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Many studies have shown that rehabilitation robots are crucial for lower limb dysfunction, but application of many robotics have yet to be seen to actual use in China. This study aimed to improve a lower limb rehabilitation robot by details improving and practical design.

Structures and control system of a lower limb rehabilitation robot are improved in detail, including joint calculations, comfort analysis and feedback logic creation, and prototype experiments on healthy individuals and patients are conducted in a hospital.

All participating subjects did not experience any problems. The experiment shows detail improving is reasonable, and feasibility of the robot was confirmed, which has potential for overcoming difficulties and problems in practical application.

Therapeutic effects need to be evaluated in the future. Also, more details should be improved continuously based on the actual demand.

The improved robot could assist the lower limb during standing or walking, which has significance for practical application and patients in China.

The primary objective of this article is to examine current procurement, inventory control and management practices in modern healthcare, with a particular focus on the procurement and management of surgical supplies in a prominent public, highly specialized healthcare sector.

This study was conducted in three phases. In Phase 1, the study team interacted with various hospital management stakeholders, including the surgical hospital store, examined the current procurement process and identified challenges. Phase 2 focused on selecting items for a detailed study and collected the qualitative and quantitative details of the store department of the healthcare sector chosen. A detailed study analyzed revenue, output/demand, inventory levels, etc. In Phase 3, a decision-making framework is proposed, and inventory control systems are redesigned and demonstrated for the selected items.

It was observed that the demand for many surgical items had increased significantly over the years due to an increase in disposable/disposable items, while inventories fluctuated widely. Maximum inventory levels varied between 50 and 75%. Storage and availability were important issues for the hospital. It is assumed the hospital adopts the proposed inventory control system. In this case, the benefits can be a saving of 62% of the maximum inventory, 20% of the average stock in the system and optimal use of storage space, improving the performance and productivity of the hospital.

This study can help the healthcare sector administration to develop better systems for the procurement and delivery of common surgical items and efficient resource allocation. It can help provide adequate training to store staff. This study can help improve management/procurement policies, ordering and delivery systems, better service levels, and inventory control of items in the hospital business context. This study can serve as a pilot study to further investigate the overall hospital operations.

This study can help the healthcare sector administration develop better systems for procuring and delivering common surgical items and efficient resource allocation. It can help provide adequate training to store staff. This study can help improve management/procurement policies, ordering and delivery systems, better service levels and inventory control of items in the hospital business context. This study can serve as a pilot study to further investigate the overall hospital operations.

This study is an early attempt to develop a decision framework and inventory control system from the perspective of healthcare inventory management. The gaps identified in real hospital scenarios are investigated, and theoretically based-inventory management strategies are applied and proposed.

The purpose of this paper is to present findings of a capacity building project on construction health and safety that is recently completed in Pakistan. The major objectives of this project are: first, to benchmark the current state of construction health and safety practices in Pakistan and to identify the data needs for continuous performance measurement; second, to develop health and safety guidelines; third, to develop adequate educational and training material; and finally, to improve the existing regulatory infrastructure for worker health and safety.

Mixed-methods approach is adopted for data collection which included site observations, surveys, semi-structured interviews, and case studies. The methodology consists of following major tasks: first, literature review and study of best practices; second, investigation of existing safety practices and development of guidelines; third, educational and training programs for construction professionals and educators; and finally, development of a strategic framework for continuous improvement in construction safety culture, laws, and practices. Collected data were analyzed using various qualitative and quantitative data analysis methods.

The enforcement of health and safety regulations on construction sites is very limited in Pakistan. Procedures for formulating, implementing, and monitoring safety rules and regulations are weak, and the implementation of safety management systems does not occur on most construction sites. The paper presents a detailed plan to improve the health and safety culture, laws, and practices in Pakistan.

Detailed proposals for improving existing construction health and safety laws and regulations are prepared for relevant regulatory and statutory bodies and ministries in Pakistan. From an educational perspective, comprehensive health and safety training material are developed and training workshops are conducted in major cities of Pakistan. Over 1,000 construction professionals benefited from these workshops.

The project helped in raising awareness about construction health and safety in Pakistan.

The project benchmarked existing health and safety practices in Pakistan. It identified data needs for continuous monitoring of health and safety performance and provided a mechanism for collecting such data. The project produced international standard health and safety training material that can fulfill the local needs. The project deliverables are extremely helpful for other developing countries in the region.

Clothing patterns play a dominant role in costume design and have become an important link in the perception of costume art. Conventional clothing patterns design relies on experienced designers. Although the quality of clothing patterns is very high on conventional design, the input time and output amount ratio is relative low for conventional design. In order to break through the bottleneck of conventional clothing patterns design, this paper proposes a novel way based on generative adversarial network (GAN) model for automatic clothing patterns generation, which not only reduces the dependence of experienced designer, but also improve the input-output ratio.

In view of the fact that clothing patterns have high requirements for global artistic perception and local texture details, this paper improves the conventional GAN model from two aspects: a multi-scales discriminators strategy is introduced to deal with the local texture details; and the self-attention mechanism is introduced to improve the global artistic perception. Therefore, the improved GAN called multi-scales self-attention improved generative adversarial network (MS-SA-GAN) model, which is used for high resolution clothing patterns generation.

To verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed MS-SA-GAN model, a crawler is designed to acquire standard clothing patterns dataset from Baidu pictures, and a comparative experiment is conducted on our designed clothing patterns dataset. In experiments, we have adjusted different parameters of the proposed MS-SA-GAN model, and compared the global artistic perception and local texture details of the generated clothing patterns.

Experimental results have shown that the clothing patterns generated by the proposed MS-SA-GAN model are superior to the conventional algorithms in some local texture detail indexes. In addition, a group of clothing design professionals is invited to evaluate the global artistic perception through a valence-arousal scale. The scale results have shown that the proposed MS-SA-GAN model achieves a better global art perception.

The objective of this study is to investigate how country risk, different political actions from the government and bureaucratic behavior influence the activities in industry supply chains (SCs) in emerging markets. The main objective of this study is to investigate the influence of these external stakeholders’ elements to the demand-side and supply-side drivers and barriers for improving competitiveness of Ready-Made Garment (RMG) industry in the way of analyzing supply chain. Considering the phenomenon of recent change in the RMG business environment and the competitiveness issues this study uses the principles of stakeholder and resource dependence theory and aims to find out some factors which influence to make an efficient supply chain for improving competitiveness. The RMG industry of Bangladesh is the case application of this study. Following a positivist paradigm, this study adopts a two phase sequential mixed-method research design consisting of qualitative and quantitative approaches. A tentative research model is developed first based on extensive literature review. Qualitative field study is then carried out to fine tune the initial research model. Findings from the qualitative method are also used to develop measures and instruments for the next phase of quantitative method. A survey is carried out with sample of top and middle level executives of different garment companies of Dhaka city in Bangladesh and the collected quantitative data are analyzed by partial least square-based structural equation modeling. The findings support eight hypotheses. From the analysis the external stakeholders’ elements like bureaucratic behavior and country risk have significant influence to the barriers. From the internal stakeholders’ point of view the manufacturers’ and buyers’ drivers have significant influence on the competitiveness. Therefore, stakeholders need to take proper action to reduce the barriers and increase the drivers, as the drivers have positive influence to improve competitiveness.

This study has both theoretical and practical contributions. This study represents an important contribution to the theory by integrating two theoretical perceptions to identify factors of the RMG industry’s SC that affect the competitiveness of the RMG industry. This research study contributes to the understanding of both external and internal stakeholders of national and international perspectives in the RMG (textile and clothing) business. It combines the insights of stakeholder and resource dependence theories along with the concept of the SC in improving effectiveness. In a practical sense, this study certainly contributes to the Bangladeshi RMG industry. In accordance with the desire of the RMG manufacturers, the research has shown that some influential constructs of the RMG industry’s SC affect the competitiveness of the RMG industry. The outcome of the study is useful for various stakeholders of the Bangladeshi RMG industry sector ranging from the government to various private organizations. The applications of this study are extendable through further adaptation in other industries and various geographic contexts.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a structured overview of so‐called business process improvement (BPI) approaches and their contribution to the actual act of improving. Even though a lot is said about BPI, there is still a lack of supporting the act of improving the process. Most approaches concentrate on what needs to be done before and after the improvement act, but the act of improving itself still seems to be a black box.

This paper is mainly based on a review of literature that deals with the term “Business Process Improvement”. The analysis of the literature is supported by qualitative content analysis. The structure of the evaluation follows the mandatory elements of a method (MEM).

A lot of literature and consulting approaches deal with the restructuring and improvement of business processes. The author finds that even so‐called BPI approaches do not describe the act of improvement itself. And if they do, they lack a methodological structure that can be reused.

To constrain the complexity of this research at this first stage of investigation only the search criterion “business process improvement” was used in the database search (EBSCO and Emerald).

The paper is valuable for academics and practitioners because the impact of BPI on organizational performance is high. Its originality is in the structured evaluation of so‐called BPI approaches according to the MEM, which so far no one has investigated.

Editorial This special issue of Industrial Management & Data Systems is a huge departure from our usual journal/ monograph style. This is an additional issue to the year's volume — a bonus in fact.

This special “Anbar Abstracts” issue of the Journal of Product & Brand Management is split into ten sections covering abstracts under the following headings: Marketing strategy; Customer service; Pricing; Promotion; Marketing research; Product management; Channel management; Logistics and distribution; New product development; Purchasing.

The purpose of this paper is to explore top managers’ role in key account management.

The possible actions that could be performed by a top manager were investigated in 12 case studies. These actions were grouped into key account managers and teams, culture, engagement and knowledge, organizational structure/conditions and customers and markets.

Top managers (TMs) informally evaluate teams and key account (KA) managers, stimulate a culture that favors the information’s prospection, persuade managers to reduce their resistance and improve organizational structure/conditions by inducing internal and external questioning. They also contact key customers’ top managers to check on the changes required or to persuade them to change requirements, accept a higher price or redirect an unattractive order to competitors. They approve revisions on the key customers list, discuss with the key account manager how to redirect an unattractive opportunity to competitors and try to improve gains even in attractive orders.

Additional research beyond the provided exploratory study is needed to generalize the results. The findings contribute to improving the understanding of how TMs get involved in key account management, buyer–supplier relationship improvement and increasing company profitability. They also unveil top managers’ role in internal culture creation and team engagement.

When managing their KAs, TMs seem to be sceptical, curious and pragmatic with their subordinates, as well as with the customers or competitors.

This paper reports on experiences of university-level mathematics teacher educators (MTEs) from participating in lesson study to improving mathematics teacher preparation. The authors investigate the questions: “What did MTEs report as benefits of participating in cross-departmental lesson study?” and “What considerations did MTEs report for stakeholders interested in lesson study?”

This study employed qualitative methodologies on one cycle of lesson study where the authors served as lesson study participants. Debrief and focus group interview data were analyzed for emergent codes on benefits, supports and challenges from a university-level lesson study.

Engaging in university-level lesson study provided MTEs firsthand professional development, created community, enabled attention to detail, improved knowledge of issues related to teaching mathematics, improved curricular materials and extended beyond one lesson. Institutional support, a natural evolution of the process, alignment of goals among members and support within the group supported their university-level lesson study. Challenges of time and funding, imposition, misalignment of goals and building trust are discussed.

The paper contributes insights about benefits for MTEs who use lesson study to examine their own teaching practice for mathematics teacher preparation. The importance of supports and constraints is highlighted.