Suchergebnisse

Introduction to environmental planning and management -- Sustainable manufacturing -- Environmentally conscious manufacturing -- The ISO 14000 model -- Environmental planning -- Life cycle assessment -- Design for the environment, part I -- Design for the environment, part II -- Manufacturing strategies: agile, lean and flow manufacturing -- Environmental risk assessment and management -- Competing on environmental management

As the world stands perplexed at the recent spate of corporate governance and financial reporting problems that have rocked the US capital markets, it is hard to imagine anything good currently pervading the world financial community. But there is some good news coming from the world of international commerce; indeed, some may even describe it as revolutionary. This silver lining peeking through these dark clouds of corporate corruption is the tremendous progress that is now being made towards achieving one global financial reporting language. As early as a decade ago, some people noted that if we cannot get the world to agree about on what side of the street to drive, what chances do they have of harmonizing international accounting standards – an area where too many nations have vested interests in maintaining their own standards and practices? This paper examines the role of the major players in bringing the world closer to a universal accounting language and also argues that, perhaps, this historic accomplishment, is only about five years away.

In this article, we discuss the role of the internet in cultural changes and transformation. The traditional view is that inherent cultures affect business operations so corporations must be cognizant of the prevalent cultures in their operating environments. Frequently, failures of multinational corporations in new environments are often blamed on corporate lack of knowledge and understanding of these prevalent cultures. While this may still be true in today's environment, the influence of technology, particularly the internet in the 21st century, has been so significant that the world may be approaching a "unification of cultures". Thus, this paper argues that the internet will lead to a global cultural transformation that will enhance global business operations by removing cultural barriers that lead to sub‐optimal business operations.

ABSTRACTThe equipment failure distributions commonly identified in practice pose great difficulties in the establishment of sound maintenance total float policy. Some of the existing analytical constructs utilize the reliability ratio of the equipment in operations in order to bypass the obstacles and arrive at applicable solutions. In this paper we give a summary of these theoretical models. In addition, we provide insight by testing the significance of factors utilized in maintenance total float determination. The paper examines the effect of the assumption made by the analytical model of no waiting time for repair. Our test showed that there is no statistically significant difference between the analytical model and simulation when waiting is allowed for the normal and uniform distributions. The analytical model thus offers some advantage in its use to estimate maintenance float due to its simplicity. When failure distribution is an exponential, Erlang‐2 or lognormal, the assumption of no waiting time for repair must be kept in order to use the analytical model.