Measuring Effectiveness of Materials Management for Industrial Projects

A measurement of the effectiveness of the material management process is needed in order to analyze problems, suggest solutions, and assess the impact of modifications to the process. Such measurement is also required for any benchmarking effort. Research was conducted to apply a set of key effectiveness measures on 17 ongoing industrial projects. This research showed that most of the measures were easily obtainable, but some were difficult to obtain. Research also showed that it was possible to obtain the highest score on all measures, indicating that best practice in industry is achieving highly successful results. Most of the projects appeared to have a highly effective materials management process, as indicated by the fact that median values of these measures were much closer to the best values than those of the mean values. A utilization plan for the measurement of the effectiveness of the material management process is presented.     

Assessment of Upstream Human Intervention Coupled with Climate Change Impact for a Transboundary River Flow Regime: Nile River Basin

Water Resources Management - The aim of this article is to determine how human interventions in upstream countries coupled with drought events are affecting the flow regime of downstream countries...     

Impact of upstream anthropogenic river regulation on downstream water availability in transboundary river watersheds

This article assesses the adverse impact of upstream anthropogenic regulation of a transboundary river watershed on the natural flow regime of the downstream country, by focusing on a case study: the Diyala (Sīrvān) River watershed shared between Iraq and Iran. The article explores transboundary watershed management difficulties in a three-level system called the transboundary three-scalar framework, which helps to sustainably manage water resources. The average rates of reduction in flow between 2004 and 2013 ranged from nearly 24% in February to about 77% in September. The median of the reduction of rates between June and October was 66.4%.     

Impacts of Multi-year Droughts and Upstream Human-Induced Activities on the Development of a Semi-arid Transboundary Basin

This paper aims at investigating the combined impacts of basin-wide multi-year droughts and upstream human-induced activities on current and future potential development of a semi-arid transboundary basin. The approach is based on the drought analysis through three widely used drought indices (Standardised Drought Index- SPI, Reconnaissance Drought Index - RDI and Streamflow Drought Index- SDI), coupled with the current and future conceivable man-made changes upstream, taking also into account the effects of climate change. As a representative case, the Diyala river basin, shared between Iraq and Iran, is selected. A close examination of the climate trends in the study area exhibits that the basin points to be drier, with a decreasein precipitation and rise in the rates of temperature and potential evapotranspiration. The comparison between RDI and SDI indicates the cumulative drought effects on runoff during recent multi-year droughts episodes (1999–2001 and 2008–2009), which crippled the socio-economic activities and influenced the environmental system. Further, the results reveal that the combined impacts of multi-year droughts at basin scale and the river damming, water abstraction and water diversion works upstream have significant effects on water availability, especially at the middle and lower parts of the basin, with impacts on the security of the irrigated agriculture and public water supply, contributing to displacement and tribal conflicts. The projected climate change conditions along with the water withdrawal schemes upstream, which will put into operation in the foreseeable future, are expected to increase the vulnerability of water security in the portion of the basin that lies in the downstream country.