M.Ing. / The purpose of this research dissertation is to test the hypothesis that entrepreneurial engineers are not familiar with innovation, growth and business planning strategies, or simply do not apply them. The hypothesis is investigated with the help of case studies and published works; outlining the different methods and principles employed by relatively new business ventures to ensure continued success. The scope of this research dissertation is limited to why there is a need for well managed growth, continual innovation and the strategic positioning and planning in business. The form of research design chosen for the experimental program is characterised and based upon the "Method of Data Collection", outlined in Cooper and Schindler: Business Research Methods, 7iT h Ed., 2001. The refined method is based upon a Two Stage Design incorporating a Non probability, Convenience Sample. The literature review of this research dissertation will be viewed as the Exploratory Section of the Two Stage Design, as outlined by Cooper and Schindler. The results of the survey which was carried out indicate that entrepreneurial engineers have an equal chance of being familiar or not familiar with the concepts of innovation and growth. Those who were familiar with the concepts were more likely to have knowledge of the entrepreneurial strategies regarding the concepts and to implement the strategies. Entrepreneurial engineers were likely to be familiar with business strategies, and those who were familiar, were more likely to have strategic architecture and intents, but less likely to have company missions than those who were not familiar. There seemed to be no correlation between the field of engineering or the field of business, and the likelihood of familiarity with the concepts. However, engineers who had business and management experience prior to starting their business ventures were more likely to be familiar with the concepts, but no more likely to implement them than engineers without prior experience. The literature review and the survey carried out agree with the initial hypothesis that entrepreneurial engineers starting relatively new business ventures either were not familiar with the concepts of innovation, growth and strategy, or simply did not apply them. However the agreement between the survey results, and the hypothesis and literature review, are not to the extent that was originally expected.

The lack of highly qualified labour force in the Vietnamese water and environmental sector as well as the problems in the mutual admission of doctoral students between German and Vietnamese Universities have motivated the Institute of Environmental Engineering and Management (IEEM) at the University of Witten/Herdecke to initiate the Water Doctoral Network (WDN). This network shall not be limited to tuition and conferral of doctorates in water sciences, engineering and economics, but serve as nursery for new, innovative research potentials and projects within the international academic co-operation. Applied learning and research, rather than basic research and pure science, are the main focuses of this project. / Sự thiếu hụt lực lượng lao động chất lượng cao trong lĩnh vực nước và môi trường ở Việt Nam cũng như các vấn đề trong việc tiếp nhận nghiên cứu sinh tiến sỹ giữa các trường Đại học của Đức và Việt Nam đã tạo động lực để Viện Kỹ thuật và Quản lý Môi trường (IEEM) của trường Đại học Witten/Herdecke đề xuất mạng lưới đào tạo Tiến sỹ nghiên cứu về ngành nước (WDN). Mạng lưới này không chỉ giới hạn ở việc giảng dạy và cấp bằng tiến sĩ trong lĩnh khoa học, kinh tế và kỹ thuật về ngành nước, mà nó như là vườn ươm đối với các dự án và tiềm năng nghiên cứu sáng tạo mới trong hợp tác hàn lâm quốc tế. Học tập và nghiên cứu ứng dụng thực tế là các trọng tâm chính của dự án này chứ không đơn thuần là nghiên cứu cơ bản và khoa học thuần túy.

The purpose of this study is to have ReMoTe be commercialized or released as open source at some future date to the general public. ReMoTe will provide an enhanced user interface that will allow users easy to use functions and setup their projects and define their thread and phases. ReMoTe will have the ability to handle muliple projects, and specify any number of phases for any thread.

Engineering is inherently a process of constant change. The process of managing engineering changes is however, not a new topic and it is well defined and implemented in various other engineering management philosophies. Yet, on its own, it still remains a very challenging problem to organisations. This research examines the applicability of engineering change management to a large steel manufacturing company who identified the lack of an engineering change management system as the main contributing factor of numerous problems the company experienced over time. The study sets out to determine the high level understanding, the level- and sophistication of practical implementation and quality (identified problems with existing, or the lack of existing systems) of the engineering change management procedures. The study also compared how three surveyed companies relate in terms of their engineering change management systems and how the companies relate to the academic principals found in literature. Furthermore everyday user experience was measured to determine what aspects of engineering change is important and what needed improvement As part of the research, literature was reviewed and it was found that various authors, practitioners and academics agreed that engineering change management is increasingly important as an engineering management item. The literature revealed high-level requirements, models and constituents that are required for successful engineering change management. A questionnaire survey was developed as the experiment to measure how engineering change management was perceived practically. The aspects and phases listed from literature were examined and the perceptions, experience and feedback from the engineers that face engineering changes on a daily basis was determined. The general understanding and feeling towards their engineering change management was analysed and used to identify areas of common problems. The two other surveyed companies: a petrochemical company and a specialised product company provided means to determine if the process of engineering change management could be generalised and applied to the large steel manufacturing company. The analysis of the results of the survey provided valuable information that was used to conclude why some companies were able to achieve success with their engineering change management procedures and why others failed or struggled. The research effectively showed how engineering change management is perceived both negatively and positively in industry and identified common areas where improvement can be made. Furthermore, it can be concluded that engineering change management remained generic from a high-level and would thus be applicable to the large steel manufacturing company. The study also determined that engineering change management can effectively be used to mitigate and reduce the effects of uncontrolled changes that were listed by the large steel manufacturing company. / MIng (Development and Management Engineering), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2014

Engineering is inherently a process of constant change. The process of managing engineering changes is however, not a new topic and it is well defined and implemented in various other engineering management philosophies. Yet, on its own, it still remains a very challenging problem to organisations. This research examines the applicability of engineering change management to a large steel manufacturing company who identified the lack of an engineering change management system as the main contributing factor of numerous problems the company experienced over time. The study sets out to determine the high level understanding, the level- and sophistication of practical implementation and quality (identified problems with existing, or the lack of existing systems) of the engineering change management procedures. The study also compared how three surveyed companies relate in terms of their engineering change management systems and how the companies relate to the academic principals found in literature. Furthermore everyday user experience was measured to determine what aspects of engineering change is important and what needed improvement As part of the research, literature was reviewed and it was found that various authors, practitioners and academics agreed that engineering change management is increasingly important as an engineering management item. The literature revealed high-level requirements, models and constituents that are required for successful engineering change management. A questionnaire survey was developed as the experiment to measure how engineering change management was perceived practically. The aspects and phases listed from literature were examined and the perceptions, experience and feedback from the engineers that face engineering changes on a daily basis was determined. The general understanding and feeling towards their engineering change management was analysed and used to identify areas of common problems. The two other surveyed companies: a petrochemical company and a specialised product company provided means to determine if the process of engineering change management could be generalised and applied to the large steel manufacturing company. The analysis of the results of the survey provided valuable information that was used to conclude why some companies were able to achieve success with their engineering change management procedures and why others failed or struggled. The research effectively showed how engineering change management is perceived both negatively and positively in industry and identified common areas where improvement can be made. Furthermore, it can be concluded that engineering change management remained generic from a high-level and would thus be applicable to the large steel manufacturing company. The study also determined that engineering change management can effectively be used to mitigate and reduce the effects of uncontrolled changes that were listed by the large steel manufacturing company. / MIng (Development and Management Engineering), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2014

M.Ing. (Engineering Management) / Construction project success is the number one goal for every client, stakeholders and for project team members who are involved with construction projects. However, construction projects often exceed the stipulated budget, are completed beyond the scheduled period and are not even to the required quality. Despite its poor record, the construction industry contributes a lot to the country’s economy and as such, it should be ensured that it performs better than it has currently. Besides the technical issues/factors which are a norm for influencing construction project performance, recent studies have shown that other factors relating to people and how they interact in teams may in fact have a significant influence on project performance. Consequently, culture and cultural differences seem to be one of the important issues that need to be dealt with and managed properly if projects are to be successful; given the nature of contracting, where joint ventures and partnerships seem to be prevalent (Kivrak et.al, 2009). Therefore, the purpose of this research was to investigate the impact of cultural differences on construction project performance. Because culture is seen as a ‘soft’ issue, it makes it hard to be measured empirically (Ankrah, 2007), and therefore requires to be assessed through the perceptions of the individuals who operate within that particular culture (Palmer, Cooper and Burns, 2010). Five dimensions of culture, namely: age, gender, race/ethnicity, educational background and organisational culture background were investigated and chosen to be measured against the three traditional project outcomes, namely: time, cost and quality, while taking into account safety and productivity. A questionnaire was issued to 310 participants drawn from construction projects across South Africa, and 109 responses were received, giving a response rate of 35.16%. The study reviewed that the construction industry’s performance is poor and it can also be attributed to differences in individuals’ cultural background because culture affects one’s mind in terms of behaviour and decision making. Findings from the study showed that a relationship existed between culture and project performance, and that cultural differences had an impact on construction project performance.

In this study, an approach is proposed to model and simulate the systems engineering process of design projects. One of the main aims is to model the systems engineering process, treating the process itself as a complex system. A conceptual model is developed as a result of a two-phase survey conducted with systems engineers. The conceptual model includes two levels of activity networks. Each first level systems engineering activity has its own network of second level activities. The model is then implemented in object oriented modeling language, namely SysML, using block definition diagrams and activity diagrams. Another aim is to generate a discrete event simulation model of the process for performance evaluation. For this purpose the SysML model is transformed to an Arena model using an Excel interface and VBA codes. Three deterministic and three stochastic cases are created to represent systems engineering process alternatives, which originate from the same conceptual model but possess different activity durations, resource availabilities and resource requirements. The scale of the project and the effect of uncertainty in activity durations are also considered. The proposed approach is applied to each of these six cases, developing the SysML models, transforming them to Arena models, and running the simulations. Project duration and resource utilization results are reported for these cases.

Majority of the studies in the scheduling literature is devoted to time based performance measures. In this thesis, we develop a model that considers monetary issues in single machine scheduling environments. We assume all the jobs should be completed by a common due date. An early revenue is earned if the completion time is before or on the due date, and a tardy revenue is gained if the job is completed after the due date. We consider restricted and unrestricted due date versions of the problem. Our objective is the maximization of the net present value of all revenues. We first investigate some special cases of the problem, and present polynomial time algorithms to solve them. Then, we develop branch and bound algorithms with lower and upper bounding mechanisms. Computational experiments have shown that the branch and bound algorithms can solve large-sized problems in reasonable times.

There is a growing interest and research on improvement of business processes as an essential part of effective quality management. Process improvement is possible with measurement and analysis of the process performance. Process performance measurement has been studied to a certain extend in the literature, and many different approaches have been developed such as Sink-Tuttle Model, Performance Measurement Matrix, SMART Pyramid, Balanced Scorecard Approach, Critical Few Method, and Performance Prism Framework. These approaches require that process owners and analysts define appropriate measures based on general guidelines for each process separately. Recently, with the advancement of information technologies, modeling and simulation of processes on a computer aided platform has become possible / standards and software support regarding such applications have been developed. Even though increasingly many organizations have been building their process models on computers, only a few manages effective use of such models for process improvement. This is partly due to difficulties in defining appropriate performance measures for the processes. The purpose of this study is to propose a method that can be used for defining performance measures of business processes easily and effectively according to specific nature of these processes. The proposed performance measure definition system is based on the idea of using generic process performance measures published by trusted business process frameworks for high level processes and adapting them for lower level ones. The system, using a search mechanism available on a computer, allows users to easily find and define appropriate performance measures for their processes. The proposed system is used for a research project management process and a creating research opportunities process of a public university and the results are discussed.

Project planning in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry at present relies heavily on individual skills, experience and improvisation. In an attempt to increase predictability and efficiency, and to improve knowledge retention across projects, this thesis proposes a more systematic approach to project planning. It does so by introducing the notion of a meta-process model that embodies and cultivates the logic and intelligence of incremental and collaborative planning activities in a given domain. Planning tasks are encoded and enforced as a set of structured dialogues between project partners. To make this possible, a taxonomy extension to current workflow modeling technology is introduced. The concept of the chosen approach can thus be classified as process mediation through structured dialogues. It is applied to the particular example case of Design-Build project delivery for which a detailed workflow model was created. This model serves as a partial instantiation of the larger Project Management Body Of Knowledge, an abstract framework put forward by the US Project Management Institute. A prototype system architecture is devised as an extension to an existing collaborative virtual environment developed in the European e-HUBs research project. This experimental Web-based platform supports the enactment of workflows that are expressed in the standardized syntax of the neutral process definition language XPDL. The functional richness of the structured dialogue extensions is demonstrated through a dialogue management prototype developed as a separate MS Access database application.