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The purpose of this paper is to explore the similarities and differences of legal responses to older adults who may be at risk of harm or abuse in the UK, Ireland, Australia and the USA.

The authors draw upon a review of elder abuse and adult protection undertaken on behalf of the commissioner for older people in Northern Ireland. This paper focusses on the desk top mapping of the different legal approaches and draws upon wider literature to frame the discussion of the relative strengths and weaknesses of the different legal responses.

Arguments exist both for and against each legal approach. Differences in defining the scope and powers of adult protection legislation in the UK and internationally are highlighted.

This review was undertaken in late 2013; while the authors have updated the mapping to take account of subsequent changes, some statutory guidance is not yet available. While the expertise of a group of experienced professionals in the field of adult safeguarding was utilized, it was not feasible to employ a formal survey or consensus model.

Some countries have already introduced APL and others are considering doing so. The potential advantages and challenges of introducing APL are highlighted.

The introduction of legislation may give professionals increased powers to prevent and reduce abuse of adults, but this would also change the dynamic of relationships within families and between families and professionals.

This paper provides an accessible discussion of APL across the UK and internationally which to date has been lacking from the literature.

Describes the nature of accrediting prior learning (APL). Examines its potential from the perspectives of professional bodies, such as the IPM and the Government. As a prelude to examining a case study evaluation of a “Portfolio Exercise” used to detect non‐standard entrants to a suite of programmes in higher education discusses some problems of putting its principles into practice.

This paper aims to explore the possible connections between self‐directed support and adult support and protection, both of which are important policy developments in Scotland.

The authors draw on findings from the national evaluation of the test sites or pilots of self‐directed support in Scotland and interviews at two time points with adult protection leads in the test sites. These interview data are set in the context of Scottish developments in adult support and protection.

Self‐directed support and adult protection had not been joined up initially. In the three Scottish test sites those responsible for adult safeguarding had not been engaged with the changes. They were unclear about the new systems and were concerned about the implications of reduced monitoring of risks. Shared training between those implementing self‐directed support and those carrying out adult protection work was viewed as a way of bridging these different areas of practice through enhancing mutual understanding and communication.

Policy and legislation have used the word support to provide reassurance of social protection for adults in need of care services. This paper provides new opportunities to consider the ways in which early enthusiasm for self‐directed support in Scotland may have neglected the support inherent to support and protection and the ways in which some adult support and protection stakeholders seemed to be acting as “bystanders” rather than influencing new systems of self‐directed support.

Optimal placement of static VAR compensator (SVC) devices not only improves the voltage profile (VP) but also reduces the active power loss (APL) and enhances the voltage stability (VS) through injecting appropriate VARs at optimal buses. The traditional mathematical methods may not provide global best solution and pose difficulties in handling multi-objective SVC placement (SVCP) problem with complex constraints and forcefully place all the given number of SVCs in the system without assessing their real requirements in enhancing the chosen performances. The purpose of this paper is to formulate the SVCP as a multi-objective optimization problem and solve it using a metaheuristic algorithm for global best solution.

The proposed SVCP method uses improved harmony search optimization (IHSO) with dissonance-avoiding mechanism for obtaining the global best solution through driving away the solution from the sub-optimal traps. In addition, the method uses a self-adaptive technique for optimally tuning the IHSO parameters and places only the required number of SVCs from the given number of SVCs.

This paper presents the results of the proposed method for 14, 30 and 57 bus systems and exhibits that the proposed method outperforms the existing SVCP methods in achieving the desired performances.

This paper proposes a new self-adaptive IHSO based SVCP method for optimally placing only the required number of SVCs with a goal of attaining the global best performances.

This case describes the experience of Kanpur Confectioneries Private Limited (KCPL), a family managed company, in being a contract manufacturer for A–One Confectioneries Private Limited. The alliance had worked to the advantage of KCPL. It had prospered as a profitable contract manufacturer. It had used the surplus to diversify into unrelated businesses. The family members, however had doubts regarding the employment opportunities provided by the move. They were not sure whether the progress was sustainable. Alok Kumar Gupta, Chairman and Managing Director of KCPL, along with his brothers and son, is required to review the strategy and performance of his company and develop a course of action for the future.

The area of distribution has enjoyed a long history of application of computer modelling to the solution of its problems. For more than 30 years, the areas of terminal analysis, routing and scheduling, inventory control, facility location and system design have been subjected to a multitude of modelling solutions. These modelling solutions include a variety of optimisation, heuristic and simulation models. The vast majority of these models, however, have been mainframe‐based. With the advent and popularisation of the microcomputer, considerable latitude exists in building microcomputer‐based, as opposed to mainframe‐based, distribution‐planning models. Since, in many cases, microcomputer‐based models can be more effective for distribution modelling than mainframe models, this application of microcomputers represents a new generation in the maturation of distribution‐planning models. However, guidelines for the use and development of microcomputer‐based models are needed.

An important management topic across a wide spectrum of firms is reconfiguring the value delivery system – defining the boundaries of the firm. Profit impact should be the way any value chain configuration is evaluated. The managerial accounting literature refers to this topic as “make versus buy” and typically addresses financial impact without much attention to strategic issues. The strategic management literature refers to the topic as “level of vertical integration” and typically sees financial impact in broad “transaction cost economics” terms. Neither approach treats fully the linkages all along the causal chain from strategic actions to resulting profit impact. In this paper we propose a theoretical approach to explicitly link supply chain reconfiguration actions to their profit implications. We use the introduction by Levi Strauss of Personal Pair™ jeans to illustrate the theory, evaluating the management choices by comparing profitability for one pair of jeans sold through three alternative value delivery systems. Our intent is to propose a theoretical extension to the make/buy literature which bridges the strategic management literature and the cost management literature, using A-P-L and SCM, and to illustrate one application of the theory.

In the course of constructing, maintaining, operating or upgrading facilities, Facility Managers generate and collect many documents. Their offices become repositories for plans, manuals, contracts, etc. These documents then begin to take on a life of their own. Stories about documents locked in drawers or cabinets for years flourish and are now legendary. Many documents accumulate on desktops, collecting dust, and others reside on local computers with no global access to their data. Software licensing, obsolescence, and incompatibility and lack of organisation are major problems. Crucial information is lost, misplaced or just hard to find. Organisational effectiveness suffers, and documents begin to lose their value as institutional assets. What are the best ways to collate and share existing information? How can a facility truly manage its documents? Which entity within an organisation has the expertise to undertake such a project? This case study reveals that existing resources within an organisation can help resolve the problem. At The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, the library personnel have the required expertise in organising, cataloguing, indexing and managing both existing and future documents and are currently in the process of creating an electronic infrastructure for sharing institutional facilities data.

Declining U.S. production volumes, increasing competition on many corridors, and refinery rationalization in the 1980s combined to put profit pressure on nearly all interior liquid pipeline companies. Amoco Pipeline Company (APL), a regulated common carrier transporting crude oil and petroleum products for both Amoco and non‐affiliate customers, responded with a series of programs that included the development of mission, vision, and values statements; organization redesign; investment in team skills and empowerment; the use of gainsharing; and periodic strategic planning studies that focused on capital projects, generic strategies, and projected financial performance.