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Elaborating on the positions of two key players in the global earthmoving and construction industry, this article discusses the Japanese market entry strategies. Also discussed are alternative strategies for retaliation against Japanese competition.

As is now synonymous with a Japanese owned company, Komatsu UK's strict adherance to quality control, with resultant quality assurance for the customer, goes right through to the finish. To maintain this quality, Komatsu recently decided that their range of hydraulic excavators producd at Birtley, Co. Durham, should be finihed in a tougher, longer lasting two‐pack non‐isocyanate polyurethane coating. At the same time production was to be increased from 10 to 13 excavators per day.

This article considers employment policy and labour relations in three Japanese manufacturing enterprises in north‐east England. In each case, the author discusses a number of features, namely, the decision of the company to locate in the north‐east, union recognition, workforce flexibility, and industrial relations.

It is well known in the mining industry that the increase in failures and breakdowns is due mainly to a poor maintenance policy for the equipment, in addition to the difficult access that specialized personnel have to combat the breakdown, which translates into more machine downtime. For this reason, this study aims to propose a remote assistance model for diagnosing and repairing critical breakdowns in mining industry trucks using augmented reality techniques and data analytics with a quality approach that considerably reduces response times, thus optimizing human resources.

In this work, the six-phase CRIPS-DM methodology is used. Initially, the problem of fault diagnosis in trucks used in the extraction of material in the mining industry is addressed. The authors then propose a model under study that seeks a real-time connection between a service technician attending the truck at the mine site and a specialist located at a remote location, considering the data transmission requirements and the machine's characterization.

It is considered that the theoretical results obtained in the development of this study are satisfactory from the business point of view since, in the first instance, it fulfills specific objectives related to the telecare process. On the other hand, from the data mining point of view, the results manage to comply with the theoretical aspects of the establishment of failure prediction models through the application of the CRISP-DM methodology. All of the above opens the possibility of developing prediction models through machine learning and establishing the best model for the objective of failure prediction.

The original contribution of this work is the proposal of the design of a remote assistance model for diagnosing and repairing critical failures in the mining industry, considering augmented reality and data analytics. Furthermore, the integration of remote assistance, the characterization of the CAEX, their maintenance information and the failure prediction models allow the establishment of a quality-based model since the database with which the learning machine will work is constantly updated.

The paper aims to provide a structured framework for comparing different productivity estimation methodologies and evaluate their sensitivity to operational coefficients variation for excavation operations.

Two process‐oriented methodologies were analysed in a deterministic fashion in terms of their input requirements and their respective outputs. A phase‐oriented framework was presented to enable their comparison. The research methodology allows the estimation of excavation productivity in relation to the selected operational coefficients.

The system productivity is significantly influenced by operational conditions, such as the digging depth and the swing angle from the excavation front to the dumping position. Each methodology presents a differing sensitivity to every operational factor. Since the excavator is considered as the system's leading resource, the variation on productivity has direct implications for the truck fleet size and the unit cost of operations.

The proposed approach is useful in analyzing process‐oriented productivity estimation methodologies under a given set of operational coefficients when no historical data is available. Thus, it provides an alternative to intuitive estimates based solely on personal judgment. The concept of “baseline reference” conditions is introduced, so as to enable the transformation of any operational scenario into equivalent mathematical models that allow comparisons between different estimation methodologies and computational approaches.

Humans remain unsuccessful in their attempts to achieve environmental sustainability, despite decades of scientific awareness and political efforts toward that end. This paper suggests a fresh conceptualization, one that focuses on education, offers a fuller explanation for our lack of success and calls attention to alternatives.

The authors first critically review mainstream approaches that have been used to achieve environmental sustainability, then introduce an alternative that the authors call the cultural approach. The authors finally discuss how educational research should be re-articulated based on the cultural approach.

The authors identified three mainstream approaches – the technological, cognitive approach and behaviorist – all of which function to reproduce modern mainstream culture. In contrast, the cultural approach assumes modern mainstream culture as the root cause of environmental unsustainability and aims to rearticulate it. To elaborate a cultural approach, the authors recommend education scholars to (1) bring attention to the role of culture in sustainability and (2) identify education practices that are potentially useful for enacting a cultural shift, primarily developing richer synergies between qualitative and quantitative research.

Unlike many previous studies in the field of education, the authors’ account highlights how current mainstream approaches used for current global education policymaking often merely reproduces modern mainstream culture and accelerates the environmental crisis. It thus proposes to redirect educational research for a cultural shift, one that allows human society to move beyond the comforting rhetoric of sustainability and face the survivability imperative.

Quantile‐based measures of risk, e.g., value at risk (VaR), are widely used in portfolio risk applications. Increasing attention is being directed toward managing risk, which involves identifying sources of risk and assessing the economic impact of potential trades. This article compares the performance of two quantile‐based VaR estimators commonly applied to assess the market risk of option portfolios and the credit risk of bond portfolios.