history of hydrological development. According to Chinese legends, famous projects of flood water diversion were developed by the Great Yu as early as the year two thousand B.C. The earliest hydrological record appeared in 256 B.C., when Mr. Lipin and his son constructed the Dujiangyan irrigation system in the upper reach of the Mingjiang River in Sichuan Province. At Baopingkao, the water intake point of the Dujiangyan irrigation system, a water staff gage was carved on a stone for the measurement of water levels. Although hydrological studies in China started early, hydrology and water resources as modern sciences have been developed only in the last several decades, particularly rapidly in the last 30 years. For instance, the number of hydrological stations has increased 45 times, from about 350 to more than 16,000. Of these, about 3300 stations also take flow velocity measurements. The average density of the hydrological stations is about one per 530 km2 and that of discharge measurement stations about one in 3,000 km2. These stations are highly concentrated in eastern China. The longest records of precipitation are maintained in the large cities in eastern China, including Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjing. Beijing has 140 years of precipitation records. The Hankao hydrological station on the Changjiang (Yangtze) River has the longest discharge record spanning 117 years (1865- 1982).

The study has defined the position with regard to existing and evolving United Kingdom (UK) and European Union (EU) legislation, world trade agreements and institutions, global trade in chicken meat and market Quality Assurance (QA) standards in a series of peer-reviewed published papers and working papers. The development of global food supply chains can be a key driver in the harmonisation of international legislation, product and private assurance standards. Indeed compliance with legislation and retailer requirements has been a key market driver in the development of private assurance standards. The key objectives of the research were to examine current assurance schemes within the integrated poultry meat supply chain and the influence of regulation and external market drivers within the integrated poultry meat supply chain; develop and test a QA model for the poultry meat supply chain with a view to both baseline and higher level standards including the development of a business benchmarking system utilising a pre-requisite programme (PRP) and key performance indicators (KPI); and to assess the ability of the QA model to deliver regulatory and policy compliance whilst meeting varied business and market needs for an internationally traded product. This study has shown that a QA model is capable of providing a framework within which the poultry meat supply chain can operate. The legislative and performance requirements have been translated into quantifiable performance indicators which can be used to measure supply chain performance. This can assist differentiation of products at the point of consumption and give a quantifiable measure of the extrinsic value that has been added. This approach will therefore aid the communication of the benefits of differing methods of poultry meat production and afford the consumer the opportunity to make a more informed choice when purchasing meat products.

The relaxation of international boundaries has enabled the globalisation of markets making available an ever increasing number of specialised suppliers and markets. Inevitably this results in supply chains sharing suppliers and customers reflected in a network of relationships. Within this context firms buyers configure their supply relationships based on their perception of supply risk. Risk is managed by either increasing trust or commitment or by increasing the number of suppliers. Increasing trust and commitment facilitates collaboration and reduces the propensity for a supplier to exit the relationship. Conversely, increasing the number of suppliers reduces dependency and increases the ease of making alternative supply arrangements. The emergent network of relationships is dynamic and complex, and due in no small part to the influence of inventory management practices, tightly coupled. This critical organization of the network describes a system that contrary to existing supply chain conceptualisation exists far from equilibrium, requiring a different more appropriate theoretical lens through which to view them. This thesis adopts a Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) perspective to position supply networks as tightly coupled complex systems which according to Normal Accident Theory (NAT) are vulnerable to disruptions as a consequence of normal operations. The consequential boundless and emergent nature of supply networks makes them difficult to research using traditional empirical methods, instead this research builds a generalised supply network agent based computer model, allowing network constituents (agents) to take autonomous parallel action reflecting the true emergent nature of supply networks. This thesis uses the results from a series of carefully designed computer experiments to elucidate how supply networks respond to a variety of market structures and permitted agent behaviours. Market structures define the vertical (between tier) and horizontal (within tier) levels of price differentiation. Within each structure agents are permitted to autonomously modify their prices (constrained by market structure) and collaborate by sharing demand information. By examining how supply networks respond to different permitted agent behaviours in a range of market structures this thesis makes 4 contributions. Firstly, it extends NAT by incorporating the adaptive nature of supply network constituents. Secondly it extends supply chain management by specifying supply networks as dynamic not static phenomena. Thirdly it extends supply chain risk management through developing an understanding of the impact different permitted behaviour combinations on the networks vulnerability to disruptions in the context of normal operations. Finally by developing the understanding how normal operations impact a supply networks vulnerability to disruptions it informs the practice of supply chain risk management.

published_or_final_version / Urban Planning / Master / Master of Science in Urban Planning

No description available.

<p>This thesis examined a pre-paid water metering pilot project which was implemented in Klipheuwel , Cape Town, South Africa in 2001. It was anticipated that the implementation of pre-paid water meters would help improve the management of water service delivery in the Cape Metropolitan Area. However, just four years after its implementation the project has collapsed.</p>

The objective of this investigation was to utilise water pinch analysis as a tool for the optimisation of fresh water use in an integrated pulp and paper mill. The investigation was carried out at Mondi Paper in Merebank, south of Durban. The pulp and paper manufacturing process is a large consumer of fresh water and minimising the amount of fresh water used in the processes is beneficial from both a cost and environmental point of view. There are examples of mills which have "closed" their water systems to the extent that fresh water make up is minimal and most of the water is recycled and reused in a closed loop. These examples provide guidance on the basis of proven methods for reducing water consumption in the pulp and paper industry and can be used as a reference for mills wishing to reduce water consumption by making use of tried and tested methods. This investigation sought to provide an alternative method to identifying potential savings in fresh water consumption by making use of water pinch analysis. This was done at Mondi Paper by analysing individual parts of the mill and then a larger section of the mill which included both pulp and paper production. Flow rates of water streams and fibre content in those streams were obtained from plant data, where available, and this data was used to produce.a mass balance using the Linnhoff-March software, Water Tracker. The balance produced using Water Tracker provided the missing flow and fibre content data and this data was used as the input for the Linnhoff-March software, Water Pinch , to perform the water pinch analysis. The results achieved when analysing the individual parts of the mill did not demonstrate potential for significant savings in fresh water consumption, however the analysis of the integrated section of the mill identified a potential reduction in fresh water. It was found that the application of a single contaminant analysis to the larger section of the mill identified a possible reduction in the freshwater requirement of 8.1% and a reduction in effluent generated of 5.4%. This is a savings of R1 548 593 per annum based on 2003 costs of fresh water and effluent disposal. This analysis was conducted using the most simplified representation possible to produce meaningful results in order to evaluate the effectiveness of water pinch analysis in optimising the fresh water consumption in an integrated pulp and paper mill. It is demonstrated that water pinch analysis is potentially a useful tool in determining the minimum fresh water requirement of a site. / Thesis (M.Sc.Eng.)-University of Natal, Durban, 2003.