No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

Evidence from national surveys conducted in 1995, 2002 and 2006 shows that, despite a variety of specific Government training initiatives, the UK automotive supply sector lags behind international competition and suffers from severe skills shortages. Long term recovery from this position will require improvements in education, careers guidance, recruitment and work related training. The aim of this research has been to design a model of work related training for the sector to help ensure that the learning involved delivers sustained changes in behaviour and skills. A series of case studies have been reviewed to provide a context of work related training in the sector. Separate surveys were used · to benchmark training performance in a World Class manufacturer to understand realistic norms of training output, to sample the sustainability of learning amongst SMEs engaged on similar training programmes and to determine the range of training needs across the automotive supply sector. In total data was obtained from 833 individuals in 389 companies. The initial conclusions that defined the requirements for the model were that The outcomes of training across SMEs in the automotive supply sector were mostly unknown, unmeasured and often unpredictable. For reference, even in large organisations it is estimated that 60% of training budgets lack quantifiable targets. Learners themselves are unpredictable, Training initiatives, deriving from recommendations of the Leitch report and which are „employer led‟ focus on “World Class Manufacturing” which, coming largely from the perspective of Automotive OEMs, means Lean Manufacturing. For smaller SMEs a constrained training offer can be an impediment to growth. Their needs are the more diverse. The model was synthesised from the survey results and its concept tested and refined by a further survey of sixteen predominately automotive companies. Tamkin‟s IES model from Human Resources was also used as a reference comparator. On the input side the new model stresses company readiness and relevance of training. On the output side it adds organisational impact to the accepted but often overlooked measurable outputs. Beneath each of the ten elements of the model there are quantifiable indicators for use with diagnostic tools in either a company‟s HR plan, a training provider‟s delivery planning or a funding agency‟s grant criteria. The companies most likely to meet these quantifiable criteria will be the competitive and innovative companies that operate as learning organisations. It is argued that training targeted on these companies will be cost effective to implement, provide measurable performance benefits and deliver sustainable learning.

The research develops a framework for the evaluation of automotive supply chain performance in China. In addition, the research presents indications from a study of Chinese automotive companies with regards to their evaluation and attempts to propose some alternatives for future improvement.

In today’s global and competitive markets selling products at competitive prices, coordination of supply chain configuration, and environmental and ecological consciousness and responsibility become important issues for all companies around the world. The price of products is affected by costs, one of which is inventory cost. Inventory does not give any added value to products but must be kept in order to fulfill the customer demand in time. Therefore, this cost must be kept at the minimum level. In order to reduce the amount of inventory across a supply chain, coordination of decisions among all players in the chain is necessary. Coordination is needed not only for a two-level supply chain involving a manufacturer and its customers, but also for a complex supply chain of multiple tiers involving many players. With increasing attention being placed to environmental and ecological consciousness and responsibility, companies are keen to have a reverse supply chain where used products are collected and usable components remanufactured and reused in production to minimize negative impacts on the environment, adding further complexity to decision making across a supply chain. To deal with the above issues, this thesis proposes and develops the mathematical models and solution methods for coordinating the production inventory system in a complex manufacturing supply chain involving reverse logistics and multiple products. The supply chain consists of tier-2 suppliers for raw materials, tier-1 suppliers for parts, a manufacturer who manufactures and assembles parts into finished products, distributors, retailers and a third party who collects the used products and returns usable parts to the system. The models consider a limited contract period among all players, capacity constraints in transportation units and stochastic demand. The solution methods for solving the models are proposed based on decentralized, semi-centralized and centralized decision making processes. Numerical examples are used by adopting data from the literature to demonstrate, test, analyse and discuss the models. The results show that centralised decision making process is the best way to coordinate all players in the supply chain which minimise total cost of the supply chain as a whole. The results also show that the selection of the length of limited horizon/ contract period will be one of the main factors which will determine the type of coordination (decentralised, centralised or semi-centralised) among all players in the supply chain. We also found that the models developed can be viewed as generalised models for multi-level supply chain by examining the models using systems of different tiers from the literature. We conclude that the models are insensitive to changes of input parameters since percentage changes of the supply chain’s total cost are less than percentage changes of input parameters for the scenarios studied.

Autor no autoriza el acceso a texto completo de su documento hasta el 04/12/2019. / Ingeniero Civil Industrial / El presente trabajo de memoria se desarrolló en la empresa Procter & Gamble, dentro el área de logística, específicamente en el marco del suministro de Desodorantes y Anti-Transpirantes producidos y distribuidos por la multinacional. El trabajo consta de un análisis cuantitativo del funcionamiento de una de las plantas productoras de los ya mencionados bienes, la cual alimenta parte de las cadenas de suministro de los mercados de Latinoamérica. A partir de este análisis se realiza un diagnóstico del desempeño de dicha planta en cuanto al manejo de inventarios y al nivel de servicio, todo respecto al producto terminado de la planta, además de un profundo estudio de la demanda, para analizar la capacidad de la planta en estudio a mediano/largo plazo. El objetivo principal de esta memoria es conseguir una mayor eficiencia en cuanto a los niveles de inventarios de producto terminado, sin ir en desmedro del nivel de servicio. Para esto, se realiza un levantamiento del proceso productivo de la planta, lo que permite generar un diagnóstico e identificar las oportunidades de mejora, en las cuales se basa la propuesta de solución, centrada en una reducción de los inventarios de seguridad de cada producto a través de una simulación computacional. Los resultados obtenidos apuntan a una reducción cercana al 9% en los niveles de inventarios de seguridad asociados a los productos originados en la planta, lo cual representa un ahorro estimado de los costos de almacenamiento cercano a los USD$450 mil anuales. Se concluye también sobre el horizonte para el cual la planta podría funcionar sin inconvenientes de capacidad en cada una de sus líneas productivas.

No description available.

This thesis tests the hypothesis that variation in water supply, nutrient availability and irradiance determined variation in tree growth along local and regional gradients of resource availability, and over time, in Ghanaian forests. Regional variation in soil water availability determined seasonal patterns of diameter change of Celtis mildbraedii and Strombosia glaucescens in semi-deciduous and evergreen forest, over two years. However, in a semi-deciduous forest, annualized diameter increment of Celtis mildbraedii was higher in summit and slope, compared to valley, positions after two years, even though trees in valley positions experienced a shorter effective dry season. Growth was also greater in the semi-deciduous than the evergreen forest in the second year of the study. These patterns suggest that concentrations of N in soil over topographic gradients, and concentrations of available P and the base cations over regional scales, may be important determinants of growth. Dry season stem shrinkage in semi-deciduous forest can comprise up to 0.5% of tree diameter, and varies between years. Re-enumeration of forest plots in seasonal climates should be carried out over whole year intervals, during the wet season, to minimise bias derived from variation in tree water status. In a semi-deciduous forest, no relationship was found between topography and six year growth rates of two common species or of six functional types defined on the basis of regeneration strategy and regional distribution pattern. However, within this forest, and in a comparison within five different forests across the regional gradient of rainfall and soil fertility, pioneer species with distributions biased towards drier forests had significantly higher growth rates than pioneer species associated with wetter forests. Variation in growth of dry forest pioneer species explained more than half the total variation in stand-level growth rates, demonstrating that it is the presence of abundant, potentially large, fast growing pioneer species in more seasonal forest types that generate regional scale variation in forest growth. These results indicate that the environmental variables found to determine growth are dependent on the scale of the study and the magnitude of the gradient in resources being compared. Variation in soil fertility over regional rainfall gradients in tropical forests has a significant impact on variation in tree growth, within and between species, and at the stand-level.

Supply Chain Management (SCM) aims to synchronize the requirements of customers with the flow of materials from suppliers, in order to satisfy the needs of the customers as costefficiently as possible. This has become a difficult task due to several developments in the market, such as increased competition, increased demand variability, increased product variety, increased amounts of customer-specific products, and shortening product life cycles. These developments, due in part to globalization, provide additional management challenges and new practices in which supply chains are designed and managed, and can eventually make the difference between companies staying competitive or not. The overall purpose of this thesis is to investigate how complexity and globalization affect supply chain design and operations. The main emphasis has been on producing descriptive results of the studied phenomenon. This research involves five case studies covering international transportation structures used in SCM, the selection of supply chain strategies in different business environments, and the role of information systems and technology in achieving the objective of SCM. In this thesis it has been concluded that in order to cope with increasingly complex and fragmented markets companies need more differentiated transportation structures, modes, and supply chains. Furthermore, to effectively manage this, information systems and advanced decision support tools are required. In addition, this thesis has shown that current taxonomies for supply chain strategy selection are too simplistic due to three major problems: they mediate that it is a question of choosing one supply chain strategy for the entire company, they regard markets as rather homogeneous, and they link each supply chain strategy to a specific business context. Instead, it has been concluded that in order to better satisfy differing customer needs in various markets it is increasingly necessary to develop a differentiated supply chain strategy by utilizing different manufacturing and delivery strategies concurrently. Thus, a need exists for new taxonomies for supply chain strategy selection which recognize that the markets are becoming more fragmented and complex, that customer preferences differ across customer/market segments, and that there is a need to differentiate the supply chain strategy. This thesis also highlights several requirements of a differentiated supply chain strategy. Firstly, extended supply chain collaboration is required, since a differentiated supply chain strategy will involve more supply chain partners than a traditional supply chain strategy. Secondly, there is a need for more transportation mode alternatives, particularly intermodal, both in supply and distribution operations, due to the fact that differentiation requires diversity. In this thesis, intermodal landbridge freight services are highlighted as one interesting avenue, which could potentially facilitate a more differentiated supply chain strategy. Thirdly, more integrated information systems are needed along with decision support tools. This study illustrates that agent based modeling appears to be an interesting method for developing realistic decision support tools in the context of complex supply chains. An interesting aspect for further research is to investigate how different manufacturing and delivery strategies can be used concurrently in international supply chains. Moreover, there are several requirements and opportunities of a differentiated supply chain strategy, and these have to be investigated further