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This paper aims to better control the mechanical properties and functional properties of NiTi alloy.

NiTi alloy samples with equal atomic ratio were formed by selective laser melting (SLM). X-ray diffraction (XRD), differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), scanning electron microscopy and tensile testing methods were used to study the effects of different laser power and scanning speed on the densification behavior, phase transformation characteristics and mechanical properties of NiTi alloy.

Compared with the laser power, the variation of the keyhole effect caused by the change of scanning speed is more intense, which has a greater effect on the densification behavior of SLM NiTi alloy. The effect of the laser power on the phase transition temperature is small. The increase of scanning speed weakens the burning degree of Ni element, so phase transition temperature decreases. The results of DSC test and tensile test show that the scanning velocity can significantly change the phase transition temperature, martensite twins reorientation and stress–strain behavior of SLM NiTi alloy.

This study provides a potential method to regulate the mechanical properties and functional properties of NiTi shape memory alloy in the future and NiTi alloys formed by SLM with good elongation were obtained because the Supercellular crystal structure formed during the nonequilibrium solidification of SLM and the superfine precipitates dispersed in the alloy prevented the dislocation formation.

The reciprocal method for allocating support department costs is preferred over the direct and step-down methods because it captures all support services provided to other departments. However, even as business organizations increase the number of support departments and their costs, the adoption of the reciprocal method has been hindered by mathematical difficulties in solving simultaneous equations. This paper illustrates spreadsheet matrix functions that remove the difficulties associated with the reciprocal method. The algebraic expressions for reciprocated costs commonly presented in accounting textbooks are used to form an equivalent matrix relationship. Then spreadsheet matrix functions easily compute reciprocated costs for support departments from the matrix relationship, and also allocate the reciprocated costs to other departments.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the Industry 4.0 barriers to achieve circular economy (CE). The study focuses on exploring the link between Industry 4.0 and CE. This leads to the implementation of integrated Industry 4.0-CE and attainment of sustainable production and consumption through analyzing the technological benefits of Industry 4.0.

Industry 4.0 barriers are identified from literature review and discussions with industry experts. Here, the interpretive structural modeling (ISM) technique is applied to develop the contextual relationship among the barriers and to identify the prominent barriers hindering the CE implementation.

The ISM hierarchical model and Matriced’ impacts croised-multiplication applique’ and classment analysis illustrate that the digitalization process and the semantic interoperability possess high driving power and low dependence. These barriers require keen attention to play a significant role in improving resource efficiency and sustainability, and absence of these barriers may not drive other barriers for CE. Apart from these barriers, cyber-physical systems standards and specifications, sensor technology and design challenges are also the most influential Industry 4.0 barriers for achieving CE.

The findings provide an opportunity for industry practitioners to explore the most driving Industry 4.0 barriers. The study confirms that integrated Industry 4.0-CE will maintain sustainable operations management by optimizing the production and consumption patterns. It will also provide an opportunity of customization where customers and products interact and can monitor the performance of the operations through the Internet of Things sensors.

The study provides integration of Industry 4.0 challenges to implement CE. However, the integration of the two burgeoning fields is still very scarce and lacks in adopting the technological benefits of the integrated Industry 4.0-CE.

The purpose of this study was to propose a tool for evaluating implementation of strategic performance management (PM) by examining the strategic PM practices in public universities in Uganda.

Literature was reviewed and the general features of PM practices were identified. These were captured in a survey instrument which was later administered to staff in selected universities in Uganda to determine the extent of strategic PM implementation. Principal component analysis was conducted to cluster similar variables together with an aim of identifying the focal areas for determining the extent of strategic PM practices implementation in a university.

Strategic PM in public universities in Uganda exists and is aimed at achieving quality. Despite its existence, respondents generally disagreed that: an effective PM system exists in their respective universities, PM training is continuously provided to managers and staff and a formal process exists for units to provide feedback on the attainment of goals. Findings further revealed that implementation of PM practices in universities could be evaluated based on five foci, namely, alignment of organisational vision, mission, strategy and individual performance goals; staff involvement in PM implementation at unit level; existence of an improvement plan; existence of a performance evaluation plan; and staff awareness and understanding of PM.

The study focussed on only public universities in Uganda; hence, another study could be conducted considering all universities, both private and public. The list of items from literature may not be exhaustive hence additional PM practices that were not included in this tool should be identified from literature to enrich the evaluation tool.

This study allowed the development of an empirical list of PM practices which could be used by universities and policy makers to evaluate implementation of strategic PM. Hence, the five foci could be adopted as an evaluation tool for universities with regard to strategic PM implementation. Using these five foci, university managers can identify the grey areas in their PM systems to which management attention could be focussed for improvement.

Despite the increasing desire for effective PM implementation in most organisations the world over, there exists no empirical evidence of institutional PM implementation in public universities in Uganda. Besides, to the best of my knowledge, no study has been previously conducted with the aim of developing a tool for evaluating strategic (PM implementation in universities in Uganda.

Construction management is ameliorated by the lean construction concept in many direct and indirect ways to reduce waste of construction process and improve the value. The purpose of this paper is to identify the challenges of the implementation of lean construction in the Bangladeshi construction industry and to prioritize these factors that constitute these challenges.

A comprehensive literature review was used for shorting the global challenges of implementing lean construction. Subsequently, these challenges were incorporated into a structured questionnaire for survey. A total of 164 valid responses were collected from Bangladeshi construction practitioners involved in different types of construction organizations. The results were analyzed using the Relative Important Index (RII) and Mann–Whitney U test.

The findings revealed 41 challenges of lean construction implementation in the Bangladeshi construction industry. The highest ranking challenges are the lack of awareness about lean construction, lack of skills, training and lean techniques, unwillingness to change the existing culture, lack of management commitment, fragmented and cyclic nature of the construction project and unavailing communication between all project participants. The study also discusses some universally applicable solutions to overcome these challenges.

By the findings of this study, the Bangladeshi construction industry could get a new insight into the challenges of implementing lean construction. It could play a very important part in the body of knowledge, as it reveals the challenges of implementing lean construction for the first time with the socio-economic context of Bangladesh. Exploring the findings, the study could help the stakeholders, companies, academician, researchers and government to focus their effort and resources on the significantly appropriate issues. Furthermore, this study may beneficial to those developing countries especially in South Asia, who have shared the same socio-economic status with Bangladesh.

Here's a problem that a number of managers may face: How to keep track of expenditures for personnel by different locations or departments when certain staff members work in more than one location or department? This problem arises when a reference librarian spends four days of the work week in the main library and one day at the branch library. Or, when a cataloger is assigned to public service duty half‐time.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of remelting each layer on the homogeneity of nickel-titanium (NiTi) parts fabricated from elemental nickel and titanium powders using laser powder bed fusion (LPBF). In addition, the influence of manufacturing parameters and different melting strategies, including multiple cycles of remelting, on printability and macro defects, such as pore and crack formation, have been investigated.

An LPBF process was used to manufacture NiTi alloy from elementally blended powders and was evaluated with the use of a remelting scanning strategy to improve the homogeneity of fabricated specimens. Furthermore, both single melt and up to two remeltings were used.

The results indicate that remelting can be beneficial for density improvement as well as chemical and phase composition homogenization. Backscattered electron mode in scanning electron microscope showed a reduction in the presence of unmixed Ni and Ti elemental powders in response to increasing the number of remelts. The microhardness values of NiTi parts for the different numbers of melts studied were similar and ranged from 487 to 495 HV. Nevertheless, it was observed that measurement error decreases as the number of remelts increases, suggesting an increase in chemical and phase composition homogeneity. However, X-ray diffraction analysis revealed the presence of multiple phases regardless of the number of melt runs.

For the first time, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, elementally blended NiTi powders were fabricated via LPBF using remelting scanning strategies.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on how to automatically generate the individualized patterns for women’s suits based on the 3D body point-cloud images.

With the software Imageware, the point-cloud data of the female body were measured according to the female body feature to obtain the heights, widths, depths and girths at various landmarks. Then the relationship between the height of each landmark and the body height was analyzed to build the height calculation rules by software SPSS, and the prediction models of body girths were established from the body widths and depths using regression analysis for pattern generation.

The pattern generation rules were built with the relationships between a human body and the garment patterns using the graphic flattening method. Based on the above rules, the final patterns were drafted automatically by using these dimensions to fit the subjects. The try-on experiment also showed that the individualized suits could fit the subjects’ body well at some feature landmarks.

In order to realize tailor-made and meet the consumers’ demands for individualized clothes, the development of garment CAD system has become inevitable in the garment industry. This paper could provide the foundation for automatic pattern generation, and technical support for tailor-made.

Building information modelling (BIM) research studies are highly contextual as the contexts provide lenses for interpreting the results. However, there has been a growing decontextualization in extant studies especially between the small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and large firms; and between developed and developing countries. Albeit these contexts are all in the same construction industry, they often react differently to the same conditions. Thus, this study aims to evaluate the perceptions of firms in varying contexts of size and location on the perceived barriers to the implementation of BIM in the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry.

The perceptions of 228 firms gleaned from 26 countries across the 6 continents were collated via an international empirical questionnaire survey. The data was analysed using the mean score, rank agreement analysis, Mann-Whitney U test and factor analysis.

The findings revealed the major factors impending BIM implementation in each of the contexts and a comparative analysis emphasized the difference in their perceptions. The findings underscore that there is a general digital divide as regard BIM implementation between the SMEs and large firms, and a deepening divide between the developed and developing countries.

The study has provided empirical evidence for the BIM divide in the AEC industry, which would influence the promulgation of BIM policy and transferability of best practices across varying contexts of both firm size and country level.

This study investigates the competencies required for quality management professionals to meet the needs of industry 4.0. The authors use a case study strategy at an electronics manufacturer in southern Malaysia, to adapt their role to be relevant in the industry 4.0 environment. In doing so, this study answers the following four questions: (1) How are the changing technological trends expected to impact the future role of quality in industry 4.0? (2) What are the competencies gap between current and future roles of quality professionals? (3) What are the views and practices related to quality roles? (4) How can the gaps identified be closed to meet the quality challenges of industry 4.0?

The research methods consist of a comprehensive review of literature on the technological trends towards industry 4.0 and the impact on the role of quality and competence that may be required in the future, as well as internal document review on the current roles of quality professionals in an electronics manufacturer in southern Malaysia, to identify the competence gap. Empirical data was collected based on surveys conducted on 64 quality professionals with a response rate of 96.88%. Interviews were conducted on three decision-makers from critical areas in the electronics manufacturer for viewpoints from three different perspectives: finance, operations and talent development.

Quality professionals will require technical competencies to interpret large amounts of data from processes to make strategic decisions, the use of new AR tools and be aware of data security risks. Methodological competencies will be required to use data to identify the source of problems, to access reliable sources of learning and the ability to use new tools for solving complex problems efficiently. Social competencies will be required in communications across multi-sites, suppliers and customers in new collaborative virtual platforms, with the ability to retain tacit and explicit knowledge, in a decentralized environment that will require leadership ability to make decisions. Personal competencies required will be the ability to work in a flexible workplace and time and more frequent work-related changes.

The limitation of the study is based on what the authors currently know of the future, which may not be much for the quality professionals in the electronics manufacturer, who have not been exposed much to the technology yet. The potential for the future landscape to change dramatically with rapid technology changes may also result in a different set of skills for future quality professionals. The quality professionals who were involved in this study were the quality executives, engineers and managers, irrespective of their gender, age, length of service and experience in the field of quality. Therefore, these variables were not taken into consideration for this research.

This research helped to identify the role of quality in industry 4.0 and key competencies that the quality professionals in the electronics manufacturer will require to adapt to their role in industry 4.0. However, based on the questionnaire and the interview comments of key personnel, it can be concluded that quality professionals lack awareness of their new roles in industry 4.0. This could be due to the fact that the new technology is not implemented by quality professionals but by the innovation team based in Singapore headquarters, as was also advised by the operations head.

The benefit of industry 4.0 technology is clearly shown by Philips's new Dutch factory with robotized technology that was able to produce the same output with one-tenth of the workers of its China factory (Rifkin, 2014, chapter 8). Rojko (2017, p. 80) also shared a similar view that industry 4.0 is expected to reduce production costs by 10–30%, logistics costs by 10–30% and quality management costs by 10–20%. The importance of this research can be seen from the findings of “The Future of Jobs” (2018, p. 22), which suggests that the window of opportunity for organizations to leverage the new technology to re-skill is within the period of 2018–2022, in order to enable employees to reach full potential in the high value-added tasks. The electronics manufacturer may need to keep to this timeline to maintain its competitive advantage.

The purpose of this paper was to determine the competence gap of current quality professionals in the electronics manufacturer with the competencies required in industry 4.0. This led to the third objective, to identify the views of stakeholders based on the propositions derived from the gaps identified, to triangulate the findings, to conclude the competency gaps of the current quality professionals in the electronics manufacturer. Finally, the objective of this paper was to make a recommendation on how to prepare the quality professionals in the electronics manufacturer for their role in industry 4.0. The research identified the technical, methodological, social and personal competencies gap of the quality professionals in the electronics manufacturer by looking at the changes expected in industry 4.0 from four aspects, factory (people and process), business, product and customers.