Lean manufacturing is defined as a systematic approach to identifying and eliminating waste through continuous improvement, flowing the product at the pull of the customer in pursuit of perfection. This paper describes some learning from the literature and actual practices in USA, UK, and India. Attempts are made to present the gaps between the principles and practices. Some pertinent propositi...

This article outlines a hybrid method, incorporating multiple techniques into an evaluation process, in order to select competitive suppliers in a supply chain. It enables a purchaser to do single sourcing and multiple sourcing by calculating a combined supplier score, which accounts for both qualitative and quantitative factors that have impact on supply chain performance. Keywords—Analytic hi...

Inter-organizational collaboration requires systems interoperability which is not possible in the absence of common standards. However, empirical research has shown that Information and Communication Technology (ICT) standards can be a major barrier in the progress of Information Technology (IT)-enabled inter-organizational collaboration [1-3]. Though often portrayed as a narrow technical matte...

The Industrial Restructuring Project (IRP) was initiated at the beginning of 1996 as the KwaZulu-Natal Industrial Restructuring Project (KZN IRP). The project initially focused exclusively on KwaZulu-Natal, but is now aimed at supporting industrial policy in South Africa at the national, provincial and local levels. It is facilitated by international experts and is based at the School of Develo...

Cloud radio access network (C-RAN) and Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) have emerged as promising candidates for the next generation access network techniques. MCC offers resource limited mobile devices to offload computationally intensive tasks to the cloud, while C-RAN offers a technology that addresses increasing mobile traffic. In this paper, we propose a protocol that allows task offloading an...