Please read the abstract in the section 00front of this document / Dissertation (MCom (Personnel Management))--University of Pretoria, 2007. / Human Resource Management / unrestricted

An inquiry was carried out into the effects of involvement in decision-making, related to how to perform a given task, on the productivity of three-man laboratory groups. One of the possible explanations for the wealth of contradictory findings in the literature is that the "motivational" effects of being involved indecision-making and the efficacy of decisions made appear to be two logically separable effects, although both are often treated as one. As a consequence, an attempt was made to control the effectiveness of the strategy used between the two treatment conditions. The theoretical basis for the experiment was McGregor's (I960) adaptation of need theory for the organizational context and Lowin's (1968) analysis of the potential effects of participative decision-making on productivity. The three hypotheses, derived there from, which guided the investigation were: (1) groups involved in decision-making would be more productive than groups which were not; (2) would implement the strategy designed to accomplish the task more faithfully, and; (3) given the choice, subjects in the experiment would choose to perform in a situation in which they were involved in decision-making rather than one in which they were not. The task involved the assembly of matrices from component pieces. The measure of productivity was time to successful completion. Results did not agree with predictions. In all three cases the hypotheses were not confirmed. Additionally productivity and choice results were significant in the opposite direction to that predicted by the experimenter . The experimental procedures, assumptions concerning the nature of the test population and the theory itself were re-examined in an attempt to offer possible explanations for these findings. / Education, Faculty of / Graduate

A computer simulation program which models the operation of a British Columbia coast dimension sawmill has been developed in FORTRAN IV. The model represents the initial log breakdown by a double cut, multi-pass band headrig, cant breakdown by a bulledger and the further processing on two resaws, pony edger and the double end trimsaw. Simulation of the headrig and bulledger operation is event oriented, whereas the piece flow through the other processing units is updated with 1-minute intervals. Flowcharts describe the routines briefly. The principal types of data input are sawlog population characteristics, machine characteristics, buffer storage capacities, and product output constraints. Information about the model operation is collected during the simulation runs, and the printed output includes productivity in Mbfm per 8-hour shift, the time each saw was operating, idle, busy or blocked, the time the bulledger queue contained a given number of cants and histograms showing the queue length distribution in 10-piece classes for subsequent saws. Validation of the model plays an important part in system simulation. The approach has been to attempt a verification of the piece flow arriving at trimmer, #l and #2 resaw, ponyedger and greenchain. Although the productivity figures obtained from simulation correspond to those experienced by the mill, the piece flow could not be verified. Irregular log shape, not reflected in the sawlog population characteristics and leading to more manufacturing of slabs in the real system, is considered to be the principal factor contributing to this. Preferably, further modelling should lead to the development of one general assembly-system, which regards sawmills as a collection of interconnected components, with increased input and output flexibility. / Forestry, Faculty of / Graduate

This thesis applies the existing agency theory into the problem of production planning in a centrally planned industry. The planner's objective is to maximize social welfare contributed by the industry, while the firms individually want to maximize utility over money compensation minus disutility over effort. The problem contains both moral hazard and adverse selection because each agent privately observes a predecision information about the production process. A model is built for determining the optimal incentive compatible scheme. The analysis starts with the problem of fixed proportions production. An optimal incentive compatible scheme is first derived in single agent settings. It is then extended to multiple agent settings. Under the optimal incentive scheme, the principal is able to derive all the rent. The solution is the first-best when the agents are all risk neutral, and strictly second-best otherwise. The subgaming issues amongst the agents are investigated. When the agents are not cooperative, a sufficient condition is given for the incentive scheme to be effective, i.e., the equilibrium induced by the scheme is implementable. It is also concluded that, if the agents are able to cooperate, there always exist some state realizations under which the scheme is not effective. Finally, a different type of production problem, namely, production with substitutable inputs, are studied. And an incentive compatible compensation scheme is again proposed. / Business, Sauder School of / Graduate

This work deals with the logistics processes in the retail chain. The theoretical part describes the development and current state of logistics chains in delivering of the goods from the suppliers to the store shelves. The practical part of this work tries to use the application of the principles of logistics to movement of customers in the store space. Among the methods used belongs the study and application of literature, mainly foreign. The thesis also discusses checkout of customer. The analysis is based on data provided by one specific retailer. At the end of the practical part, the author attempts to draft the proposals enabling the company the improvement of the productivity of checkout and also describes possible changes in metrics that measure the productivity. The aim is to map productivity measurement of checkout of customers in the retail chain and suggest improvements. The second goal of this thesis is to try to prove that logistics is not standing outside the rest of functional departments of the company (neither above them nor below them) and should therefore cooperate very closely with these departments.

This study uses linear programming and econometric tools to determine the impact of agricultural productivity (technology) on agricultural exports. The study determines total factor productivity (TFP) using the Malmquist index method for a panel of 64 countries. Productivity impact on exports is determined by a two-stage estimation procedure. The results show agricultural productivity affects agricultural exports. This has important implications for developing countries. A 1 unit change in cumulative TFP increases agricultural output by .79% and a 1% increase in estimated agricultural output increases exports by .37%. Therefore, the total effect of technology on exports of primary and processed commodities is .29%. Developed countries generally have higher TFP rates, leading to higher export earnings; meanwhile, developing countries are not getting the benefits from agricultural exports because they have a relatively lower level of agricultural productivity. Investing in research and development for agriculture can improve technology, which, in turn, can Increase agricultural exports.

This study assesses the impact on agricultural productivity of the Farmer Input Support Programme (FISP) as well as the impact of credit provided to small-scale farmers by commercial banks. It compares the two strategies by government (i.e. FISP which is a government subsidy programme and government grants to commercial banks for on-ward lending to small-scale farmers). This is to determine which policy intervention is promoting agricultural growth among the targeted farmers. The study hypothesises that subsidies through FISP and credit from private lending institutions allow farmers to have access to production inputs and reduces production costs. This enables farmers to maximise output leading to an increase in productivity and growth. This study was done by conducting a survey and data was collected using a structured questionnaire. Descriptive statistics and Ordinary Least Square (OLS) criterion are the methods used and the tool for analysis was the Statistical Package for Social Scientist (SPSS). Simple random multistage stratified purposive sampling was used in selecting household respondents. Multistage in the sense that the farm settlements were not defined in a particular pattern with house numbers. Stratified purposive sampling in the sense that farmers had to be separated according to the kind of institution they benefited from. The sample size for the study was 140 individual household for small-scale farmers. Major findings of the study showed that loan beneficiary farmers were investing more in productive assets compared to FISP beneficiary farmers. They had even showed elements of diversification as they were investing more in small livestock such as chickens, goats and pigs unlike the FISP beneficiaries. They had also spent a total of Zambian Kwacha (ZMW) 48, 100 compared to ZMW 28, 462 spent by FISP beneficiaries on productive assets. In terms of investments for assets used in the home, we concluded that both groups had a similar lifestyle but FISP farmers had a higher standard of living compared to loan beneficiary farmers as they had spent 10.6% more in terms of expenditure. The field plots under cultivation were grouped into three categories, i.e. farmers who cultivated plots below 2.5 hectares, 2.6 hectares to 5.0 hectares and above 5.1 hectares to assess which category of farmers was showing growth in terms of land under cultivation. For the 11% FISP beneficiaries who had graduated from the below 2.5 hectares of land being ploughed to the middle bracket, only 1% of the farmers managed to sustain their increase in ploughed land. There were no farmers who managed to plough above 5.1 hectares of land under the FISP category. As for the loan beneficiary group, we see movement in all three categories indicating growth in terms of productivity. We noticed that from the 4% farmers who managed to graduate from the below 2.5 hectares category to the 2.6 hectares to 5.0 hectares category, a further 3% of the beneficiaries managed to graduate to the above 5.1 hectares of area ploughed. We determined variability in output by examining its relationship with independent variables such as educational level attained, fertiliser quantity used, maize seed quantity used and access to assets (oxen) ceteris paribus. Only fertiliser and hybrid maize seed use were found to be statistically significant with p-values below 5% and 10% significant levels respectively in both cases. A 1 kilogram (kg) increase in fertiliser and hybrid maize seed use would result in a 0.69% and 0.26% increase respectively in the quantity of 50 kg bags harvested for FISP beneficiary farmers. A 1 kg increase in fertiliser and hybrid maize seed use would result in a 0.83% and 0.11% increase in the quantity of 50 kg bags of maize harvested by the loan beneficiary farmers. Comparing the two beneficiary groups in terms of productivity and income earned through the sale of maize on the market, the loan beneficiary group was found to be doing far much better compared to the FISP group. In the 2009/10 farming season, the loan group sold a total of 6754 bags of maize compared to 3428 bags sold by the FISP group. In the 2010/11 farming season, the loan group sold 7769 bags as opposed to the 4606 bags sold by the FISP group while in the 2011/12 farming season, the loan group sold a total of 9151 bags of maize on both markets compared to 4822 bags of maize that was sold by the FISP group. Though it may be difficult to distinguish the real effects of both the FISP and loan programme on its beneficiaries due to lack of baseline information based on regression results alone, and claim that it has made either group better than the other, it is clear that the fertiliser support policy is working better for loan beneficiaries when compared to FISP beneficiaries. This gives them an edge in income over FISP beneficiaries and graduates them into higher brackets of productivity and asset possession leading to higher yields, more income and increased growth in agricultural productivity in general. It is recommended that educational level attained should be one of the major criteria for farmer selection when introducing new advanced technologies to increase productivity. The other recommendation is that, to invest in improved ploughing methods such as use of oxen, the area under cultivation should not be less than 2.5 hectares. It is also recommended that government should increase service delivery in an efficient manner as it has positive externalities on farmers dealing with the private sector as well other than just those targeted farmers they are servicing under the FISP programme. / Dissertation (MScAgric)--University of Pretoria, 2014. / tm2015 / Agricultural Economics, Extension and Rural Development / MScAgric / Unrestricted

High-end multicore systems with GPU-based accelerators are now ubiquitous in the hardware landscape. Besides dealing with the nontrivial heterogeneous environ- ment, end users should often take into consideration the underlying memory architec- ture to decrease the overhead of data motion, especially when running on non-uniform memory access (NUMA) platforms. We propose the OmpSs parallel programming model approach using its Nanos++ dynamic runtime system to solve the two challeng- ing problems aforementioned, through 1) an innovative NUMA node-aware scheduling policy to reduce data movement between NUMA nodes and 2) a nested parallelism feature to concurrently exploit the resources available from the GPU devices as well as the CPU host, without compromising the overall performance. Our approach fea- tures separation of concerns by abstracting the complexity of the hardware from the end users so that high productivity can be achieved. The Cholesky factorization is used as a benchmark representative of dense numerical linear algebra algorithms. Superior performance is also demonstrated on the symmetric matrix inversion based on Cholesky factorization, commonly used in co-variance computations in statistics. Performance on a NUMA system with Kepler-based GPUs exceeds that of existing implementations, while the OmpSs-enabled code remains very similar to its original sequential version.

The cost of construction projects have increased during the past few years. Different actors in the construction industry work together to advocate various measures to mitigate these cost increases. One of these measures is to try to improve the efficiency in the phase of production. By striving for a kind of standardization with a constant quest for improvement, the productivity can increase while the costs of production fall. For this thesis has a case study been conducted at the construction company JM AB which is seeking this. They call the approach structured production and have implemented various measures to achieve a more productive output. Based on information from reconciliations, the cost and the spent hours of craftsmen have been analyzed at the company where the case study took place. The compilations are presented in graphs and analyzes based on regression lines and mathematical ratios. The conclusion is that structured production affects the productivity. Costs and number of hours for craftsmen are in the period 2007-2011 affected, both positively and negatively.

The research is based on the problems encountered in the production process of companies in the metalworking sector. The problem arises from the low availability of machines in the production process due to working conditions (39.5%), poor maintenance management (40.3%) and poor-quality control (20.2%) that generate low profitability for business. As a solution, Lean Manufacturing tools are implemented to improve the process and increase profitability. The improvement proposal consists of a series of stages: first, the definition of indicators for the measurement of the variables; then, the design and implementation of a pilot in the production process and, in parallel, a simulation system will be designed to evaluate the long-term results. The document concludes that the implementation of the proposed tools will increase the availability of machines and an OEE to 55%, avoiding defective products and reducing reprocessed products by 4%.