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The purpose of this study is to develop a map for the holistic business process management (BPM) diagnosis in order to guide the choice of techniques that encompass all dimensions of the business process.

The design science research method was used, with the elaboration of seven steps to project solutions to empirical problems: (1) identification of the problem, (2) awareness of the problem, (3) definition of expected results, (4) design and development, (5) demonstration, (6) evaluation of artifacts and (7) communication. These steps were organized in different analyzes: descriptive, experimental and observational. The descriptive analysis comprised steps one to three (identification of the problem, awareness of the problem, definition of expected results) and made use of the systematic literature review procedure for proposing artifacts. The experimental analysis comprised steps four to five (design and development, and demonstration), where the consultation with specialists' procedures and then the Delphi procedure for the construction of the artifacts were carried out. In the observational analysis, steps six (evaluation of artifacts), where two case studies were performed, and step seven (communication), in which the map for the holistic BPM diagnosis was presented were carried out.

The article systematizes the BPM diagnostic techniques scattered throughout the literature and relates how these techniques relate to dimensions. A map for the holistic BPM diagnosis is generated containing 21 techniques and 9 dimensions, with 45 relationships between these techniques and tools. Another aspect is that the map shows that in BPM promotion projects, techniques are not restricted to any specific phase of the life cycle.

Professionals can use the map to form a blend with selected techniques and use them for holistic BPM diagnosis according to the skills and other resources of the project team.

The map developed is innovative because it relates a set of consolidated techniques for each dimension of the process to provide the holistic diagnosis for the organization. It is important to highlight that these techniques and dimensions were scattered in the literature.

Corrosion monitoring techniques fall broadly into two categories: those which provide simple numeric data for control purposes, and those which offer a spectrum of information for diagnostic purposes. Corrosion monitoring can be carried out directly at locations susceptible to corrosion, or indirectly under conditions simulating susceptible but inaccessible points. The interpretation of the data can reflect the purpose of monitoring at the particular location. A consistent form of presentation, and comparative tabulation including statistical analysis can greatly facilitate correlation and trend spotting. Broad spectrum techniques may give an early indication of new problems. An effective internal corrosion monitoring programme can make a major contribution towards the control of plant operating costs.

Identify a new methodology for fault characterization, identification and location in electrical distribution systems, based on the use of matrix algebra.

The developed diagnostic methodology is based on a high precision analytical model of the network using a distributed parameters representation.

Test results have proved the approach to be efficient and precise, while providing a generalized quadripolar model of a line affected by the most common kinds of fault.

Generalization to a greater number of fault cases, experimental tests.

Utilities are quite interested in such items, since the new required quality standards put severe constraints on faults management and clearance. On the other hand, the system requires a rather complete measurement equipment of secondary substations.

The paper presents a new diagnostic technique for faults identification, location and characterization in distribution systems.

The aim of this article is to show how Taguchi methods can be applied to health care to improve the quality of medical images. Quality is often integrated with the performance and parameters of the design of medical applications. Many imaging methods can be designed by setting the correct combination of parameters and estimating the contribution of individual quality influencing factors by means of incorporating parameter design and orthogonal arrays. The performance of any imaging equipment can be measured by signal‐to‐noise ratio. This inherent index can give a sense of how close the performance is to the ideal.

Data were collected from a database of 82 diagnostic thoracic computed tomography (CT) scans. Signal‐to‐noise ratios (S/N) were calculated.

Given the S/N's, the best CT level was found to be level 4.

To reduce bias resulting from the observer's readings, robust equipments should be designed incorporating Taguchi's experimental design. Further work is needed to establish imaging protocols and new hardware design.

Purpose – Intersexuality is examined from a sociology of diagnosis frame to show how the diagnostic process is connected to other social constructions, offer new support that medical professionals define illness in ways that sometimes carries negative consequences, and illustrate how the medical profession holds on to authority in the face of patient activism.

Methodology/approach – Data collection occurred over a two-year period (October 2008 to August 2010). Sixty-two in-depth interviews were conducted with individuals connected to the intersex community including adults with intersexuality, parents, medical professionals, and intersex activists.

Findings – Medical professionals rely on essentialist understandings of gender to justify the medicalization of intersexuality, which they currently are doing through a nomenclature shift away from intersex terminology in favor of disorders of sex development (DSD) language. This shift allows medical professionals to reassert their authority and reclaim jurisdiction over intersexuality in light of intersex activism that was successfully framing intersexuality as a social rather than biological problem.

Practical implications – This chapter encourages critical thought and action from activists and medical professionals about shifts in intersex medical management.

Social implications – Intersexuality might be experienced in less stigmatizing ways by those personally impacted.

Originality/value – The value of this research is that it connects the sociology of diagnosis literature with gender scholarship. Additional value comes from the data, which were collected after the 2006 nomenclature shift.

This study aims to apply a systematic statistical approach, including several plot indexes, to diagnose the goodness of fit of a logistic regression model, and then to detect the outliers and influential observations of the data from experimental data.

The proposed statistical approach is applied to analyze some experimental data on internal solitary wave propagation.

A suitable logistic regression model in which the relationship between the response variable and the explanatory variables is found. The problem of multicollinearity is tested. It was found that certain observations would not have the problem of multicollinearity. The P‐values for both the Pearson and deviance χ² tests are greater than 0.05. However, the Pearson χ² value is larger than the degrees of freedom. This finding indicates that although this model fits the data, it has a slight overdispersion. After three outliers and influential observations (cases 11, 27, and 49) are removed from the data, and the remaining observations are refitted the goodness‐of‐fit of the revised model to the data is improved.

A comparison of the four predictive powers: R², max‐rescaled R², the Somers' D, and the concordance index c, shows that the revised model has better predictive abilities than the original model.

The goodness‐of‐fit and prediction ability of the revised logistic regression model are more appropriate than those of the original model.

Different types of wood (ash, oak and beech) have been activated by new activation method. The aim of this work is to study the effect of different types of wood on the physical and chemical properties of Ni/Pd coatings.

The wood was activated by ablation of the Pd target using pulsed laser deposition (PLD) technique. Different diagnostic techniques such as X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), attenuated total reflection (ATR) spectroscopy and energy dispersed X-ray spectroscopy (EDS), in parallel with scanning electron microscopy (SEM) were used to achieve this goal.

The XPS technique confirmed that the highest concentration of Pd was found in the Pd/beech sample, which is associated to the texture of the beech wood substrate surface. EDS results confirmed the absence of any contamination related to electroless plating method. It is concluded that the wood morphology and its surface roughness play a conclusive role to obtain different quantity of metal by PLD and electroless plating methods.

Although several works have been performed to study the influence of substrates on the coated metals and away of the traditional methods in activating non-catalytic surface, in this paper, PLD method is used to obtain a good quantity of Pd distributed on the entire surface and inside the porous of the wood. This study could be considered as a step investigation for understanding the role of the wood substrate morphology on the physical and chemical properties of films. To our knowledge, there are no works of combining a coated Ni/Pd by electroless plating and PLD methods on wood.

Despite the wide dissemination and application of current signature analysis (CSA) in general industry, CSA is not commonly used in the wind industry, where the use of vibration signals predominates. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to review the use of generator CSA (GCSA) in the online fault detection and diagnosis of wind turbines (WTs).

This is a bibliographical investigation in which the use of GCSA for the maintenance of WTs is analyzed. A section is dedicated to each of the main components, including the theoretical foundations on which GCSA is based and the methodology, mathematical models and signal processing techniques used by the proposals that exist on this topic.

The lack of appropriate technology and mathematical models, as well as the difficulty involved in performing actual studies in the field and the lack of research projects, has prevented the expansion of the use of GCSA for fault detection of other WT components. This research area has yet to be explored, and the existing investigations mainly focus on the gearbox and the doubly fed induction generator; however, modern signal treatment and artificial intelligence techniques could offer new opportunities in this field.

Although literature on the use of GCSA for the detection and diagnosis of faults in WTs has been published, these papers address specific applications for each of the WT components, especially gearboxes and generators. For this reason, the main contribution of this study is providing a comprehensive vision for the use of GCSA in the maintenance of WTs.

The study investigated the perceived causes of structural failure of public buildings, frequency of stability checks, stability checking procedures, measures to enhance public building stability checks and the roles of facility managers in the Accra Metropolis of Ghana.

Following a comprehensive literature review, the study employed a structured questionnaire survey and gathered the opinions of sixty-seven facility managers on the facility management practices. Following statistical pretesting of the dataset for reliability, distribution and agreement among the responses, the study analysed the dataset using mean scoring and weighted analysis.

The analysis showed that external building inspectors rarely inspect stability checks of the studied public buildings in Accra. It is also found that both reactive and proactive stability checking protocols are implemented in public buildings in Accra, but inadequate knowledge of facility managers limits technical stability checks. The study further revealed that stability checks of public buildings can be enhanced through incorporating site and location conditions into the design early upfront, active engagement of facility managers in the design and construction of public buildings, adequate budgetary provisioning for planned maintenance of public buildings, and encouraging appropriate use of public buildings.

This paper, to the best of the authors' knowledge, represents the first attempt to comprehensively examine the causes of structural failure of public buildings, frequency of stability checks, stability checking procedures, measures to enhance public building stability checks and the roles of facility managers in Ghana, from the perspective facility management.