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The purpose of this paper is to describe a corporate effort to implement a sustainable business model.

A Norwegian producer of office chairs, selling products across Europe, is examined in this study. Information has been collected from semi‐structured interviews with top‐level management, as well as available internal and external documentation.

The company's efforts towards a more sustainable business model can broadly be divided into factors within the company and factors outside the company. The case study demonstrates how the carbon footprint on the Earth can be reduced by focusing and influencing factors outside the company's own production facilities.

In a highly competitive market, the case study demonstrates that focusing on the corporate impact of the natural environment can be highly profitable.

The process towards sustainable business operations must be anchored and supported by the top‐level management and owners of the company, and it has to be a long‐term commitment.

The principal contribution from the presented case study is how a more sustainable business model can be achieved even when the majority major part of the carbon footprint on the Earth is generated outside the company's production facilities. The case study illustrates how already known technologies are used to create a sustainable and profitable business.

“Business sustainability” refers to the total effort of a company – including its demand and supply chain networks – to reduce the impact on the Earth's life‐ and eco‐systems. The objective of this paper is to describe a business sustainability model based upon a case study of a European manufacturer.

A case study approach was applied describing the efforts of business sustainability in the demand and supply chain networks of a Norwegian office chair producer. It is based upon a series of semi‐structured in‐depth interviews with top executives of the company as well as observations and content analyses of internal and external documents about the company's efforts of business sustainability.

The case study shows that business sustainability is not about doing just one thing, but that a multitude of simultaneous efforts (e.g. actors, resources and activities) should be in place. Furthermore, business sustainability is not only about a company's own business operations, but its whole demand and supply chain networks which need to be included and taken into consideration.

The case study in focus is limited to just one company's effort of business sustainability and its demand and supply chain networks. It provides a business sustainability model that offers opportunities for further research.

Focusing on the corporate impact of the natural environment can be highly profitable. Business sustainability and by extension the carbon footprint of demand and supply chain networks is becoming a criterion in the decision‐making process of customers across industries. Business sustainability is a concern to everybody in society as the indicatives of climate change and global warming become more evident and troublesome. No one can have missed the fact that the weather is becoming more extreme, causing damage around the globe.

The authors argue that research into business sustainability needs at this stage of development to be inductive rather than deductive – it may be an irreversible mistake to try to re‐package existing theory into business sustainability, as climate change prediction and the poor condition of the Earth have not been fully understood or comprised in previous theory.

It has become increasingly critical to design and maintain flexible and rapid assembly systems due to unpredictable and varying market conditions. The first stage of developing such systems is to restructure the existing assembly system. After designing the manufacturing system, efforts should be made for capacity adjustments to meet the demand in terms of allocating tasks to workers. Walking-worker assembly systems can be regarded as an effective method to achieve flexibility and agility via rabbit chase (RC) approach in which workers follow each other around the assembly cell or line and perform each task in sequence. In this paper, a novel mathematical programming approach is developed with the aim of integrating RC in assembly processes. Therefore, this study is thought to add value to industrial assembly systems in terms of effectively raising engineering control for task allocation activities.

Two consecutive mathematical models are developed, since such a hierarchical approach provides computational convenience for the problem. The initial mathematical programming model determines the number of workers in each RC loop for each segment. In addition, the number of stations and the distribution of station times in the segments is essential. Therefore, the succeeding mathematical programming model generates stations in each segment and provides convenience for the workflow in RC loops. The output of mathematical programming models are the parameters of simulation model for performance assessment.

The effectiveness of the proposed approach was validated by an application in a real-life chair production system. The application resulted in performance improvements for labour requirement (12.5 per cent) and production lead time (9.6 per cent) when compared to a classical assembly system design (CASD) where one stationary worker exists in each station. In addition, it is worth to note that RC leads to a reduced number of workers for a considerable number (39.4 per cent) of test problems. What is more, input as well as output factors have been determined via discriminant analysis and their impacts to the utilization of RC were analyzed for different levels.

This study is thought to add value to the industry in terms of effectively providing convenience during production planning and task allocation in assembly lines and cells.

To the best knowledge of the author, optimization models for RC considering a real industrial application have not yet been developed. In this context, this paper presents an approach which models RC by the use of mathematical programming in manual assembly processes to address this research gap. The contribution of the paper to the relevant literature is the development of hierarchical mixed integer linear programming models to solve RC problem for the first time.

Presently, 6 Degree of Freedom (6DOF) visual pose measurement methods enjoy popularity in the industrial sector. However, challenges persist in accurately measuring the visual pose of blank and rough metal casts. Therefore, this paper introduces a 6DOF pose measurement method utilizing stereo vision, and aims to the 6DOF pose measurement of blank and rough metal casts.

This paper studies the 6DOF pose measurement of metal casts from three aspects: sample enhancement of industrial objects, optimization of detector and attention mechanism. Virtual reality technology is used for sample enhancement of metal casts, which solves the problem of large-scale sample sampling in industrial application. The method also includes a novel deep learning detector that uses multiple key points on the object surface as regression objects to detect industrial objects with rotation characteristics. By introducing a mixed paths attention module, the detection accuracy of the detector and the convergence speed of the training are improved.

The experimental results show that the proposed method has a better detection effect for metal casts with smaller size scaling and rotation characteristics.

A method for 6DOF pose measurement of industrial objects is proposed, which realizes the pose measurement and grasping of metal blanks and rough machined casts by industrial robots.

AS ALWAYS, at this the beginning of a New Year, we are incurably optimistic. Our credo can be summed up in one word: chiliasm, a belief that times will get better.

This study examines the nature of emergent, self‐organizing systems in the context of the history of Herman Miller, Inc. This history informs our understanding of emergent systems on two levels: how the dynamic of emergent self‐organization informs our sense of the past; and how it informs our understanding of an emergent, self‐organizing future. This article also recounts a critical period in the development history of Herman Miller, Inc.

The aim of this article is to suggest that the information interaction between midwives and young women during counselling meetings about contraceptives can be approached as loci of knowledge production and discuss the consequences this has for the understanding of information practices. The overarching question is: how is knowledge produced during the interaction between the midwives and the young women and what roles do their bodies play in this interaction?

Qualitative methods inspired by ethnography were used, including conversation transcripts of ten counselling meetings, 19 interviews and participatory observations at five youth centres in the South of Sweden. The study took place over a period of nine months. The feministic conceptual framework presented by Donna Haraway concerning knowledge production was used to analyse the material.

As they meet, both midwives and young women are information sources to each other, and the information conveyed is negotiated in both words and actions. Both parties are involved in a careful negotiation to establish what information is needed and appropriate for the situation at hand, but the midwives have the final say. However, the midwives balance between exerting a generalised expertise and entering in a situated dialogue with the young women.

This study may contribute to awareness among information professionals of counselling meetings as information interactions where both words and actions are important as well as the inequality of power in that interaction.

This study contributes to library and information studies by broadening the understanding of what an information source may be and by exploring the usefulness of feminist researcher Donna Haraway's analytical tools for understanding information interactions as knowledge producing negotiations.

THE fashionable topic today is management. Critics lay at its door many of the troubles from which we suffer. On the other hand there are those who laud it as the key which will open the door to future prosperity for this country. Government, Press, commerce and industry are as one in assuring us that by making management efficient we can say goodbye to many of our difficulties. That is a rather facile assumption. Prosperity depends on productivity and management is only one of the factors involved.