M.Phil. / In order for developers to provide reasonable engineering services as well as a liveable dwelling unit within the existing housing subsidy, a substantial increase in residential density is required. Increased urban densities will decrease engineering services costs due to a greater sharing ability. This study was undertaken in order to quantify the benefits of urban densification on engineering services. The financial problems of Local Authorities in South Africa due to the entrenched culture of non-payment for services, is causing a rapid decline in the sustainability of engineering services due also to low, or non-existent maintenance. The "housing" currently delivered, its nature and continued sustainability are being severely criticized. Few differences exist between the housing currently being delivered and those provided under the previous government. Houses are provided in areas on affordable land normally far from the work place. The type of housing being constructed consists mostly of the single storey, free standing units on separate erven. These types of developments encourage urban sprawl, require very expensive engineering services and discourage the establishment of an economic public transport system. Possible solutions to the workforce/job opportunity problem include mixed land use and residential densification.

M.Phil. (Engineering Management) / Total Quality Management (TQM) as a management philosophy is driven by top management with employee participation. This encompasses all facets of an organisation, with the aim of producing products and services which meet the customer’s needs.TQM was adopted by project-based organisations in the 1990s in response to increasing global competition. Process engineering design firms are operating in a competitive, global business environment where outsourcing of process engineering design services from other countries is not an uncommon practice. It is argued that TQM is crucial for an organisation’s success and survival. Although various quality management techniques exist, TQM offers the holistic approach necessary to adequately manage design quality. The study investigates the effects of Total Quality Management (TQM) implementation on process engineering design firms. Secondly, the study investigates the extent of TQM adoption by South African process engineering design firms. Lastly, the study investigates the perceived importance of TQM principles. The research questions are: i. What is the effect of TQM on the performance of process engineering design firms? ii. To what extent has TQM been adopted by South African process engineering design firms? iii. What is the perceived importance of TQM principles in process engineering design? The first research question was answered by conducting a literature survey. The author was unable to find studies relating specifically to process engineering design firms. As a result, the literature study was done for engineering firms in general. The study indicates that TQM adoption has a favourable effect on engineering firms. The study reveals that TQM implementation improves employee satisfaction, customer satisfaction, and financial performance while providing a vision that channels the entire organisation towards improvements in product quality and customer-related performances. The second and third research questions were answered with the use of a questionnaire survey, which measured importance and adoption utilising a 5-point Likert scale. The study reveals that 70% of the firms which participated in the survey have formally adopted TQM while 30% have not. Eighty five per cent of the organisations that have adopted TQM are ISO9001 certified. An adoption rate of 70% indicates an above-average adoption of TQM by South African process engineering design firms. An ISO9001 certification of 85% indicates that South African process engineering design firms are conforming to international quality standards. The adoption of the TQM principles ranges from 66% to 80% (moderate to high). Customer Involvement and Management Commitment are the most highly adopted, while Supplier Quality Management and Continuous Improvement are the least adopted. The firms which have formally adopted TQM report 77% implementation rate, while the firms which have not formally adopted TQM report a 63% implementation rate. Although the firms which have not formally adopted TQM are implementing TQM principles, they have not been able to implement the principles as well as the firms which have formally adopted TQM. The perceived importance of the TQM principles ranges from 78% to 92% (“important” to “very important”). The most important principle is perceived to be Customer Involvement, while Continuous Improvement and Supplier Quality Management are perceived to be the least important. The firms which have formally adopted TQM rate the principles more highly in the importance scale (86%) compared to the firms which have not formally adopted TQM (80%). The results indicate that the firms which have formally adopted TQM find value in doing so. The mean score for the importance of TQM principles is 84%, while the mean score for the adoption of TQM principles is 73%. It is evident from the data that there is a gap between the perceived importance and adoption of the TQM principles. The data suggests that the policies and strategies of the organisation have not achieved full implementation of TQM and have room for improvement.

M.Phil. / The aim of this study is to achieve a greater output by scrutinizing the present way of coordinating the efforts Qf Steam Industries in South Africa to achieve a sustainable industrial development by using energy source efficiently and effectively. Furthermore into the study we look at obstacles that prevents and those that leads to maximum utilization of energy management measures, and also highlights the effects of implementing cheap available energy source in South Africa...

A project report submitted to the Faculty of Engineering, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Engineering / The rapid advances in technology and the greater complexity of projects generate an ever-changing environment within which the civil engineering consulting firms have to survive and grow. This changing environment increases the necessity both for greater specialisation_ (differentiation) and for. tighter co-ordination (integration). Abbreviation abstract) / Andrew Chakane 2019

Thesis (MBA)--Stellenbosch University, 2014. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Scientific research that focuses on South African females’ success in engineering is limited. The South African engineering workforce and universities have been encountering challenges in attracting and retaining as many females as possible in these fields. This research assignment seeks to advance the understanding of challenges and reasons that contribute to most female learners shying away from engineering studies at tertiary level. To achieve this, Grade 11 and Grade 12 Mathematics and Physical Science female learners from six different schools, which are in a single educational circuit, were observed and interviewed. Mathematics and Physical Science are the two subjects which are prerequisites for engineering studies at any South African higher education institution. For this reason the research focused on female learners who were studying both these subjects. This study also includes a literature review of factors affecting South African women engineers in the labour market. This includes the factors that females around the world consider before choosing a career and the reasons why females stay in their chosen careers. The findings highlight a number of variables that contribute to females’ underrepresentation in engineering. These variables include societal expectations, perceptions of females in careers that are historically male dominated, the quality of education that female learners receive at school, female learners’ performance in Mathematics and Physical Science, guardians’ support of careers chosen by female learners, learners’ knowledge of the various career streams, the use of home language in teaching subjects assessed in English, family responsibilities, and university admission requirements for engineering. Suggestions on how some of these challenges can be mitigated have been highlighted in this research assignment. The main points are:  The need for career guidance workshops and companies’ exhibitions to be taken to the students’ schools where attention can be given to the students of one school at a time and companies can facilitate discussions with learners about the types of work that their companies offer.  Encouraging and advocating for greater parental involvement in the students’ studies as this can reduce the number of students who do not study on a regular basis.  Offering of teaching employment to candidates who fully meet the requirements for the positions they are applying for especially for core subjects like English, Maths, and Science.  Adding engineering faculties to the two universities in the Limpopo Province and giving bursaries or financial aid to help school girls who want to study engineering at university  Teaching school girls time management skills from an early age so as to help them know how to balance the time they spend on each subject. Further details on how some of these suggestions can be achieved are discussed in the last chapter of this research report.

M.Tech. (Engineering: Civil) / Please refer to full text to view abstract

M.Ing. / Link performance curwes represent the relationship between the travel time and the traffic flow on a link in a traffic network. This relationship is an essential input for trip assignment procedures. A number of different forms of link performance curves have been suggested. These curves are defined as mathematical functions (known as travel time functions) with link flow as the independent variable. Travel time functions usually have a number of parameters that may be varied according to link characteristics...

A nine (9) point project report submitted to the Faculty of Engineering, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Engineering / The successful execution of urban development projects in South Africa's developing comunities is not, as recent experience has amply demonstrated, solely a matter of resolving the technical difficulties. This report motivates the opinion that other matters outside the traditional responsibility of the civil engineer are vital to successful urban development. These matters include planning for economic development. urban managerial and financial matters as well as peripheral project related issues. The report identifies and reviews the most important issues in each of the above mentioned categories, and, based on the author's experience in practice, suggests approaches to these matters. The report concludes that civil engineers, and particularly project managers, should reconsider their role in urban development, A need exists is in this field for project managers to broaden their scope to the management of development in its widest sense. Should timeous action not be taken by the engineering profession to prepare their members for this new role, the void is bound to be filled by another discipline. / Andrew Chakane 2018

This thesis is a case study investigation of the sustainability of private sector participation in water supply and sanitation in developing countries, with a particular emphasis on South Africa. It is essentially an empirical contribution, which adds to the body of literature pertaining to the privatisation of water supply and sanitation services in developing countries. South Africa, like many developing countries, faces a significant challenge in providing a sustainable water supply and sanitation service to its citizens. It has a vast water supply and sanitation infrastructure backlog, because of the previous apartheid) government's minimal attention to the basic service needs of the African, Indian and Coloured people. This lack of basic services has had a negative effect on people's health and their basic living conditions. The traditional delivery vehicles for water supply and sanitation delivery in South Africa have been its municipalities. After the demise of the apartheid government, the democratic national government restructured these municipalities under various. processes. They merged neighbouring towns and villages, which incorporated former rural areas to achieve economies-of-scale. The intention was to ensure service delivery to the previously disadvantaged, through a mechanism of cross-subsidisation from the affluent to the indigent. However, these newly-demarcated non-metropolitan municipalities, still do not have the finances to extend the water supply and sanitation infrastructure network to rural areas within their jurisdiction. They also lack the good credit ratings to borrow funds from banks to finance new water supply and sanitation infrastructure. The rural population also has low abilities-to-pay for water supply and sanitation services. With total basic infrastructure backlogs estimated to exceed R270 billion in South Africa, the challenge to all tiers of government is considerable. Just rural water supply and sanitation over the next ten years requires R13.5 billion for the financing of new and rehabilitation of old, infrastructure. Faced with this dilemma, national government has attempted to resolve it by following the route taken by other developing nations, that is, by seeking the assistance of the private sector, National,provincial, or access to it. and some local governments argue that it is only the private sector that has the financial resources to fund this infrastructure backlog. To facilitate this change in service delivery vehicles. national government developed legislation to create an enabling environment for the entry of the private sector in the arena of water supply and sanitation provision. This transition has occurred with significant controversy and opposition. Many opponents to any form of privatisation base their argument on privatisation's fundamental drivers not being aligned with the goals of a development state. In the South African situation, these opponents include some organised labour trade unions, researchers, and labour-based research organisations. With firm pressure from this antiprivatisation coalition, private sector participation in water supply and sanitation services has been significantly staggered or impeded. Whilst this study provides evidence that this case of privatisation is not sustainable in the long-term, which is in agreement with this anti-privatisation coalition, the reasons underpinning the conclusion of this study, differ significantly from those of this coalition. The arguments that underpin differences in the opposition's views and this thesis are analysed throughout the rubric of this study. Three elemental constructs underpin the theoretical framework of this study. These constructs are compartmentalised into the nature of public goods and their natural monopoly status, the efficiencies of privatisation and its relation to ethics. and globalisation issues specifically dealing with the roles oftransnational companies. The study will show that the transfer of water supply and sanitation service delivery to the private sector in South Africa has not been sustainable due to various factors. These factors are investigated through the medium of empirical and case study analyses at a national and global comparative scale. Factors investigated include the reasons behind the privatisation, its transition period and procurement of public and other stakeholder buy-in to the change in service delivery, the role that the state has played in providing the enabling environment for privatisation, and the effectiveness of the opposition in delaying or impeding the pace of privatisation. The study also reveals that pilot projects have a special status and access to greater institutional support, which might facilitate its success. This extra attention might not be realisable in successive projects. Factors underpinning a successful privatisation include issues of efficiency, regulation and financial issues. These are also investigated within the rubric of the empirical and case study analyses. The impact of globalisation and the role of transnational companies with apparently "new technologies" and foreign direct investment, which pervade water supply and sanitation privatisation in developing countries, are also discussed. The case study examinations also provide evidence that in the South African situation, these apparent foreign technological innovations have yet to be confirmed. For South Africa and the other developing nations, the foreign direct investment has also been minimal in comparison to the profits that leave these host countries from the water supply and sanitation sector. The primary case study that underpins this research is the pilot project test case for the South African national government, the Dolphin Coast concession in its Kwazulu-Natal province . A comprehensive investigation of this concession provides evidence of the project's commercial failure. However, the concession remains in the hands of a private sector operator, due to the municipality controversially renegotiating the terms of the contract to facilitate the concession's continuity. This "municipal intervention" trend is noticeable in some international case studies. The English privatisation case is also investigated to provide a contrast between privatisation in a developed nation and a developing one. It also provides an insight into the facilitative environment of the English privatisation case, as compared to that of developing nations. The English privatisation, although not without controversy, was a decision taken by the government on efficiency grounds, whilst developing nations have taken the privatisation step based on reasons of infrastructure deficiency and a lack of finance. Essentially, the former is a push factor, whilst the latter has been a pull factor. This thesis includes a case study investigation conducted at the World Bank in New Delhi, India, which provides evidence of the opposition from state bureaucrats to privatisation in India. This serves as a contrast to the organised worker opposition in South Africa, and highlights some of the differing impediments that face privatisation attempts in each respective country. It shows that the reasons underpinning the opposition to privatisation in developing nations facing similar crises are, in fact, dissimilar. The study also investigates the success that can be achieved through the economies-of scale of a public sector utility in South Africa, shown by the Umgeni Water case study. This is essentially a public agency that has corporatised5 along business principles and employed economies-of-scale to become a successful example of public sector water supply and sanitation provision in a developing country. Cumulatively, this study provides evidence that, in South Africa, the transfer of water supply and sanitation services to the private sector is not sustainable without some degree of state intervention. This is especially evident in cases where there are no economies-of-scale to be exploited, and a lack of affluent people to ensure a critical degree of payment of tariffs or cross-subsidisation to the indigent. In effect, by transferring these services to private hands, this would serve only to postpone the eventual lack of sustainability that these services are currently experiencing in public sector hands. The evidence reveals that the privatisation of water supply and sanitation services in South Africa is not a commercially viable option in the long-term, under the normal mechanisms of supply and demand of the market. Concomitantly, the South African national government and its municipalities are faced with a new dilemma. The private sector can provide immediate sources of financing for urgent water supply and sanitation infrastructure development that cannot be similarly procured from limited state funds or other sources. Considering the urgency to provide water supply and sanitation infrastructure, because of the health-related effects that no access creates, privatisation, with strong regulation, may be a more amicable alternative to the current financial restrictions on municipalities, until a more comprehensive and sustainable solution is found. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of Natal, Durban, 2003.

In the area of project management, it is well understood that effective communication processes impact positively on project performance. Despite this, project teams still struggle to develop effective communication plans that address their project communication needs. The evidence of this is that many project problems are attributed to poor communication. The literature addresses the needs and shortcomings of group communication and communication planning in general; but there is however, a scarcity of literature describing how to plan for the internal communication needs of high-performance civil engineering teams. With the limited literature available on the topic, this study seeks to validate how effective the current communication planning methods are at Aurecon in meeting the communication needs of its project teams. This qualitative research project is a case study of communication planning within the project teams at Aurecon in Port Elizabeth. A semi-structured interview process was followed, addressing specific questions, without limiting the direction of the interviews. Project team members, working on high performance projects, were asked for their thoughts, feelings and suggestions about existing communication practices and project communication planning. Overall, it was found that the existing communication-planning practices at Aurecon did not have any beneficial effect on how team members communicate. It was concluded that project teams would benefit from improved communication-planning processes that are more inclusive of their specific communication needs. Organisations working on high-performance projects will benefit directly from the research, which challenges these organisations to think more broadly about how they plan for communication at a project level. The research provides practical suggestions for improving the way that teams plan their communication processes; and it does so by focusing on the communication needs of the team members. Recommendations are made to professional bodies, tertiary institutions, project organisations – and most importantly – to project team members themselves. The recommendations to project team members include taking ownership of communication practices, asserting their views, as well as making their needs known.