Narrow Results

This article is about the modernization of chinese herbal product, product design and the chemical analysis of Chinese herbal products.

Through an appropriate process design and outsourcing decision, enterprises are able to control critical factors and performance indices to maintain flexibility and robustness. This study uses an empirical research to investigate the performance of Taiwanese production management systems. We analyze and compare the differences between the production management system with low, middle and high outsourcing rate strategies through questionnaires. There are four critical factors which influence customer satisfaction, of which flexible capability is the most influential. Satisfied suppliers will promote a good performance within SCM, and it will improve customer services. Enterprises should cooperate with their suppliers closely in their business collaborations. The middle outsourcing rate strategy has better flexibility in product and process change. These findings give enterprises managerial insights to achieve good performance and production management objectives.

There are three distinct functions in the product realization chain — product design, process design, and process execution; thus there are two interfaces (product design — process design; process design — process execution) rather than one (product-manufacturing). Case studies of four organizations manufacturing high-tech products in New Zealand are explored to study the organization of process design functions and success strategies. Similarities in structuring, relationships between functional groups, and the methods for product and process design implementation are investigated. De-coupling of process design functions occurs best with high volume production with stable process technology — an infrequent situation with high-tech NZ manufacturers.

The microelectronic industry continues to grow rapidly in size and importance. The industry has already reached the size of other major industries with sales of product and equipment totalling billions of dollars a year. Among all the options available for semiconductor assembly, plastic packaging by using epoxy based encapsulation process is less expensive and accounts for approximately 80% of the worldwide packaging share and this percentage is increasing. Microchip encapsulation based on transfer molding is one of the important processes of semiconductor manufacturing. Quality is heavily dependent on the encapsulation mold design, selection of molding compound and process parameter setting of encapsulation molding. In current practice, encapsulation mold design and parameter setting of the transfer molding are done manually in a trial-and-error manner which would result in long lead time for obtaining acceptable molding quality. In this paper, an artificial intelligence technique, Case Based Reasoning with Fuzzy Retrieval, is described to perform process design of microchip encapsulation from which a case based system for microchip encapsulation, named CBS-ME, was developed. The system aims to automate the design of the key elements of encapsulation molds, suggest process parameters for transfer molding and improve its own design know-how through a learning process. A validation test was performed and the system solutions were benchmarked with the solutions obtained from the actual molding. Deviation of the two sets of solutions for mold design parameter setting and process parameter setting are 3.5% and 6% respectively.

Using a survey mode of inquiry, involving informants from 19global manufacturing companies in six sectors of the process industries, this study explores the intrinsic nature of product innovation of non-assembled products. Results show that the characteristics of the “transformation-based” production system in the process industries should not only govern the design of the total product innovation work process and the selection and use of related experimental environment but will also influence the design of the forthcoming production system. It is noted that pilot-planting and full-scale production trials are important instruments not only during the product development phase, but also afterward in solving B2B customers’ post-launch production problems. It is concluded that the experimental output from the product development phase of the product innovation work process for non-assembled products is both a new product design and a new foundation for the production process design.

Sustainability is an essentially integrative concept. It seems reasonable, then, to design sustainability assessment as an essentially integrative process and framework for decision-making on undertakings that may have lasting effects.

The realm of sustainability has often been depicted as the intersection of social, economic and ecological interests and initiatives. Accordingly, many approaches to sustainability oriented assessments — at the project as well as strategic level — have begun by addressing the social, economic and ecological considerations separately and have then struggled with how to integrate the separate findings. The problem is exacerbated by the generally separate training of experts in the three fields, the habitual collection of data separately under the three categories and the common division of government mandates into separate social, economic and ecological bodies. The combined effect is not merely an absence of integrative expertise, data and authority but an entrenched tendency to neglect the interdependence of these factors. The three pillars or triple bottom line approach also appears to encourage an emphasis on balancing and making trade-offs, which may often be necessary but which should always be the last resort, not the assumed task, in sustainability assessment.

There are, however, important concerns underlying advocacy and application of some three pillar, limited integration approaches. Most significant are well-grounded fears that integrated, sustainability-based assessments may facilitate continued or even renewed neglect of traditionally under valued considerations, especially the protection of ecological systems and functions. This problem needs to be addressed thoughtfully in judgements about how integration is to be done.

One possible solution is to take sustainability as an essentially integrative concept and to design sustainability assessment more aggressively as an integrative process. This would entail a package of regime and process design features, centred on ones that.

• build sustainability assessment into a larger overall governance regime that is designed to respect interconnections among issues, objectives, actions and effects, though the full interrelated set of activities from broad agenda setting to results monitoring and response;.

• design assessment processes with an iterative conception-to-resurrection agenda, aiming to maximise multiple, reinforcing net benefits through selection, design and adaptive implementation of the most desirable option for every significant strategic or project level undertaking;.

• redefine the driving objectives and consequent evaluation and decision criteria to avoid the three conventional categories, to ensure attention to usually neglected sustainability requirements and to focus attention on the achievement of multiple, mutually reinforcing gains;.

• establish explicit basic rules that discourage trade-offs to the extent possible while guiding the decision-making on those that are unavoidable;.

• provide means of combining, specifying and complementing these generic criteria and trade-off rules with attention to case- and context-specific concerns, objectives, priorities and possibilities;.

• provide integrative, sustainability-centred guidance, methods and tools to help meet the key practical demands of assessment work, including identifying key cross-cutting issues and linkages among factors, judging the significance of predicted effects, and weighing overall options and implications; and.

• ensure that the decision-making process facilitates public scrutiny and encourages effective public participation.

This paper outlines a Decision-Maker's Tool (DM Tool), designed to guide practitioners and their inter-disciplinary teams through a typical strategic environmental assessment (SEA) process. While SEA properly includes post-decision follow-up, the DM Tool covers the SEA process up to the creation of a Briefing Note for the decision maker. Together, use of the DM Tool and the Briefing Note should facilitate positive contributions to sustainability through well considered and aligned policies, plans and programmes (PPPs), by enhancing the comprehensiveness, consistency, clarity, accessibility and credibility of decision making information.

The discussion presumes that the SEA is central to the PPP development process, rather than being a separate exercise. The DM Tool and Briefing Note are designed to recommend PPP action based on clearly stated needs and purposes, addressing the key issues, and application of explicit sustainability criteria in the comparative evaluation of feasible alternatives. Particular attention is paid to recognising trade-offs and residual risks, and presenting all this information concisely for the decision maker.

Multi-objective optimization (MOO) has received considerable attention from researchers in chemical engineering. Bhaskar et al. (2000a) have reviewed reported applications of MOO in chemical engineering until 2000. In this chapter, nearly hundred MOO applications in chemical engineering reported in journals from 2000 until mid 2007 are reviewed briefly. These are categorized into five groups: (1) process design and operation, (2) biotechnology and food industry, (3) petroleum refining and petrochemicals, (4) pharmaceuticals and other products/processes, and (5) polymerization. However, applications reported in this book are not included in this review.

Multi-objective optimization (MOO) has received considerable attention from researchers in chemical engineering. Bhaskar et al. (2000a) have reviewed reported applications of MOO in chemical engineering until 2000. In this chapter, nearly hundred MOO applications in chemical engineering reported in journals from 2000 until mid 2007 are reviewed briefly. These are categorized into five groups: (1) process design and operation, (2) biotechnology and food industry, (3) petroleum refining and petrochemicals, (4) pharmaceuticals and other products/processes, and (5) polymerization. Applications reported in this book are not included in this review.

This chapter^† describes differential evolution (DE), its parameters and their values. Then, proposed modifications to various components of DE algorithm until the year 2009 are summarized; these modifications have improved DE capabilities for tackling a variety of optimization problems. Finally, chemical engineering applications of DE reported until the year 2009 are reviewed. In particular, DE has found many applications for parameter estimation and modeling in addition to process design and operation. Further developments and applications of DE since the year 2009 are outlined in Chapter 1. Given these developments and applications, DE is attractive and useful both as a simple general optimizer and as a sophisticated tool to solve complex chemical engineering applications.

Sustainability is an essentially integrative concept. It seems reasonable, then, to design sustainability assessment as an essentially integrative process and framework for decision-making on undertakings that may have lasting effects.

The realm of sustainability has often been depicted as the intersection of social, economic and ecological interests and initiatives. Accordingly, many approaches to sustainability oriented assessments — at the project as well as strategic level — have begun by addressing the social, economic and ecological considerations separately and have then struggled with how to integrate the separate findings. The problem is exacerbated by the generally separate training of experts in the three fields, the habitual collection of data separately under the three categories and the common division of government mandates into separate social, economic and ecological bodies. The combined effect is not merely an absence of integrative expertise, data and authority but an entrenched tendency to neglect the interdependence of these factors. The three pillars or triple bottom line approach also appears to encourage an emphasis on balancing and making trade-offs, which may often be necessary but which should always be the last resort, not the assumed task, in sustainability assessment.

There are, however, important concerns underlying advocacy and application of some three pillar, limited integration approaches. Most significant are well-grounded fears that integrated, sustainability-based assessments may facilitate continued or even renewed neglect of traditionally under valued considerations, especially the protection of ecological systems and functions. This problem needs to be addressed thoughtfully in judgements about how integration is to be done.

One possible solution is to take sustainability as an essentially integrative concept and to design sustain ability assessment more aggressively as an integrative process. This would entail a package of regime and process design features, centred on ones that

• build sustainability assessment into a larger overall governance regime that is designed to respect interconnections among issues, objectives, actions and effects, though the full interrelated set of activities from broad agenda setting to results monitoring and response;

• design assessment processes with an iterative conception-to-resurrection agenda, aiming to maximise multiple, reinforcing net benefits through selection, design and adaptive implementation of the most desirable option for every significant strategic or project level undertaking;

• redefine the driving objectives and consequent evaluation and decision criteria to avoid the three conventional categories, to ensure attention to usually neglected sustainability requirements and to focus attention on the achievement of multiple, mutually reinforcing gains;

• establish explicit basic rules that discourage trade-offs to the extent possible while guiding the decision-making on those that are unavoidable;

• provide means of combining, specifying and complementing these generic criteria and trade-off rules with attention to case- and context-specific concerns, objectives, priorities and possibilities;

• provide integrative, sustainability-centred guidance, methods and tools to help meet the key practical demands of assessment work, including identifying key cross-cutting issues and linkages among factors, judging the significance of predicted effects, and weighing overall options and implications; and

• ensure that the decision-making process facilitates public scrutiny and encourages effective public participation.