The magnitude of a product recall: offshore outsourcing vs. captive offshoring effects

The escalation in product recalls in recent years is attributed to the rise of globalisation and associated challenges of offshoring. Extant SCM research suggests that product recalls have a significant negative impact on financial performance, but gaps exist relative to the managerial actions to minimise their impact. Recall response strategies have become more important in the press, given that a single recall may result in the mandatory withdrawal of millions of products from the market, with firms incurring enormous logistics costs and brand damage. In this study, we address this gap in the research, and using a measure of product recall defined as the volume of products withdrawn from the market due to product quality failure. We explore the scale of the recall in the context of pharmaceutical sector global sourcing strategies, exploring whether the variation in global sourcing decisions not only increases the likelihood of a recall, but also influences the capability to minimise the total cost of recall. Our results suggest that offshore outsourcing and captive offshoring have opposite effects in terms of their influence on the magnitude of product recall. We summarise the implications through a compelling set of insights for future global sourcing strategy research themes.     

Concordance analysis of microbial genomes

The set of proteins which are conserved across families of microbes contain important targets of new anti-microbial agents. We have developed a simple and efficient computational tool which determines concordances of putative gene products that show sets of proteins conserved across one set of user specified genomes and not present in another set of user specified genomes. The thresholds and the homology scoring criterion are selectable to allow the user to decide the stringency of the homologies. The system uses a relational database to store protein coding regions from different genomes, and to store the results of a complete comparison of all sequences against all sequences using the FASTA program. Using Web technology, the display of all the related proteins for a given sequence and calculation of multiple sequence alignments (using CLUSTALW) can be performed with the click of a button. The current database holds 97 365 sequences from 19 complete or partial genomes and 8798905 FASTA comparison results. A example concordance is presented which demonstrates that the target of the quinolone antibiotics could have been identified using this tool.     

Reconfigurable control of robotized manufacturing cells

This paper investigates the field of manufacturing system control. The addressed subject is indeed very fascinating, due to the importance that it has reached in the last decades both at research and industrial level. On the other hand, it seems to the author that most of the complexity intrinsic to the subject itself relies on the different meanings or levels of abstraction that both the terms “manufacturing system” and “control” may symbolize. The presented research aims to face the topic in a concrete fashion, i.e., by developing a control software system for a specific, although easy to be generalized, robotized manufacturing cell. Two different development methodologies, from the conceptual design to the actual implementation, of a cell control system are presented and compared. The former, based on ladder logic diagrams, for a PLC controlled manufacturing cell; the latter, based on object-oriented modeling and programming techniques, for a PC controlled manufacturing cell. The analysis has been conducted considering the internal and external requirements of the manufacturing system, mostly driven by the contemporary industrial need of reconfigurable control systems, largely acknowledged as the critical key to succeed in the new era of mass customization.     

Increase in brain stem cytokine mRNA levels as an early response to chemical-induced myelin edema

This study examined the early response of pro-inflammatory and regulatory cytokines in the mouse brain following triethyltin (TET)-induced myelin injury characterized by edematous vacuolation. Following an acute intraperitoneal injection of triethyltin (TET) sulfate (3 mg/kg) to 17-day old CD1 mice, significant increases in brain stem TNF-alpha and IL-1alpha mRNA levels occurred at 6 and 24 h, respectively with elevations in TGF-beta1 and MIP-1alpha at 1 h. In the cortex, responses were limited to elevations at 6 h in TNF-alpha, TGF-beta1 and MIP-1alpha. These data suggest that a chemokine/cytokine response can occur with minimal alterations to the integrity of the myelin sheath and may contribute to the initial signaling mechanisms associated with demyelinating disorders.     

Wide-band CMOS low-noise amplifier exploiting thermal noise canceling

Known elementary wide-band amplifiers suffer from a fundamental tradeoff between noise figure (NF) and source impedance matching, which limits the NF to values typically above 3 dB. Global negative feedback can be used to break this tradeoff, however, at the price of potential instability. In contrast, this paper presents a feedforward noise-canceling technique, which allows for simultaneous noise and impedance matching, while canceling the noise and distortion contributions of the matching device. This allows for designing wide-band impedance-matching amplifiers with NF well below 3 dB, without suffering from instability issues. An amplifier realized in 0.25-/spl mu/m standard CMOS shows NF values below 2.4 dB over more than one decade of bandwidth (i.e., 150-2000 MHz) and below 2 dB over more than two octaves (i.e., 250-1100 MHz). Furthermore, the total voltage gain is 13.7 dB, the -3-dB bandwidth is from 2 MHz to 1.6 GHz, the IIP2 is +12 dBm, and the IIP3 is 0 dBm. The LNA drains 14 mA from a 2.5-V supply and the die area is 0.3/spl times/0.25 mm/sup 2/.     

An Object-Oriented Approach for Flexible Manufacturing Control Systems Analysis and Design Using the Unified Modeling Language

In reacting to global competition and rapidly changing customer demands, industrial business organizations have developed a strong interest in flexible automation. The aim of flexible automation focuses on achieving agility in handling uncertainties from internal or external environments. Modeling complex structures, promoting reuse, and shortening the development time cycle are particularly significant aspects in the analysis and design of CIM systems, where heterogeneous elements have to be integrated in a complex control architecture. The design methodology for FMS control software involves the abstraction of an FMS and the estimation of the system performances. The aim of this activity is to suggest the optimal configuration of an FMS for given specifications, through simulation tools. In the software engineering field, object-oriented (OO) approaches have proven to be a powerful technique with respect to such aspects. The unified modeling language (UML), by using OO design methodologies, can offer reusability, extendibility, and modifiability in software design. Also, it bridges the gap that exists between the OO analysis and design area and the area of OO programming by creating an integrative metamodel of OO concepts. The specific goal of this paper is to formulate a new methodology for developing reusable, extendible, and modifiable control software for an FMS in an object-oriented environment. It is demonstrated that, with few diagrams, UML can be used to model such systems without being associated with other modeling tools.     

Generating all two-MOS-transistor amplifiers leads to new wide-bandLNAs

This paper presents a methodology that systematically generates all 2-MOS-transistor wide-band amplifiers, assuming that MOSFET is exploited as a voltage-controlled current source. This leads to new circuits. Their gain and noise factor have been compared to well-known wide-band amplifiers. One of the new circuits appears to have a relatively low noise factor, which is also gain independent. Based on this new circuit, a 50-900 MHz variable-gain wide-band LNA has been designed in 0.35-μm CMOS. Measurements show a noise figure between 4.3 and 4.9 dB for gains from 6 to 11 dB. These values are more than 2 dB lower than the noise figure of the wide-band common-gate LNA for the same input matching, power consumption, and voltage gain. IIP2 and IIP3 are better than 23.5 and 14.5 dBm, respectively, while the LNA drains only 1.5 mA at 3.3 V     

Diffraction efficiency of 200-nm-period critical-angle transmission gratings in the soft x-ray and extreme ultraviolet wavelength bands

We report on measurements of the diffraction efficiency of 200-nm-period freestanding blazed transmission gratings for wavelengths in the 0.96 to 19.4 nm range. These critical-angle transmission (CAT) gratings achieve highly efficient blazing over a broad band via total external reflection off the sidewalls of smooth, tens of nanometer thin ultrahigh aspect-ratio silicon grating bars and thus combine the advantages of blazed x-ray reflection gratings with those of more conventional x-ray transmission gratings. Prototype gratings with maximum depths of 3.2 and 6 μm were investigated at two different blaze angles. In these initial CAT gratings the grating bars are monolithically connected to a cross support mesh that only leaves less than half of the grating area unobstructed. Because of our initial fabrication approach, the support mesh bars feature a strongly trapezoidal cross section that leads to varying CAT grating depths and partial absorption of diffracted orders. While theory predicts broadband absolute diffraction efficiencies as high as 60% for ideal CAT gratings without a support mesh, experimental results show efficiencies in the range of ～50-100% of theoretical predictions when taking the effects of the support mesh into account. Future minimization of the support mesh therefore promises broadband CAT grating absolute diffraction efficiencies of 50% or higher.     

Reconfiguration: a key to handle exceptions and performance deteriorations in manufacturing operations

During a manufacturing operation, exceptions may occur dynamically and unpredictably. Their occurrence may lead to the degradation of system performance or, in the worst case scenario may interrupt the production process by causing errors in the schedule plan. This paper classifies three families of exceptions: (1) out-of-order events such as machine breakdowns, (2) operational out-of-ordinary events such as rush orders and (3) deteriorations of manufacturing resource performance such as reductions of machines’ utilization. In all cases, in order to maintain an adequate level of system performance, it is necessary to detect exceptions, to diagnose them quickly and to recover them by taking corrective actions to avoid fault propagations. Decisions concerning how to deal with exceptions, i.e. which strategy to implement, depend on the manufacturing environment (dedicated line, flexible system, reconfigurable system or a mix of them) and the advantages arising from using a certain exception handling policy vary from one production system to another. The activity of reconfiguring manufacturing resources has been demonstrated to be a powerful operation strategy to handle machine breakdowns. This paper extends the concept of ‘reconfiguration for exception handling’ to other families of exceptions and proposes reconfiguration for their recovery. The reconfiguration process is handled by an agent-based control system that implements four negotiation processes among manufacturing resource agents.