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PROPORTIONATELY, that is to say by percentage, salaries for managers are showing what the British Institute of Management describes as a “disquieting” trend when compared to earnings by production workers. While last year pay for the latter rose by 7.7 per cent, that of managers went up by only 7.2 per cent.

The case centers on Shilling & Smith's acquisition of Xteria Inc. and the resulting need to quickly scale the company's IT infrastructure to accommodate the acquisition. The case is based on a real leasing problem faced by a major retail firm in the Chicago area when it purchased a small credit card processing firm and scaled the operations to handle the retail firm's credit card transactions. The CIO of Shilling & Smith needs to determine which lease option is the best means of providing the technical infrastructure needed to support the firm after the acquisition of Xteria. Several issues will drive this decision, including the value and useful life of the equipment, as well as the strategic context of the firm. This case examines how to evaluate different lease options when acquiring data center information technology infrastructure. Specifically, the case addresses software vs. hardware leasing, different lease terms, and choosing between different lease structures depending on the strategy and needs of a company. This case enables students to understand the different types of technology leases and in which situations these leases would be employed.

The Shilling & Smith case examines how to evaluate different lease options when acquiring data center information technology infrastructure. Specifically, students learn software vs. hardware leasing, different lease terms, and how to choose between different lease structures depending on the strategy and needs of the company. A secondary objective of the case is to teach students the important components and relative costs of information technology infrastructure.

This paper outlines a steady state multi-modal equilibrium transportation model which contains elastic demands and deterministic route-choices. The model may readily be extended to include some stochastic route-choice or mode choice. Capacity constraints and queueing delays are permitted; and signal green-times and prices are explicitly included. The paper shows that, under natural linearity and monotonicity conditions, for fixed control parameters the set of equilibria is the intersection of convex sets. Using this result the paper outlines a method of designing appropriate values for these control parameters; taking account of travellers' choices by supposing that the network is in equilibrium. The method may be applied to non-linear monotone problems by linearising about a current point. An outline justification of the method is given; a rigorous proof of convergence is as yet missing. Thus the method must now be regarded as a heuristic.

Smiths Industries Aerospace (SI) offers a multi‐aircraft capable generic health and usage monitoring system (GenHUMS) using field proven, off‐the‐shelf, airborne and ground‐based technology. The UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) has selected the GenHUMS for the Chinook aircraft with additional options for Puma, Sea King and Lynx aircraft. The GenHUMS provides all conventional HUMS functionality, and incorporates key innovation in the areas of rotor track and balance, failure detection, flight regime recognition, alert generation, system configurability, and user interface. The architecture is unique in that all required airborne data acquisition and processing, including crash survivable cockpit voice and flight data recording, are combined in a single line replaceable unit. This architecture significantly reduces space, weight and power requirements and results in the highest reliability, least risk, lowest life cycle cost, HUMS known today. Fixed and portable PC‐based HUMS ground stations provide configurable, user friendly, data extraction and analysis capabilities.

An initiative to help facilitate a more genuine partnership between the participants of the Leeds Compact is described. Emphasis has been placed on the development of a team of Compact Associates drawn from education, careers and business to take ownership and responsibility for the training requirements of the Compact. The training for Compact Associates is described, together with an evaluation of progress to date.

WHAT I WILL SUGGEST in the following paragraphs is a new look at library values. I suppose, however, we must first define values and what we mean by values.

Just as managers and accountants were becoming used to the idea that tanks should be regularly emptied for inspection, Forbes Tankguard arrives with its proposal that emptying is now obsolete.

This paper is a discussion of how an organisation providing community support developed its employment strategy to focus on gainful employment, valued employment roles, citizenship and human rights, from a traditional model with support/activity workers and sheltered employment, to social firms, employment development and supported employment at differing levels.