The 15 Most Common Obstacles to World-class Reliability


Book Description

Examines the larger issues (culture, leadership, commitment, consistency) that functionaries cannot overcome without strong senior management involvement. Focuses on the managerial leadership, cultural change, organization-wide commitment, and perseverance required to transform the operational environment from reactive to proactive. Uses illustrations to visually convey Principles and Concepts of Maintenance/Reliability Excellence. Includes appendices that provide generic tools and plans used to drive the essential change. Reliability is dependent upon shared understanding and beliefs. Managers at all levels must understand how their decisions and directions often impact adversely the ability of their organization to achieve and perpetuate Reliability...thereby undermining realization of broad business objectives. This book identifies and explores fifteen cultural obstacles commonly encountered by most organizations in their pursuit of World-Class Reliability. The intent is to provide senior management with a wake-up call. They must address the identified obstacles the people they have charged with pursuit of reliability (middle managers, engineers and functional specialists) can be successful. Otherwise, senior management is its' own worst enemy. It is a must-read for Senior Managers at all levels (Corporate to Plant and within Plant at Departmental levels).







Maintenance and Operational Reliability


Book Description

The quest for reliability is long overdue! In the case of many operations, realization of sustained reliability is still a work in progress. Very few organizations have completed the journey to world-class reliability. The vast majority still operate within a reactive culture, allowing response to repetitive failures to consume an excessive proportion of already limited maintenance resources, and leaving too few for performance of any proactive activities. In today's competitive international environment, enterprise survival is a battle of the fittest. To survive, organizations must achieve "world-class" stature, characterized by wellness, readiness, and application required for a company to successfully compete globally. That's why Maintenance and Operational Reliability is so important. This work is organized by the foundation and 5 Pillars of Maintenance/Reliability Excellence, plus 24 Building Blocks, as depicted throughout the book. This pillar graphic shows the functions, management techniques, systems, information sources and performance management vital to the maintenance and reliability process, and also serves as an important visual aid for the education of the entire organization. So, how is the ultimate, but challenging reliability goal to be achieved? Are you prepared to manage, support, process, and interpret the magnitude of information in real time, critical to making the right business decisions to achieve a competitive advantage? The authors, two veteran maintenance and reliability experts, have collected all the essentials leading to reliability here, in one practical resource, connecting and sequencing the integral pieces for world-class reliability. Features Guides readers through the journey from classic reactive repair upon failure to reliable, proactive maintenance, engineered to preclude failure and, ultimately, to sustain reliability. Clarifies roles and responsibilities of involved functions while explaining control tools to be deployed by each position. Provides the overriding business justification required to gain senior management commitment.




Challenges of Understanding History


Book Description

The history of India, so far, has not focused on a civilizational Bharatiya perspective, emphasizing a geo-political history based on the Nation-state paradigm, rather than a geo-cultural practice based on India’s civilizational antiquity. Until recently, history had been viewed from various ideological lenses- Colonial, Nationalist, Marxist, Subaltern, soon and so forth. These schools have been immensely successful not only in tapping the immense range of sources and exploring the various regions and sub-regions across the subcontinent, but have also contributed towards bringing to light important perspectives concerning the political, economic, social and cultural developments in the history of India from the 8th to the 14th centuries. While tapping into these schools has its obvious advantages, in that they have focused on partial aspects of the grand march of the civilization’s history, a lot still needs to be done.




New Challenges for Data Design


Book Description

The present work provides a platform for leading Data designers whose vision and creativity help us to anticipate major changes occurring in the Data Design field, and pre-empt the future. Each of them strives to provide new answers to the question, “What challenges await Data Design?” To avoid falling into too narrow a mind-set, each works hard to elucidate the breadth of Data Design today and to demonstrate its widespread application across a variety of business sectors. With end users in mind, designer-contributors bring to light the myriad of purposes for which the field was originally intended, forging the bond even further between Data Design and the aims and intentions of those who contribute to it. The first seven parts of the book outline the scope of Data Design, and presents a line-up of “viewpoints” that highlight this discipline’s main topics, and offers an in-depth look into practices boasting both foresight and imagination. The eighth and final part features a series of interviews with Data designers and artists whose methods embody originality and marked singularity. As a result, a number of enlightening concepts and bright ideas unfold within the confines of this book to help dispel the thick fog around this new and still relatively unknown discipline. A plethora of equally eye-opening and edifying new terms, words, and key expressions also unfurl. Informing, influencing, and inspiring are just a few of the buzz words belonging to an initiative that is, first and foremost, a creative one, not to mention the possibility to discern the ever-changing and naturally complex nature of today’s datasphere. Providing an invaluable and cutting-edge resource for design researchers, this work is also intended for students, professionals and practitioners involved in Data Design, Interaction Design, Digital & Media Design, Data & Information Visualization, Computer Science and Engineering.




Leapfrogging Africa


Book Description

In this study, we look at the potential for development leaps in Africa in three key sectors that provided the basis for socioeconomic development around the world: health, education and agriculture. Advances in these sectors increase the human capital, create jobs and economic opportunities and have a positive influence on each other. Healthy and well-fed children can learn better; hygiene and better medical care diminish infant mortality, which reduces the desire for a large number of children; education for women promotes gender equality and causes birth rates to fall further. This creates a population structure under which the economy can grow particularly well: a demographic dividend becomes possible.




Global Security, Safety and Sustainability: The Security Challenges of the Connected World


Book Description

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Global Security, Safety and Sustainability, ICGS3 2017, held in London, UK, in January, 2017. The 32 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 74 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on the future of digital forensics; cyber intelligence and operation; information systems security management; systems security, safety, and sustainability; cyber infrastructure protection.




Solving Large Scale Learning Tasks. Challenges and Algorithms


Book Description

In celebration of Prof. Morik's 60th birthday, this Festschrift covers research areas that Prof. Morik worked in and presents various researchers with whom she collaborated. The 23 refereed articles in this Festschrift volume provide challenges and solutions from theoreticians and practitioners on data preprocessing, modeling, learning, and evaluation. Topics include data-mining and machine-learning algorithms, feature selection and feature generation, optimization as well as efficiency of energy and communication.




From Oil to Cities


Book Description

The Nigeria Urbanization Review serves the critical and timely purpose of understanding the challenges and opportunities of urbanization in Nigeria. The country’s rapid urban population growth and expansion is examined in relation to the account of its recent urban economic growth in order to seek for ways to finance urban development, particularly the provision of urban public goods and services. The objective of this analytical program is to provide diagnostic tools to inform policy dialogue and investment priorities on urbanization. This report serves the critical and timely purpose of focusing attention on the challenges and opportunities of urbanization in Nigeria. The executive summary at the front summarizes the key trends of Nigeria’s urbanization and sets out a framework to structure core urban challenges in view of underlying causes. Detailed analyses follow in the subsequent four chapters. In Chapter 1, the dynamics of Nigeria’s urbanization process are presented, with particular attention to the country’s rapid urban population growth, the very large-scale urban expansion, and the stubborn persistence of high levels of urban poverty, inequality and regional disparity. Chapter 2 provides an account of Nigeria’s recent urban economic growth, in view of the nature of the concentration of economic activity across the country’s states and cities, and of the limited performance of urban and regional economies in generating higher levels of employment and improving business climates. Chapter 3 turns to description and assessment of land management, urban planning and housing provision procedures and systems, which face a variety of challenges with regard to costs, affordability, capacity, equity and efficiency. Finally, Chapter 4 deals with the financing of urban development, particularly the provision of urban public goods and services, which is in need of both substantial finance and institutional and systemic improvements and reform.




Cooperation for a Peaceful and Sustainable World


Book Description

Part 2 of the Cooperation for a peaceful and sustainable world volume, brings together some of the leading researchers on peace science. Chapters discuss issues including, but not restricted to, military expenditure and economics in China, India and Pakistan, Peace science in South East Asia, and approaches to anti-terrorism.